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On Cleaning Out My Writing Intake
If a culture war happens online and you don’t get sucked into the algorithmic vortex of it, did it make a sound?
You “never start a piece with a quote” folks just grab onto something and bare down for a moment, we are going to quote right off the top here.
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” is an age-old philosophical exercise. If you grew up in the woods of West Virginia, it was irrelevant, since a downed tree meant clean up and if you were quick enough before it rots maybe some firewood.
It was darn breezy Up Yonder for a family shindig this past weekend, and the large fireplace was popular, so Cousin Gary brought a load of firewood to keep the festivities warm. When asked if we had enough wood, he pointed to Aunt No-no who lives nearby to him and remarked “All these storms, her yard is full of firewood.” The trees definitely made a sound coming down, and the chainsaws cutting them up did as well. Let the philosophers make of that what they may.
Since I first started writing publicly in 2017, the single biggest change I’ve made to my “process” is really pruning what I intake off of social media.
