Meme Time

I held a small pie potluck today, in honor of National Pie Day. Everyone who brought a pie, brought a blueberry pie, so it was three blueberries against my lone durian. The durian, of course, lost by a landslide.

Below the fold: I’ve been tagged! This meme is about writing. Also, it only requires you to list three things, which I think is probably the maximum number of things that should be in a meme. Otherwise it’s almost as much work as writing something original.

Here are the rules:

1. List 3 writing tips
2. Tag 3 people whose writing style you would like to imitate

So here are my words of wisdom:

1. Give yourself permission to write a shitty first draft. You share 95%* of your genome with a hundred monkeys on a hundred keyboards, so you will probably need to produce a lot of gibberish before you spit out the first sentence of Hamlet.
2. Give yourself permission to publish your shitty first draft on your blog. If you keep typing and posting you can have a banana or a squirt of water.**
3. Potty words are funny.

I tag:

1. Bill Bryson
2. John McPhee
3. Anyone who wants a banana or a squirt of water

* I have no idea what the actual degree of genetic similarity is between humans and monkeys. It’s some sort of metaphor.
** Yes, monkey experimentalists use water as a reward. If they used juice all the time, the monkeys would get fat.