I’m in trouble. When I set out on this mission to write multiple mini-reviews of The Martian as I read it, I didn’t really plan out whether or not I would include spoilers. I’ve managed to avoid them pretty well so far, but now that I’m three quarters of the way through the novel, it’s getting more difficult not to give stuff away. Solving problems is what writing is all about, though, and I’ve come up with a temporary solution: I’ll write this installment of my review in the style of one of Mark Watney’s log entries.
Okay, so far so good. I’ve got my intro paragraph in place. Now I’ll need to really give a sense of the astronaut’s thought process as he works through his latest challenge. Of course, a writing challenge is very different from an engineering challenge. For one thing (stay with me here as I whip out some technical jargon), engineers use “numbers” and “equations,” whereas writers use “words” and “grammar.”
The tricky thing about writing is not the words, though, or how to string them together to form grammatical sentences. That part takes some time to learn, but when you’ve got it down, it’s there, and you can just draw on it pretty much at will. The tricky thing is coming up with the ideas that will knit those sentences together into paragraphs that hold up under scrutiny, that draw the reader in, that convey something that’s worth reading in a way that’s both clear and interesting.
Now a few words to wrap it up, and just like that, I think my problem is solved. Let me read it over to make sure I haven’t made any mistakes that’ll blow up in my face when it comes time to deploy. Yup, it checks out. I think it has enough humour in it that it doesn’t come across as too pretentious. I’ll only know for sure once I take it out for a test drive, but that’ll have to wait till tomorrow. Time to see what those Duke boys are up to.
The tricky thing about writing is not the words, though, or how to string them together to form grammatical sentences. That part takes some time to learn, but when you’ve got it down, it’s there, and you can just draw on it pretty much at will. The tricky thing is coming up with the ideas that will knit those sentences together into paragraphs that hold up under scrutiny, that draw the reader in, that convey something that’s worth reading in a way that’s both clear and interesting.
Now a few words to wrap it up, and just like that, I think my problem is solved. Let me read it over to make sure I haven’t made any mistakes that’ll blow up in my face when it comes time to deploy. Yup, it checks out. I think it has enough humour in it that it doesn’t come across as too pretentious. I’ll only know for sure once I take it out for a test drive, but that’ll have to wait till tomorrow. Time to see what those Duke boys are up to.
