Caulking Up My Writing

I had cause to re-caulk my shower recently, and it put me in mind of writing.  One might think that all sorts of things put me in mind of writing, the way I go on, but keep in mind this is a blog primarily concerned with writing.  Go read my Hungarian folk music blog and you’ll see that a lot of things put me in mind of pentatonic kaval formations, too.

But anyway.  Laying down a bead of caulk always sort of makes me think of writing a short story.  Not so much the beginning part, where I try to get the gun going and send caulk all over the place, or the middle part, where things always seem to go pretty well.  But at the end comes the time where I smooth it out, nice and neat.  Then comes the time when I look at it and think that there is one place where it didn’t quite come out perfect and I wonder if I should try to add some more caulk to tidy it up.  And then it turns out that gently adding a blob of caulk just makes things worse, and the whole section ends up slightly worse than it was before I tried to improve it.  So I try again, cleaning off bits and adding more and so on, and end up with something that may or may not be better than it was when I first started improving, but is at least different.  That’s the part that reminds me of writing short stories.

~ by smwilliams on May 24, 2012.