Tommy's Blog » Writing

Summer too short?

Tommy Williams — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 00:55:43 +0000

It’s been a while since I wrote a baiku but Fritz linked to one over at Cycle-Licious so here you go:

Rain sprays off my tire
Yesterday I cursed the heat
Is this summer’s end?

Technorati tags: haiku, bicycles, cycling, summer, rain

A commuter’s haiku

Tommy Williams — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 19:55:10 +0000

I thought this up on my way in to work this morning, although I managed to ride in during a break in the rain today.

Pedaling through rain
A driver passes and looks
We both think: “you’re nuts.”

Technorati tags: haiku, cycling, bicycles, commuting

Do you know what woot means?

Tommy Williams — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 00:55:12 +0000

A manager responded simply “Woot!” to a team-wide mail message today. I have read and heard the term woot (or w00t) for years and, though I have never traced its etymology, I grok its meaning. So I didn’t give the message another thought.

And then replies started showing up from people who had searched for the word because they didn’t know what the manager meant.

There are people who write software for a living who haven’t heard of w00t? And they’re in the team I work in? Amazing.

Tags: w00t, jargon, etymology
del.icio.us tags: w00t, jargon, etymology

The smug deprivations of vegetarianism

Tommy Williams — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 06:33:48 +0000

Yeah, so the best line in the whole post is the title, and it’s not even mine. It’s from Alfina the Vague, the author of Zemblan Grammar. She’s not writing about photography, or technology, or world events, or even about people I know. But that doesn’t matter because she’s always coming up with glorious combinations of words. Just say it out loud: “the smug deprivations of vegetarianism.” Isn’t that marvelous? Doesn’t that kind of command of sounds — and especially the way the words work in combination but fall apart individually — belong in poetry?

It isn’t fear of writing

Tommy Williams — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 20:31:25 +0000

There’s a lot of bad advice on blogs. Some of it even seems like it’s good: “Use your blog to become a better writer. Write regularly, and you can’t help but get better.” Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror is the most-recent I’ve found promoting this idea.

The problem for me: it doesn’t work.

Over the years, I have learned to hate the way I write on my blogs. I used to write with rhythm and a nice smooth flow. I enjoyed reading what I wrote. I enjoyed the sound of my sentences and the way they felt in my mouth.

Maybe this is happening because I don’t write fiction anymore. Maybe it’s because I write thousands of words every day, but they’re mostly in email and most of them are jargon that even the participants in the thread won’t be able — or want — to decipher in a few months.

Whatever the reasons, I need to find my way back to enjoying my writing.

He points to a couple of good resources: Writing Tips for Non-Writers Who Don’t Want to Work at Writing and Hints for revising. He also points to Elmore Leonard’s writing tips: Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle.

The advice he gives is good. For most people, writing more — especially in public — is a great way to improve your writing. I just need to figure out why it hasn’t worked for me.