Searching for Words

I watch myself spending two hours on a paragraph when I know I’ve often written five to ten pages in that amount of times. I wonder if I’m losing brainpower.

Didn’t I used to have a larger vocabulary, a quicker facility with English? Maybe, maybe not. I go to an online thesaurus. It’s a disappointment, as thesauri have always been. By the time you find the word you want, it’s the word you came up with just to find it.

And so I decide, tentatively, with fingers crossed, that the reason I couldn’t find a word to stand in for my sentence is that it probably doesn't exist.

But I’m still left with the need to tell my story in 14 lines, because that’s what fits on the back of the video box I’m using as a model. If others have done it for other movies, thousands of times, I should be able to do it for this one. And so far I haven’t. Even though I’m getting close to the age Hemingway was when he finished his life, by which time he had long since enlarged the world’s idea of literature, not just with theory, but examples.1

1. Email to Rob, September 25, 2004