Coincidence seems to happen more often as you get older, or maybe you are just more aware. One of yesterday’s posts in Hypercompendia notes the change in writing style an author may undergo that makes ‘old’ writing nearly unrecognizable as one’s own.
This morning’s reading of Calvino brings me this, from Silas Flannery’s diary:
Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my papers. More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing from my manuscripts. A few days afterward I would find the pages in their place again. But often I no longer recognize my manuscripts, as if I had forgotten what I had written, or as if overnight I were so changed that I no longer recognized myself in the self of yesterday. (p. 186)
The concept–whether this is the intention of Calvino in bringing out or not–is the influence of experience from reading, writing, and just observing and living life that changes a writer’s style. The more he partakes, the greater the change.
In the next section, I see all hell breaking loose as Lotaria brings in the idea of electronic reading.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology