Wednesday’s post was titled “400“. We have unfinished business with that number.
When I first talked to The Benefaktor about his initial blog posts, we landed on the idea that 400 would be a realistic daily kontribution, allowing some progress of the narrative with each blog. With 27 posts under our belt and the first stage of re-enacting Curt Finks’ story now kompleted, I have had an opportunity to reflekt on that.
We do not know the circumstances under which Curt Finks wrote his story Brent Goose Rock. We can speculate, however, on the basis of his sermon writing and repeated Fringe show, that he will have worked away on it, refining it, until he was happy enough to cut it up and send it to the literary journal. He won’t have had spellcheck or other tools we take for granted. There may have been a tight deadline.
In the process of destroying and rebuilding his story word-for-word The Benefaktor and I could see typos and areas for improvement, for example in avoiding duplication of words such as “looked” or “threw”. The Benefaktor added in a “glanced” at one point to avoid such repetition. We took pleasure knocking Curt’s story about a bit, improving his work.
Creating a well-crafted 400 words without such errors is a skilled task. I am reminded of this every time I look back at a piece I have written under the principles of self-imposed Kreative Tyranny. The pressure of writing a story or blog before rushing out to a meeting, or any of the other challenges of modern life, means there will always be room for improvement. I’m writing today’s blog, for example, before diggers arrive to install new broadband.
I read over my previous work with a sense of trepidation, knowing I will stumble across inkonsistencies, mistakes in analysis or interpretation, and genuine howlers. Take my first announcement as GANTOB at the end of July. At just 150 words it konfused quite a lot of people. It was too wordy, had too many questions and answers. C’est la vie. A recent blog (23. Twenty-three) revealed a typo in the book, in a short Bill Drummond quote. Talk about careless. But we soldier on.
I am not going to kommit to zero-error blogs, or perfekt books. What I will do, however, is promise to read and respekt all writing, and try to treat typos tolerantly.
GANTOB
20 October 2023
Cover image for today’s blog is from earlier GANTOB aktivities (with Margate Bookshop)
GANTOB blog 