From "The Blind Assassin," by Margaret Atwood:
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.
Impossible, of course.
From my Garner's Usage Tip of the Day:
"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
-- Thomas Mann
So that's my problem. It's not that I'm not a writer, or can't write. It's that I'm a writer, and I'm just having a really hard time. (Soon to be the excuse of every kid who hasn't turned in that essay on time.)
"The split
infinitive is not a violation of literary morality. It is not even a
blemish until it is grossly overdone."
-- Edward T. Teall, Putting
Words to Work (1940).
One of my students experienced a flash of insight into copy editing, saying, "You catch 19 errors in a story and then get penalized for the 20th. It' just not fair."
A story with only 20 errors may be better than average. Some years back, a veteran reporter set to work on the city desk commented after the first week, "Reading other people's raw copy is like looking at your grandmother naked."
Back in the day, when I'd meet ballet fans outside a stage door or simply get into conversation with people who knew what I did but had no idea what it entailed, I used to get asked the question, "So why do you do it, anyway?" (Or, from the less tactful: "What's the point?") It's hard to explain the "why" to people who can never truly understand: they'll never walk in your shoes, get up on that stage, or know what it is that drives a person to dance (or sing or act), despite the blisters and the bruises and the sprains and the intangible wounds and struggles that go oh so much deeper. But the public would demand an answer, and so I would try to find the simplest response. Sometimes throwing a question back at the original question worked: "Why do you breathe?" Oh, yeah. Deep. That tended to elicit a lot of thoughtful "hmms" and slow nods of the head. There was also the Honest but Not Helpful response: "It's hard to explain. I just love it," trailed sometimes by another question: "Can you explain why you love?" (More nods, more "hmms.") But the thing is, it was not always about me. That was hard to explain, too. This passage, though, from Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, by Kate Bornstein (I'm culling all sorts of good stuff from this book), taken from correspondence to the author from David Harrison, then her partner, could have stood in as a useful response:
What's important is loving the audience. It's not about what you feel as a performer when you're up there -- it's not about your personal catharsis. As an audience member, I want you to make me feel something. That's why I come to the theater. The artists I have the most respect for, and I'm most moved by, are those who give so much of their hearts. To me, a good performance is, in its essence, an act of love.
So beautifully put. In other words: It's not just that I love what I do -- it's that I'd like to share this love with you, and I expect you to demand that of me. It's hard to find fault with that.
"Fanatics are distinguishable by the fact that they can't laugh at themselves."
From Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, by Kate Bornstein.
"Like good art and good sex, good healing can be transformational, blurring the lines between life and death."
From Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, by Kate Bornstein.
"Since I am neither a camera eye nor much given to writing pieces that do not interest me, whatever I do reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel."
-- Joan Didion, Preface, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"
I have felt for a long time now an inability to conjure prose, to piece it together in a way sufficient for others to lay eyes on. And yet there is the urge to write. This feeling that not to do so is somehow a corruption. Some knowledge deep in my belly that this is one of those things I am supposed to do, never mind the momentary lapses in personality, in confidence, in a willingness to face life. I love words. I love the way they make me feel when they rub up against each other just so. I have a desire to play back with them, to put them into juxtapositions from which, by some magic, a song may rise. I search for beauty in books, in journals and other clippings. And when these things are beautiful, I want to eat them, to squeeze out their pulpy juices, to feast upon them course by delicious course. I know the mechanics of writing, the right and the wrong, but I have never felt deserving enough of the words. A major handicap has been the firm belief that no matter what I say, no one will want to hear it. The things that interest me, no one will care to know. The world as seen through these eyes -- why? The world has been there, done that. But then I read that quote up there by Joan Didion, and I think, Yes. All right. That’s the attitude. I’m no Joan Didion, but I can spin a line or two. And so what if there’s a good deal of me in there. Maybe all that me won’t be such a bad thing. I have ideas, so many ideas, every day, walking to work, waiting for the subway, riding the subway, staring into my drink, waiting, hours, to fall asleep. And yet most of this has not led anywhere. Yet. I am hoping that this school business can help me finally escape the waiting room into which I have sequestered myself. For so long, I have felt inadequate to the task. But there comes a point when such feelings must be put away, tucked in beneath sheets and sweaters and closed into a dark box. Click of the lock. I see it now, within reach: the courage to toss the key.
From Garner's Quotation of the Day:
"There may be some writers in this world who never get stuck, writers whose fluency is so great that it carries them without a break from the beginning to a predetermined end. I am not one of them. I wouldn't believe anyone who claimed to be. I get stuck with depressing regularity, and I find that the best way to become unstuck is to start over as if I were writing a letter to a friend. This prescription also seems to work well for others who have tried it." -- Ernst Jacobi, Writing at Work: Dos, Don'ts, and How Tos 4 (1976)
In her chapter on "Sentences," Ms. Prose imparts some wisdom, and a charming analogy:
What's strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great literature. ... Mastering the logic of grammar contributes, in a mysterious way that again evokes some process of osmosis, to the logic of thought.A novelist friend compares the rules of grammar, puntuation, and usage to a sort of old-fashioned etiquette. He says that writing is a bit like having someone to your house. The writer is the host, the reader the guest, and you, the writer, follow the etiquette because you want your reader to be more comfortable, especially if you're planning to serve them something they might not be expecting.
I couldn't have put it better. It's an odd feeling, reading a book and having the sense that something is off -- realizing, as you're trotting along, that at some point a few words back, you must have taken a wrong turn, because all of a sudden you've arrived in a place that seems foreign, disjointed. And you have to go back, retrace your steps, try to figure out where the sentence led you astray, where some rapscallion of a comma showed up in the wrong place or flashed the wrong warning signal. A lot of people, when reading, can recognize when something is amiss but don't always have the tools to explain what, precisely, that is. The authorities who set the rules don't make it very easy for us, either, throwing out all these enigmatic terms like "apposition" and "participial" and "restrictive" and "subjunctive mood." (How is it helpful when you're looking for an explanation to something, but in order to understand the explanation, you have to go to the dictionary for translation?)
So I feel the writerly people's pain. It's tough to get it down. And yet, in the long run, trying to figure it all out can only help.
