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23
Sep
2018
This is my 1000th Sharp Edges column. At around 50 columns a year, that’s almost 20 years of writing a weekly column!
“How do you find something to write about every week?” people ask me.
That’s easy – by paying attention. To the world around me. To my own reactions. To what other people are saying.
Given the number of issues in the news each week, the problem is not finding a topic, but selecting which topic to focus on.
But there is a second step. If a local story grabs my attention, how does it connect to a larger topic? If an international story, how does it relate to life here in the Okanagan Valley. Or closer still, in little Lake Country. Or even in my own home.
There’s no point in raging about Donald the Dump – or lobbying for an endangered salamander in the Congo – if it isn’t relevant in some way to life here and now.
Macro and micro, universal and particular, belong in the same picture. I don’t care whether I zoom out or zoom in; the big picture and the small picture belong together.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Writing