My short story writing course (5)
This term, I’ve been attending a City Lit course on short story writing. I’ve only managed to make 8 of the 12 sessions and for me the course is now over. I would have liked more structure and more feedback in the course, but it gave me some tips and insights and encouraged me to experiment.
The last piece of homework I did involved creating a monologue in the voice of someone talking about their job (but not our own). I chose the occupation of web site designer and you can see my monologue below.
Monologue
I love words. I love the shape of them, the look of them, the interactions between them. I so admire writers, but the writer only starts the act of creation; much more has to be done before the words can be accessed, seen, read, savoured. The writer does not shape and reshape the words as I do. By designing web sites, I can give words a whole new look and a vast new audience.
Bits of HyperText Markup Language allow the words to take the form of dozens of different scripts, make them larger or smaller, bolder or fainter, turn them into italics, give them colour, reformat their collection into different lines and paragraphs and pages. And, at the click of a key, I can make everything permanent or everything disappear. The passion and the power. I am a wordsmith in a manner that Johannes Gutenberg could never have imagined.
The beauty and the madness of HTML. It enables me to create the perfect representation of a piece of text – no indecipherable handwriting, no smudged print, no faded page. And yet, it is so totally unforgiving – just one character out of place and the whole thing can be wrong. But, ah when it’s right …
The words are instantly accessible to over a billion people all around the world every second of every day. And, oh the magic of it, I can make the words hyperlinks to words on another web page on another site on another server in any other part of the planet. And, oh the joy of it, other words can link to mine.
These words can educate, illuminate, inform, transform, amuse, bemuse, excite, incite, advise, admonish, inspire, infuriate, query, answer. They can challenge reputations, corporations, dictatorships. They can make the loneliest soul or the most anonymous writer at minimum a quiet voice and at best a thunderous roar.
In the opening of the film “The Matrix”, numbers cascade down the screen. In my dreams, letters fall before my closed eyes like alphabet rain. Then they whirl and swirl as if in a storm of symbols and I know, just know with utter confidence, that I can make this madness a perfect form.
Tim Berners-Lee, I love you.