Worth of 1000 Words

Terribly sorry for not posting anything recently. I blame school and my dear “sister” for finally pushing me over the edge of obsession with her characters.

But no longer! For here is another blog post for you all to enjoy!

Warning: This post contains a lot of irrational complaining

I just have to know, does anyone else get seriously and completely ticked off when people say “A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Words”? Every single time that the grandma in Princess Diaries yells at Mia about how she has two pictures which equals 2000 words, I just get so mad!

That’s actually probably just me though, huh?

For some reason I always and still do take that personally, as if the people are purposefully trying to insult the value of words. I don’t know, it’s just one of those weird personal things that always makes me so mad. The reason for this: we were talking about it in Bio and it just got my blood boiling when a single phrase popped into my head for ya’ll to hear me babble about.

You ready?

I don’t think you are.

You’re going to cave in from the sheer awesomeness of this line.

Sure you’re ready?

Positive?

You asked for it!

A picture’s worth a thousand words. Your job is to paint one in less.

Bask in its sheer awesome amazingness.

Uh huh. You know you want to.

… so yeah. I guess this is mostly about expressing my frustration with people who say THAT phrase because I for some reason take it as a persona insult against one of my favorite things, writing. And the problem is that in the world’s view they’re right! Sure the pen’s mightier than the sword, but the picture’s 1000 times more worthy than the word.

And I’ll admit that in a number of situations, pictures are more useful than words. For example, explaining oxidative-reduction-chemiosmosis-phosphorylation. The picture helped a lot in that situation. But we have to realize that words can do just the same thing sometimes, and can do it better too.

So here’s the rub, returning to the earlier statement. “Your job is to paint [a picture] in less [than 1000 words].”

What does this mean children?

It means description.

Good description, not lengthy description. Let’s not lie to ourselves here, the world of books and literature doesn’t usually run on the principle of “longer the better”. In fact it’s usually more along the lines of “less is more”.

Trust me. I know what you’re thinking.

I don’t like description much either.

It’s boring. The characters are fun, the dialogue is interesting and witty (most of the time), and you just want to get on with the plot already. Trust me. I KNOW. It’s one of the problems I need to work on, I think. It’s something a lot of people need to work on.

So let’s try to write something together. I’ll “paint a picture” in less than 1000 words and post it. Then you rate it. If anyone wants to send in their own “pictures”, I would be more than happy to post them so they can be rated at the same time.

(I was told I need to be more interactive with you guys, so I’m trying it out. Is it working?)