About writing.....

Recently, I was 'discovered' by my long-lost American cousin and his wife, the family's genealogist. She has written several nice 'newsy' emails, while my cousin has exercised admirable restraint by contributing only a couple of briefer ones. He excuses the brevity by saying it comes from his training as an engineer.

I'm more of the James Michener school of writing. He said, "In six pages, I can't even say 'hello'." So this morning, I started looking through a little book of quotations that I've had for a few years now. Its title is 'Quotations With An Attitude' (Roy L.Stewart, Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., New York, NY) and its pages are mostly loose from the binding now. That's why they were numbered, and I'm thankful for that. 

I was looking in it just now for a quote I thought came from Oscar Wilde, because old Oscar usually had something to say about almost everything, whether he had any real knowledge of it or not. But this time, it wasn't from him it came; it was from good old Anonymous: "In Ireland, a writer is looked upon as a failed conversationalist."

Someone once said that those who pepper their writing with quotations are either lazy or lack imagination. Not necessarily. Why should I wrack my brain for something witty when I can simply 'borrow' the wit of better writers? It's the results I'm after. And as our electrical engineering boss at the old Power Commission in Ottawa many years ago once said, while admiring my little shelf of engineering handbooks, "Half the battle of being an engineer is knowing where to quickly find the answers, and you've got most of those right there in those handbooks." I replied, "Dave, please help yourself to them any time you like. That's why I got them - so that they are handy when needed."

Dave insisted that I should attend the weekly brainstorming sessions where the various engineers and our bosses would discuss the latest ongoing projects and offer improvements or suggestions. I felt totally beyond my depth, being a 'gold-plated nobody' as one of the technologists put it so well. I sat there usually with a letter-sized pad and a soft 2B pencil, making quick sketches of subjects under discussion - sort of an 'artist's conception' of what Joe, our boss, had in mind. Dave told me that he wished some of our engineers had that gift of visualizing how a project might come together. He sounded rather envious at the time. So maybe 'the gold-plated nobody' made a useful contribution after all.