A Slight Delay

It’s National Grammar Day! Okay, there went the last vestige of my excitement. Not that there’s anything wrong with grammar, in and of itself. We need a few rules so that the words we set down on the screen, the page, or pretty much anywhere else will make sense to someone besides ourselves. Or are grammar rules too much to put up with? Let’s try to somehow get to the bottom of this.

As you might’ve guessed, that last paragraph is riddled with grammatical errors. In fact, there are probably a handful in there besides even the ones I put there on purpose. Right off the top of my head, I’m seeing a rhetorical question, a split infinitive, and a sentence ending with a preposition, and frankly (to quote Rhett Butler), I don’t give a damn. (more…)

Ages ago, one of my college professors told a creative writing class, “Nothing ruins writing like going to college.” And while it’s true that the endless grind of essays and term papers can lead to a stilted, overly academic, view of the writing craft, I think there’s another thing that’s equally destructive: making writing a mysterious, mystifying thing. I bring this up because I’ve seen the topic of finding one’s voice as a writer referred to in sometimes mystical, new-agey terms. Well, enough of that.

Ever listened to a recording of yourself? It can be a bit disconcerting–Do I really sound like that?–but that’s your voice. It can also take a little while to get used to your voice on the page. Do I really write like that? If there are aspects of your writing voice you’re not crazy about (maybe your similes are nasally), you can always work on those, in much the same way you can train your speaking voice. Just be careful not to train all the life out of your writing. (more…)

If you’re looking for advice on writing, there are innumerable books and articles on writing (Well, duh. –Ed.). Having said that, you can easily cut through all of them and narrow the whole pile down to just two items, one a (very small) book, and the other an essay. I’m speaking from experience here, since every so often I’ll go to the bookstore and add another to the pile, and read a bit, and then allow them to gather dust.

So if you’re looking for just the bare essentials, your starting point should be William Strunk’s The Elements of Style, later edited and updated by E. B. White. Whereas most style manuals are bulky, boring, pedantic, and expensive, Elements is concise and readable (It’s writing, isn’t it readable by definition? –Ed.) (Enough with the editorializing, you. –PB). And did I mention inexpensive?

The other is an essay, George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language. It’s not a primer or a how-to, as such. As is typical of Orwell, it’s more analysis and polemics. It’s also, typically, funny as hell. Anyway, if you’re either a writer or a reader (and I’d hope you’re one or the other, if not both), you need to read this. Yearly, if needed. Sample quotation:

Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Further reading:
You can find Orwell’s Politics and the English Language here, though I’d suggest buying it in the collection A Collection of Essays (Mariner, 1970) along with Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, from your favorite local/indie bookstore.

Every language has its expressions that don’t quite translate into English. Saudade, weltschmerz, and other lacunae bedevil translators since there’s no easy one-to-one translation for them. So you can imagine the problem posed by Yiddish.

Yiddish is the Marx Brothers to Hebrew’s Maimonedes, Lenny Bruce to its Ben Gurion, klezmer to its kaddash. It doesn’t pretend, or aspire, to be scholarly. Its cadences and meaning carry a different set of cultural baggage than Hebrew.*

Assimilation goes both ways; the speakers and their language, both of which came here in steerage ages ago, didn’t only assimilate into America; as so often happens, America assimilated some of the habits and language of the new arrivals, too. And what an assimilation. (more…)

You might be wondering what magpies have to do with writing, exactly. To be honest, I’m not altogether sure myself, but I’ve started this thing, so I’m sure I’ll come up with something. Let’s see, birds, birdsongs, feathers, feather your nest… Ah, there we go. Nests. When working on your next written project, make sure you have a sufficient quantity of stray twigs, small bits of thread, and perhaps some mud and wattles.

No, that wasn’t quite it, either. I’ve got it in my head somehow that magpies are great finders and hoarders of “stuff,” from the aforementioned twigs and thread, to perhaps also bellybutton lint (someone else’s; I don’t think magpies have bellybuttons, though I’ve never asked, either). I don’t know if they’re big on wattles, but… alright, before I get too far off track, here’s the point: Save everything. And I do mean everything. (more…)

Every so often, it happens. You stare at a blank page, and… stare. And then stare some more. You go back to your notebooks, then back to staring. You try coffee, tea, warm milk, eight-year-old scotch, late-night phone calls, and nothing works. As far as you can tell, you’re officially “blocked.”

Every so often in this space, I’ll be putting up writing prompts, exercises, and other suggestions for beating the block. I’ll put something up just as soon as I think of something…

Okay, only kidding. Here’s your first batch: (more…)

Just the same as nobody writes in a vacuum, nobody writes for a vacuum, either. Nobody writes for the sake of not being read. Nobody–at least no one that I know–writes something with the fervent hope that it’s overlooked or ignored.

So who are we writing for? Who’s your audience, your adoring public? Many people who create–whether for a living, or just on impulse–will tell you that they’re doing it primarily for themselves, and that’s a good starting point. After all, if what you’re doing doesn’t even interest you, why bother? Having said that, I think most people who write do it on some level in order to reach a wider audience; stuff that’s written primarily to please one’s self ends up reading as though it was written that way (ie. bloated, self-indulgent). (more…)

A little while back in this space, I wrote about certain writers and writings acting as inspiration, or permission, for your own efforts. I’d like to take up what I think is the flip side of that particular coin: separating your voice from your mentors’.

James Thurber wrote once of Robert Benchley, one of his influences, “One of the greatest fears of the humorous writer is that he has spent three weeks writing something done faster and better by Benchley in 1919.” And chances are, you’ve been there, too. You re-read something, whether it’s a first draft you’ve just finished, or something you’ve re-written for the nth time, and realize that it’s a copy of your favorite writer (or, worse still, one you don’t like all that well).

I’ll admit, I went through my Benchley phase, and a Barthelme phase when I was in college–among others. If you encounter something that inspires you to create something in response (I’m wording it that way for those of you who paint, play music, et cetera), odds are that there’ll be something of the inspiration in the finished product. (more…)

The dishwasher is the bane of creativity. Just my personal opinion, mind you, but one based on years of evidence. Seeing neatly regimented rows of mugs, bowls, dinner plates and silverware represents lost opportunities; for me, there’s no better time for thinking than when you’re elbows-deep in suds. You could say that dishpan hands and creativity go together like peanut butter and jelly.

It’s not that there’s an insane amount of concentration going on; it’s rather the opposite. It doesn’t take all that much concentration to do dishes, so your mind is generally letting something else brew while you’re getting those caked-on bits of oatmeal off your bowls. I won’t say that every dishwashing experience has produced Isaac Newton-quality stuff, but what I have gotten over the years has been useful, sometimes even startling, and usually better than what I come up with when I sit there straining over it.

Now, for you it could be something different. Some people have their a-ha moments in the shower (singing “Take On Me” doesn’t count, by the way), while gardening, or in the course of doing any number of usefully mindless things. They’re a good way to overcome mental blocks, whether it’s a creative block or a problem that stubbornly resists solving no matter how hard you’ve tried. And, lest this sound like some kind of new-agey crap, there’s actually scientific evidence to back it up. (more…)

Sooner or later, it happens: you’ve read a lot, or listened to hours upon hours of music, or seen enough paintings to fill the MoMA twice over, and a thought comes to you: I could do this. That spark, when it comes, will be something different for each person; it’s that one thing that lets you know not only that you want to do this, but that it’s alright to give it a whirl.

Salman Rushdie wrote something years back that sums it up wonderfully. In an essay on Gunter Grass, he says:

There are books that open doors for their readers, doors in the head, doors whose existence they had not previously suspected. And then there are readers who dream of becoming writers; they are searching for the strangest door of all, scheming up ways to travel through the page, to end up inside and also behind the writing, to lurk between the lines; while other readers, in their turn, pick up books and begin to dream. For these Alices, these would-be migrants from the World to the Book, there are (if they are lucky) books which give them permission to travel, so to speak, permission to become the sort of writers they have it in themselves to be. A book is a kind of passport. And my passports, the works that gave me the permits I needed, included The Film Sense by Sergei Eisenstein, the Crow poems of Ted Hughes, Borges’s Fictions, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros—and, that summer of 1967, The Tin Drum.

(more…)