sweeper - by laura gao - being less

On Monday mornings, my arts and culture magazine publishes a “Street Sweeper,” a collection of 150 to 250 word blurbs, each about an event or musing from the previous week. They tend to be lightly edited, chirpy and preppy, well structured but not groundbreakingly poetic. Whenever I write longform, I’m too much of a perfectionist that I never finish anything, demanding crispy diction and symmetrical syntax. So, anyways, here is a Laura Sweeper: musings, or events, 150 to 250 words each, a little mediocre. 1. In reading Bresson, it jumps out to me how much he emphasizes the natural and “real.” For instance, he warns us to “neither beautify or uglify” your work, as that would be “denaturing.” A director’s role, he sees, is not to curate from the top; rather, a filmmaker ought to go with the flow of the reality he is capturing, to let reality guide him to places that he may not have gone otherwise. “Choose your [actors] well,” he advises, “so they lead you where you want to go.” I suppose

On Monday mornings, my arts and culture magazine publishes a “Street Sweeper,” a collection of 150 to 250 word blurbs, each about an event or musing from the previous week. They tend to be lightly edited, chirpy and preppy, well structured but not groundbreakingly poetic. Whenever I write longform, I’m too much of a perfectionist that I never finish anything, demanding crispy diction and symmetrical syntax. So, anyways, here is a Laura Sweeper: musings, or events, 150 to 250 words each, a little mediocre. 1. In reading Bresson, it jumps out to me how much he emphasizes the natural and “real.”