Scraps

A nice rewriting of the 'kill your darlings' advice, by James Buchan in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday (reviewing Paul Theroux's Blinding Light:

"Theroux has not learned the first law of writing, which is this: if you are particularly proud of a sentence, by all means enjoy it for a day or two, but then you must cross it out, for it is certainly a bad sentence and it will haunt you."

And a small piece of mindblowing stupidity from the letters section of Good Weekend:

"The 'I' in Christ means that without Christ I am nothing; the 'Me' in mercy highlights that showing mercy to those in need is completely up to me."

Hmm, now I'm really wondering about that "i" in "devil" and that "me" in "machine gun".