My Actifit Report Card: November 6 2019

Twenty thousand steps and a good deal of writing. Not bad.

I’ve been listening to audiobooks again, and I’m not sure I like the one I’m currently listening to. I’m not sure that I even want to name it, because I don’t like to be critical unless I’m really judging the entirety of a work, but there are three things that I think are causing my discontent.

First, the writer speaks to the audience as if they were adversarial. It’s a quasi-academic work, so I appreciate the need to include evidence, but you really don’t ever need to ask if the audience believes you in a nonfiction text. There’s no point: they do or they don’t, but if they keep reading they’re at least willing to hear you out.

There’s also just an overly plodding “textbook” tone to it, in the sense that there’s a lot of stuff that is very much written in a way that is dry and boring, and I’m normally quite into dry and boring. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by Jung, who is dry and wordy but manages to keep information coming at a blistering pace.

Perhaps in an ironic twist considering my previous statement, there are a lot of blended together folkisms and cliches that are used to try and offset the previous issues with pacing.

I think that further criticism might be that the book is too prone to stray away from its core topic and into personal opinions of the author (or, rather, not necessarily opinions but irrelevant tangents), and is perhaps being written to hit some length goal. I don’t think this is necessarily in a cynical “hit this length to sell your book” way, but more of a “I want to make my arguments sound good by presenting them in triplicate” manner. There’s nothing wrong with repeating information, but it does need to come across as meaningfully distinct in each telling to remain interesting.

For my own writing, I’ve hit a point where there’s some definite tone dissonance in my work, but whatever. I’m doing this to create a novel of 50,000 words so that my capstone project isn’t the first finished novel I’ve done, and I’m willing to accept some sacrifices in everything except having a clear plotline with a beginning and conclusion. If there are awkward scenes that don’t flow well together, places where I’ve invented something overnight and not made reference to it in obvious places earlier, or tone shifts, I’m fine with that for now. It’ll just serve as a reminder for what to work on when I go onward with my program.

Daily Activity, Walking