hustle and flow
Oct. 22nd, 2010 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
constanceIn between my recent sweaty Greco-Roman wrestles with computer problems not my own (the latest: at a coworker's house until almost! midnight! last! night! replacing his son's painfully slow PC with another slightly less painfully slow PC, and every time I made polite noises about leaving them to their snug beds, my coworker would say, no no you should really stick around to make certain that [iTunes] [AVG] [his bio project] is in working order, so I stayed and stayed and stayed. I now feel that any obligations incurred by his giving me a lawn mower over the summer have been, if not paid in full, then substantially discharged. But also, in an aside in an aside, I haven't been in a teenaged boy's room since I was a teenager myself, and it was interesting to note that the only way in which teen boys' rooms have changed in two decades is that their electronic equipment is more impressive), I've been thinking about the deeply satisfying efficiency of a good flowchart, because I've been catching up on back issues of Wired -- which at my house have a tendency to stockpile until we're all in danger of suffocating under piles of non-porous eco-unfriendly coated paper -- and Wired loves a flowchart almost as much as I do.
(I feel that I should apologize for that labyrinthine paragraph; you're probably used to that sort of thing from me by now, but I'll say it anyway: sorry, sorry.)
There's something so satisfying, isn't there, in a flowchart's ordered progression? So tidy, and yet so flexible, able to accommodate any number of digressions, as long as the digressions follow tangential logical progressions. I think any number of the world's problems and misunderstandings could be easily solved by the application of a judicious flowchart or two, and I've been pondering the usefulness of flowcharts in writing, too, both as means of planning, and as ends in themselves, because seriously, who doesn't want to read novels or fics in flowchart form? I am already planning my first ones. (You probably think I'm joking, but I'm not.) Likely they'll never get written, like most of my Great Ideas of Writing, but like most of my Great Ideas of Writing, they'll make me ridiculously happy right up until the moment I run them right off their legs.
I could make a flowchart of my writing process, too, come to think of it. I could make a flowchart of this entry. I could make a flow chart of everything, though as usual, someone's beat me to it. It's about time, too.
Life, I am soon to be many steps closer to understanding you.
(I feel that I should apologize for that labyrinthine paragraph; you're probably used to that sort of thing from me by now, but I'll say it anyway: sorry, sorry.)
There's something so satisfying, isn't there, in a flowchart's ordered progression? So tidy, and yet so flexible, able to accommodate any number of digressions, as long as the digressions follow tangential logical progressions. I think any number of the world's problems and misunderstandings could be easily solved by the application of a judicious flowchart or two, and I've been pondering the usefulness of flowcharts in writing, too, both as means of planning, and as ends in themselves, because seriously, who doesn't want to read novels or fics in flowchart form? I am already planning my first ones. (You probably think I'm joking, but I'm not.) Likely they'll never get written, like most of my Great Ideas of Writing, but like most of my Great Ideas of Writing, they'll make me ridiculously happy right up until the moment I run them right off their legs.
I could make a flowchart of my writing process, too, come to think of it. I could make a flowchart of this entry. I could make a flow chart of everything, though as usual, someone's beat me to it. It's about time, too.
Life, I am soon to be many steps closer to understanding you.
