Whenever I’m getting ready to start a new writing project, I feel the way I imagine a tire feels swelling with air.
Archive for the ‘writing’ Category.
Some of those who cast off religion (as being insufficiently hip) but continue to experience spiritual hunger wind up plunging into such ethereal realms of soul-questing as astrology, Scientology, fortune-telling, white witchery and New Age blatherbloat. Before long they’re channeling Rock Hudson and Bella Abzug and joyously waggling their hands like Yes-God-ing gospel singers; and their throbbing souls (which they had said they didn’t “believe in” anymore) are ripe for plucking by manipulating apostles. Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates wrote novels about this rhapsodic idiocy that will scare the hell out of you.
I have devoted fifty years to the effort of formulating language conveying precisely what I think I mean. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that practically everybody else employs language to evade the slightest suspicion of specificity.
If I sound as though I think I’m superior to the average American, then the real Don Thompson is not getting through, because I’m not superior to anybody. It’s just that in today’s mental climate, putting together sentences that are formally correct and coherent in thought inevitably yields that impression. (But at my age I’m not going to write down, nor will I build paragraphs by sticking buzzwords together like Lego blocks). For that matter, I suppose that trying to be incisive in communicating what I think I’ve learned about things must lead readers, supposing there are any left in this country, to conclude that I am also a sarcastic son of a bitch.
One of the ways a hack differs from an artist is by not wanting to put out anything there isn’t already an audience for.
Pith and Wit: The only advice I have for novice writers is to practice saying the same thing in as many different ways as he or she can think of and invent. (Consult Act I of Cyrano de Bergerac, the scene concerning varieties of descriptions.) When a writer wants to say something, he wants to say it in a particular way, giving it emphasis and shading, tone and specificity. He wants his phrasing to marry energy, incisiveness and force; he wants to fuse pith and wit.
Huge personal anguish: Today (12/19/02) I’m forced to see my prose for what it is: puerile, inadequate, inept, anemic, bathetic, vapid and clumsy-booted. I have just finished reading a column—the first of his I’ve seen—by James Lileks. If I used a pen to write with, I’d break it. As it is, I can’t destroy the thinkbox, because it belongs to my daughter. I’ll have to suffer my humiliation before its mooted, mocking visage.
I want to write at the intersection of the sensibility and the mind.
Vladimir Nabokov had a hell of an idea. I’ll reconstruct what I believe to be his thinking: If I could just get the brain, or rather the mind, out of the way, I could light the sensibility up like a Christmas tree and take the reader’s emotions on a real sleigh ride. But the mind imposes patterns of its own stemming from its expectations and preconceptions. Those puerile patterns interfere with my patterns—and thus with my ability to strike directly at the heart. How might I divert and occupy the mind so I can work my sorcery? I know what I can do. I’ll give the mind some intellectual games to keep busy with, and I will make them so devilishly complex—what with puns, word games, brain teasers and the most obscure references imaginable—that the donkey of all organs will become oblivious of what’s going on in the rest of the person. Surely V.N. was the greatest fiction writer of the second half of the 20th century.
I am an oppressive male barbarian god with my boot planted squarely on the neck of feminism, yet I’m not wholly insensitive to women’s “issues”. Many of the bitches are academics and invest their energy in reinforcing wombanity syntactically and philologically. This sparks my own desire (wholly unacted on heretofore) to intellectualize, and in doing so I have made a breakthrough in the protocols of blatherbloat all on my own. I now use “woperson” and “wopeople” instead of the gender-demeaning, essence-stealing traditional forms of the generic noun, reserving the complete versions of the term for only very special and very sisterly occasions, such as Taking Back the Night campus demonstrations: “wombperson”, “wombpeople.”
I spotted John Updike in Washington’s National Airport one day during the Nineteen Eighties. A man who bears a likeness to the character Punchinello in Commedia dell’arte, the illustrious author acted (as Punch himself was wont to do) like a being from a different dimension of reality. Exhibiting “writer’s preoccupation” in full panoply, he really was trying to conduct himself normally while spontaneously spinning out his graceful yet incisive sentences in their eye-beguiling variety of constructions, all the while displaying an occluded gaze despite the throngs of passengers and a facial activity that mimicked itchy mastication, though he would give a start when somebody jostled him, halting abruptly to peer at the jostler as though the latter were an animated clothes bag while the skirt of his overcoat flounced about his knees. God was that a great sight. Updike is one of America’s national treasures as far as I’m concerned, and yet observing the writer I was reminded of no one so much as Holden Caulfield.
The first literary construction that slammed me in the gut was the last line of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Talent is to craftsmanship as a feel for spelling is to War and Peace.
The power of the most vivacious writing comes not from rhetorical skill or linguistic prestidigitation, but from the tidal flow of the writer’s emotions and the fierce clear motions of his mind.
Believe it or not, there is an upside to being a writer whose material is not read. (No one reads the Knifethrusts except the people I specifically send them to, and I’m not sure they read them either since none has ever alluded to the entries; perhaps I am one of the boxes they check before they hit Delete every day to exorcise the junk mail.) It is not widely known that writers whose “product” some segment of the public is willing to pay to read are in some manner and to some extent constrained by that audience’s predilections as to what they can say and how they ought to say it if they want to keep receiving the audience-segment’s money and go on living and writing. I, on the other hand, am able to say any fucking God-damn thing I God-damn fucking well please. I can assert that I favor baby stomping and fuel-injected enemas with olive oil, it doesn’t matter in the slightest, because nobody gives a tinker’s dam because there’s nobody to give a tinker’s dam. If there were somebody out there in Cyber City reading my effusions—some contemporary typical American jack-off somewhere—he would by virtue of being who is and partaking of his Zeitgeist’s illusions probably not be someone I particularly care to have read my crap anyway, the kind of smarmy dork who flatters his ego with the claim that he’s in some significant and important way “liberated.” But as long as you are reading, read this, dickwad: When it comes to being liberated, you don’t have the merest scintilla of a tiny fraction of a smidgen of a ghostly iota of a clue as to what liberation is, baby. I do. I am broke, alone, isolated, fucked up and fucked over, sick, visually a wreck, generally un- or misshaven, a shambling ex-drunk and ex-smoker who thinks of nothing else all day but cigarettes (and dreams about them five nights out of seven), obscenely overweight, entirely disreputable, and wearing dentures of which the lower plate is cracked and held together by crazy glue, and I can get away with feeling sorry for myself like this on the Internet because no one will ever see this bullshit except for a few poor blighters who receive them in the form of unsolicited e-mail but have not (yet) blocked my correspondence for some unfathomable reason. But I can write about anything I want to write about in any fashion I choose, so don’t cry for me, my nonreader. I am doing a more than adequate job of that myself.
It’s not true that I never any made money from my writing. In thirty-eight years, I made $5.00. But then I didn’t become a father in order to put my children on an auction block when they grew up, either.
Most days I am elated by the prospect of putting together sentences and paragraphs. And then there are mornings like this, when not even testing myself in the writing of English brings joy, and I am oppressed by the feeling that human beings are not even acceptable as a concept.
This is more for my benefit than anybody else’s, though the confusion that impelled me to go to www.yourdictionary.com and finally look the thing up, after three decades of idly wondering what the correct form of the word might be (“And you call yourself a writer!”), is as far as I can tell universal. The word dynamic is employed in the singular with these two meanings: “an interactive system or process, especially one involving competing or conflicting forces” (I would add that such forces are collaboratively or constructively competing or conflicting); and “a force, especially political, social, or psychological: the main dynamic behind the revolution.” This means that virtually everyone who says “dynamics”, which includes virtually everyone who uses the base word at all and in the past has always included me, is unknowingly referring to more than one set of forces in the first instance, or more than one normative force in the second, unless he is a genius language user on the order of Wittgenstein and is signifying a sort of process of processes he conceptualizes as a metadynamic.
I fear that no one will ever read the Knifethrusts who is competent to evaluate their qualities as prose. What is more, no one will ever read them except me who will consider that circumstance as grounds for melancholy reflection.
As I waited this morning in the hospital for the opening phase of another episode of bureaucratic out-patient horseshit, I literally “just happened to think” of this aphorism from one of literature’s most beguiling practitioners, F. Scott Fitzgerald: “In the long dark reaches of the soul, it’s always three o’clock in the morning.”