Over the recent Sunset Beach vacation, I picked up Kurt Vonnegut’s “Timequake.”
It’s a little bendy sci-fi story that Vonnegut seemed to use more as a swan song than as a novel. He could only get away with it after something like “Slaughterhouse-Five”, because, as a novel, nobody would take that as a first book.
The book reads less like a novel than it does a handbook on how to be a writer.
Well, first of all, write. Writers write.
He’s using a lot of general sayings such as “How about that!” to let those who know him in on a little joke. Cliches in writing are to be avoided. But he uses them as a way to access normal folks and poke fun at convention.
But what I come back to, and thought about again this morning is Occam’s Razor. Vonnegut talks about it in his book. Boiled down (as the principle would have it anyway), it means:
The simplest answer is usually the correct answer.
To wit:
When I spoke with my old pal today, she asked me why I gave her the wrong number to catch up with her sometime. An actor away doing work, she was nearby again and wanted to catch up over a beer or something.
It really hurt her that I gave her the wrong number, she said over the chat service. Like she felt fooled.
I typed my number 704-XXX-XXXX.
“Oh.” She said. “I had typed it in wrong in my phone.”
No big deal, I say, give me a holler.
And there we have it folks, Occam’s Razor. It’s not about being right, it’s about saving time and trouble and to keep from fretting unnecessarily.
From a car repair (it’s not the starter, it’s the battery. No, it’s the fuel filter. No, the alternator), to problems in communication (Who texted who? Did it get through?), there’s usually a simpler explanation.
Along those lines, here’s a handy chart for decision-making.
3 responses so far ↓
Gerald // July 6, 2009 at 5:05 pm |
Disaster. According to m-w.com, it’s ” a sudden calamitous event bringing great damage, loss, or destruction ; broadly : a sudden or great misfortune or failure ”
In day-to-day life disaster is in the realm of stuff such as unintended consequences resulting in severe humiliation, personal injury or is in line with that old saw, “It’s better to beg for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission.”
Or something like that?
Cousin Ray // July 7, 2009 at 7:38 pm |
My concept of this was all wrong. I thought it was more of a cut your losses kind of thing.
Gerald // July 8, 2009 at 8:22 am |
No, not at all. The phrase you’re looking for there is “You gotta know when to fish and when to cut bait.”
The shortened form of that is “cut bait”, as in, “I had to cut bait and get out of that mess. It obviously was not working.”