on writing and reading

I've decided to be more diligent about writing here again. It's going to be a writing exercise for myself. I've tried writing a diary, but somehow I just can't keep myself motivated. Perhaps the reason why I still write here is because there's this sense that you guys are out there reading, every so often. And even if no one reads this, I still feel more comfortable talking to myself here. Just the other day, I was at a book discussion where Richard Rodriguez was speaking. He despised email and all the new technologies and said that there is something very sensual about writing by hand. Bending over, scribbling--the fatigue of writing he called it. I don't know. I am not someone who can write well by hand. My hand is too slow and it can't catch up to the voice in my head. Besides, the motion of typing seem so natural to me. I just let m fingers fly over the keyboard and they just dictate. There's a sense of freedom in that too.

Other than that, there is not much new update other than the fact that I didn't get accepted into one of the schools I applied for. I'm beginning to think that, perhaps studying is not the way to improve my own writing. What will probably end up doing is me getting stuck in workshops, which I hate. I hate competitiveness, especially when it comes to writing, I think it hurts my writing more than it helps and I believe that what I really need is to read more deeply and work at trying to describe things more precisely--specific yet without losing the instinct of what the thing feels like, not merely what it is or looks like.

I have been reading Virginia Woolf's diaries. She is an excellent writer who is obsess with trying to capture life and its essence. I think her attempt is obvious. As beautiful as her books are though, her sense of life and its essence always remain elusive. Her writing is sensual but yet at the same time, it lacks some of that grittiness of the realists whom I have been reading. Why do things always have to be in two extremes? Either you are cut and dried like Hemmingway and Carver and the impact of their words hit like a boxer or it has to be a meandering form of musing like Woolf's, no one seems to be able to deliver both. Or perhaps it is just a matter of me not reading widely enough. I long to discover excellent new comic writers. SOmetimes, I think writers take themselves too seriously. Want to read someone like Wodehouse or Douglas Adams.