Writerly Habits: A Defense of Dark Arts

As it's November 15th today, an official midway point on this project I'm becoming increasingly dubious about, I've decided to use this as an opportunity for reflection about who I am as a writer and who I want to be. Before I began writing this I thought, well, this entry won't count, it will be my blog's version of a bye week in football. Because it'll be easy just to say, oh look, here are my writerly quirks and foibles. But now that I've posed this as a sort of redefinition blog (defining things being what I strive to do most in life, and struggle the most with), I'm scared shitless.

Dubious. It's a word I like to use a lot. Probably because, like my experience with a lot of words, I pretty much always knew what it meant but wasn't comfortable using it in my own writing, but I read another writer who was in love with it, so I looked it up for a final time and fell in love with the word myself. I believe said writer is Saul Bellow, who wrote Herzog, which I read this summer, and which I didn't completely understand. But oh, how those dog-eared pages persist in my mind. Will I go back to them ever to extrapolate some meaning? Probably not. Because while I do desire to know what I'm reading and find out what I don't know, there's the constant fear that I will die before the best books out there to be read are indeed read. By me. While that makes me sound like Dr. Faustus and one might presume I'm ready to sell my soul to the devil, that's not quite accurate. I don't wish to know it all--I'm too lazy for that--but I do want to experience as many books as possible, feel whatever it is they offer, whether I understand them fully or not. And if I don't quite get everything you say, Annie Dillard, oh well, fuck it. Reading about lizards is boring as balls anyway.

In writing I like to curse a little bit because I do so much in life. I'm sure some would see this as a moral failing, as a weakness of mind, as not having enough vocabulary at my disposal to express with. This is certainly true. But, I'm also of the mind that the writing voice should sound at least a little like the writer's speaking voice, and since I verbalize fuck-shit-piss dozens of times per day, some of this must be included on paper (or on blog). (An aside: in college I had the best t-shirt ever. It was black, and in white letter it read, "Fuck you, you fucking fuck." I'm pretty certain someone I literally fucked stole this shirt from me, but surely he was a fuckhead, and only hope that me and my shirt taught him something--anything--about life. Like how to talk good.)

Another element I'm careful about is the way I start sentences. Very rarely will I start with either of these two structures: "I_______" or "There is/are." Thank you Rodger Kamenetz, my thesis advisor, for pointing of how profusely I used these sentence constructions without aesthetic purpose. Seriously, it wasn't like I was going on about "There is" this and "There are" that for the intention of refrain or litany or some other poetic crapola. At that point in my writing career, just as I was finishing an MFA which would purport that I was relatively successful at the art of writing, I simply didn't pay attention to my sentences. Hopefully I've improved in this area a bit.

Hopefully. Speaking of hopefully, I fucking love the adverb. All kinds and of all sizes. Sometimes I'll adverbize a noun, creating new words altogether, such as adverbize. This doesn't always work well, but if you can't play fun games with words sometimes you might as well be John Updike or an earnest writer with similar dickish qualities: you must do this when you write, real writers never do that.

Can I rail against Stephen King for a moment? He is a terrific writer, da da da da da, but...he's got way too many rules in his On Writing book. It makes me dislike him immensely. Any writer who expostulates on what real writers do as opposed to, what? unreal writers?, is as far as I'm concerned, a clown. Yes, hard and fast rules and how-tos sell books, but it seems these versions of advice are for left-brained thinkers who usually don't gravitate towards writing anyway. (Another aside: when I was in elementary school, and we learned the difference between the responsibilities of the right and left sides of the brain, I became convinced that the right brain was good and equaled to god, whomever he was, and the left brain was bad and equaled to the devil, whomever he was, and I just had to be right brained, because I wanted to be the disorganized, misunderstood yet charming artist, and figured I would become so because: well, I was right-handed. Oh, the seven year old logic! Probably every goober kid like myself reasoned the same thing.) Look, I'm not above the fray--I own probably every famous how-to-write book on this good planet--but the thing is I don't take them seriously. If I find five useful elements I consider it success. There are no real or unreal writers, but there are assholes, and as long as I'm not being too much of one at any time I consider myself to be okay.

On the foible end, I should really try to stay away from the smaller, simpler, less interesting adverbs I use like toilet paper: very, truly, extremely, really. This was a grading weekend for me, and as I turned over profile after profile essay while on autopilot, I came across something astonishing: a student in love with the very. No, I mean, she was really in love with very. At some point obsessions of this magnitude have to be enumerated, and out of sheer curiosity I counted the verys and in a paper of five pages there were thirty-seven. Some would argue that reading bad writing hurts your craft, but I'm here to tell you I now refuse to use very in this very blog in anything but an ironic way, and I'll be wary of the word for a long, long time from now.

Often I'm guilty of the worst writerly (and human) sin there is, and that's insincerity. Especially now that I'm forcing myself to write a blog per day, and I'm forced to create some semblance of a running, coherent theme in each entry, the process sometimes involves saying stuff I don't necessarily believe to be true. For instance, in my Erudition of Texts blog. Midway through I pontificated about not understanding so many rap lines because they're about Jesus, and I just can't do Jesus or the Bible (which is stupid: at the very least I should be aware of the gospel gobbledy-gook for intellectual reasons). Now, on one level this is true: many references in life and lit that I don't get are Biblical/religious ones. But I don't think this is a preoccupation of the rap community, as I asserted in the blog. Rappers' preoccupations are with themselves, which is the very reason I didn't understand the Jay-Z line I wrote about. He was referring to a Young Jeezy line, and I don't even know who the hell that is. It's a tacit rule of mine when considering which rap artists to give a chance to, that if they highlight in their name some allusion to their small size or age and conflate that with the idea that small size/age is something to be admired, I simply cannot listen and wouldn't mind if the FCC hauled them all off to jail for being so misguided (and that's a double fuck-you to you, Lil Wayne).

Things I love to do in writing: start sentences as an introductory phrase followed by a semicolon. Write litanies, write long, discursive Proustian sentences which I hope make sense, though they often don't, compose long connections through ands, or long refutations through buts. I love to italicize the word worth italicizing. The digression is another friend to my writing, and I don't mind setting if off either by dashes or parentheses (and I hope the reader doesn't mind it either). I love the deft analogy, the hearty image, and recognize they're the hardest to conjure of all the dark writer's arts. At least for me. I love, most of all, that I still love doing this, even when I feel sucky and want to hide under a blanket of chocolate to avoid all pain.

One fiction workshop in graduate school (if only you all know how miserably embarrassed myself that entire semester with my inability to construct a fictional story) our teacher asked for everyone to go around the room and comment on one another's writers ticks. All I remember is my exchange with my best friend Ashley. I said she was in love with parentheses, and she said I was in love with the semicolon. Hopefully now both she and I live in a writer's world in which we love all punctuation, but I can tell you one thing that's for damned sure: I'm out of love with the semicolon. Seriously, I used to use it all the time, and now, for some reason, that warped-looking wannabe comma is an affront to my aesthetic vision. Like, I hate to look at it.

But even more than that I don't like to write grammatically inaccurate sentences. A few weeks ago I finished reading a memoir called The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard, and I tell you the book is fabulous and I recommend it to all, but damn, did this writer ever divorce herself from the semicolon! The thing that really bothered me about her lack of it, though, was that she used a comma--a comma!--to separate two independant clauses (two independant clauses that, by the way, did not include an appropriate coordinating conjunction). Basically she was using a comma and pretending it was a semicolon. Here's the kicker though: a few times in the text, Beard used a semicolon in places where the correct punctuation to use was a comma! This concerned me immensely. I thought, what the fuck, can she do that?! Who says? Why can't I do that? If I do that, if I break the rules it's taken half a lifetime for me to learn, will I forget them? Will I become way stupider than I already am, or worse, a bad writer?

In a gigantic leap of faith, I'm going to end this blog by answer my own distressed questions: who says I can do it?--I say. Those who love to read me say. I can do that. I won't forget what I've learned. Occasionally I'll start a sentence with "I ______," or I'll be so very in my writing, and that will be all right too. It doesn't mean I'm bad, or wrong, or that I should quit this blog or any other project I take on. Overall I'm just figuring things out, more than twenty years after I decided it would be super-cool to be super-right-brained, and imagined how neat it would be to write about myself and my creations in a diary forever. Exclamation point.