About a year ago, I wrote about the dashes that I use— write with on my wikiblogardenite / that you’re reading right now.
The idea is that I don’t delete previous— delete things that I’ve—
By adopting dashes, it means that I don’t have to delete anything in my editing— writing process. You can— You get to see— watch a recording of how I wrote my blog post. You can see where I deleted something or changed something because there’s a dash there. If there’s a dash there it means I deleted that— something from the chain of— from the flow of writing and I put something else after it instead. It doesn’t mean I didn’t go back and edit any part of the post. But if I do edit, then I still don’t delete. I write a dash instead, and then I write something else.
I think dashes are good because it lowers / reduces the gaps / walls between me and you. I don’t have a front up. There’s no hiding behind the edit. I’m here! Writing things live! on the spot! in the moment! and you are reading it!
In a sense, it makes this blog post liver… live-er… than before / than it would be otherwise. It’s a kind of “live writing”.
But hey, to do it / this properly—
To do this properly, you have to really commit to it. You can’t half-do it. If you don’t stick to it— If you don’t stick to the practice fully, then the liveness gets broken / the effects get— the effect gets lost.
It’s really hard to write about your— It’s like speaking about how your voice sounds. You can’t stop thinking about it while you’re speaking. It makes it all become deliberate. It’s hard.
And yeah, that’s kind of the problem I’ve had. After a year of using the dashes approach, I’ve become very used to it. So much so, that I— my writing voice inside my head has started to include dashes in them— the things— the trails of consciousness— thoughts / emerging thoughts / words that end up landing on the page. AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGHHHH
So— No.
What I end up with getting— What I end up with is far too many dashes, because some of them are pre-planned dashes, because that’s my writing style that I can’t help but doing— to do when I’m writing live. And then on top of that, I end up changing my mind a lot, so I end up removing or changing stuff. I—— It’s more like human speech. Like, have you ever tried to transcribe raw human speech? It’s pretty wild really. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as written, uhh— or maybe it does— oh god what am I talking about
Like what am I supposed to do if my inner monologue writes a dash but then I decide against the dash in the end? Do I do a double dash? Like “——”? It feels ridiculous.
Something I’ve been doing / You may have noticed this if you read my other posts / I’ve been using slashes instead when it’s a “pre-planned” dash. You might notice that they usually make— They have a different feel to the dashes. However, I sometimes feel a bit mean / like I’m being a bit mean to myself by not allowing myself to do an intended dash / You know what I mean?
Anyway I don’t know. I think if I let myself do intentional dashes, it ends up sounding a bit grandiose / it makes the pauses it creates in my writing sound overly dramatic or something. However, slashes feel really unsatisfying / way less satisfying than a dash. They take up less visual room and they’re less jarring, which is what I like about dashes. I’ve been thinking about using other symbols instead but that’s a bit fiddly • a bit of a pain but maybe • hey wait a minute I actually • I kinda like that
okay wow
maybe that’s the way to go——— No no no no, on second thoughts I hate it
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