Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:

“One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.”

—George Orwell, “Why I Write”

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

 

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Jim Van Pelt wrote an interesting post today. Take a paragraph of writing—your own or a master like Fitzgerald—and arrange it like a poem. Immediately, the vibrancy (or lack thereof) of the writing pops out in ways it doesn’t when arranged as a paragraph.

I decided to try this with the opening of my novel Shivery Bones. Here’s the original, which I’d previously thought decent-enough:

Jolene’s earthquake passed through her midsection, rolled along her limbs, then off into the grass beneath her toes to make the ground shake. She fell, gasping with pain and surprise as the temblor radiated out from her and across the yard, the ground splitting like an overripe peach. The leaves of the trees along the high wall shook as if attacked by nerves, swaying and groaning. The wave crested inside Jolene, her personal shaking stopped. The earth and trees stilled a moment later, and the ground healed itself, closing as if no trembling had ever occurred.

However, when I arranged it as a poem, the dead parts really jumped out at me. It didn’t have life or flow, I thought:

Jolene’s earthquake
passed through her midsection,
rolled along her limbs,
then off into the grass
beneath her toes to make
the ground shake. She fell,
gasping with pain and surprise
as the temblor radiated out
from her and across the yard,
the ground splitting
like an overripe peach.
The leaves of the trees
along the high wall shook
as if attacked by nerves,
swaying and groaning.
The wave crested inside Jolene,
her personal shaking stopped.
The earth and trees stilled
a moment later, and the ground
healed itself, closing as if
no trembling had ever occurred.

******************************

Immediately, the tweaking began:

Jolene’s earthquake
rolled through her midsection,
vibrated along her limbs,
sloughing off into the grass
beneath her toes, the ground
beneath an echo of her own shaking.
She fell, gasping with pain
and surprise as the temblor
radiated from her and
across the yard, the earth
splitting like an overripe peach.
The leaves of the trees along
the high wall quivered as from an attack
of nerves, swaying and groaning.
The wave crested inside Jolene,
her personal quaking done.
The earth and trees stilled,
the ground healed itself,
closing as if no trembling
had ever occurred.

I don’t think this is a perfect paragraph by any means, but I do think it’s an improved one. It might be worth trying this techniques for openings and other troublesome passages:

Jolene’s earthquake rolled through her midsection, vibrated along her limbs, sloughing off into the grass beneath her toes, the ground beneath an echo of her own shaking. She fell, gasping with pain and surprise as the temblor radiated from her and across the yard, the earth splitting like an overripe peach. The leaves of the trees along the high wall quivered as from an attack of nerves, swaying and groaning. The wave crested inside Jolene, her personal quaking done. The earth and trees stilled, the ground healed itself, closing as if no trembling had ever occurred.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Here’s the entire excerpt for today’s quote.  I liked it so much I thought you might like to see it in full.  The letter was quoted in Raymond Chandler Speaking.

May 25, 1957
To: Helga Greene
…To accept a mediocre form and make something like literature out of it is in itself rather an accomplishment.  They tell me—I don’t say this on my own information—that hundreds of writers today are making some sort of living from the mystery story because I made it respectable and even dignified.  But, hell, what else can you do when you write?  You do the best you can in any medium.  I was lucky, and it seems that my luck inspired others.  Steinbeck and I agreed that we should like the writer who is to be remembered and honoured after we were gone to be some unknown, perhaps far better than either of us, who did not have the luck—or perhaps the drive.  Any decent writer who thinks of himself occasionally as an artist would far rather be forgotten so that someone better might be remembered.  We are not always nice people, but essentially we have an ideal that transcends ourselves…There are, of course, cheap and venal writers, but a real writer always at the bottom of his heart, when he runs across something good, makes a silent prayer that “this guy may be better than I am”.  Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better.  An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to.  A lover cannot deny love.  If you believe in an ideal, you don’t own it—it owns you, and you certainly don’t want to freeze it at your own level for mercenary reasons.

I hate mannered prose. Every time I read some oh-so-overly-tinkered-and-twisty piece of writing I think, "You better show me some Fine to make me wend my way through all this clap-trappity stuff." Often this kind of prose is labeled "poetic," which it most certainly is not. Often, it's pretentious. Sometimes I find myself reading one of these mannered stories or books and they actually do show enough Fine that I finish it. I might even enjoy it in the end. Most times, if I don't see sufficient evidence of Fine soon enough, it gets added to the recycling pile.

Yet I try to always remind myself that one person's pretentious clap-trappity stuff is another person's "poetic," and another person's "poetic" is yet another person's "pedestrian," and so on and so forth, and I think, "It's all good." Because it is all good, even when it ain't, only some people always have to be thinking their way is the only way, their taste the only Important Taste.

The one thing I've noticed about taste in literary manners is that it often has some of the same characteristics as religious mania: "Our way of worship is infinitely superior to all others and anyone who appreciates what we consider low brow are knuckle-draggers. When the Literary Armageddon comes"—(the passage of time and the sorting out of reputations after everyone here and now are dead)—"we will be proved Right and Virtuous, and all those other sinners will be laughed at and shunted to the Lower Realms of Literary Hell."

Even when people nod and say, "Sure, it's all good, and no one taste is superior to another," what they're often thinking is: But in my case, it really is superior. I am not immune from this effect. I just try to remind myself on a regular basis that nothing I think is the Ultimate Last Word Indisputable Fact on anything. I remind myself how often works considered low brow and pandering to the masses in ages past are now regarded as masterworks, while those thought the pinnacle of literary achievement in their times have fallen into utter obscurity.

Reputation is a funny thing. It changes over time like a living organism, it falls into the pit of doom only to find redemption and a second chance, sometimes falls between the cracks and deserves to, other times falls when it should have risen...But there's that word "should" again. Opinion. Which is as slippery and ever-changing as Reputation, it's sometimes bastard child.

I posted this to the OWW mail listing over a month ago, but someone expressed interest in it, so I decided to post it here as well.


When I was a very young writer—and even now when I engage in magical thinking—I thought there was this Big Secret that all the real writers knew and were keeping from the rest of us. Maybe a secret formula for concocting the perfect, killer hook; or a set of guidelines and formulae which, if applied to any piece of writing, could turn sophomoric dreck into polished and professional prose. (No offense meant to sophomores.) After much gazing into crystal balls trying to figure out what the Secret was, I finally decided maybe I should give up because I would never be smart or good enough to decipher the mystical ways of the writer.

I kept writing, though, because I had the need real bad, and discovered something. My writing was improving. I wasn't quite sure how or why, and it still wasn't great, but the more I did it, the more I figured things out. And I came to the conclusion that the only Big Secret about writing is the same dreary secret to losing weight: consume less fat and work out on a regular basis.

That's it. The calisthenics of writing. Just write. Try new stuff, as Hannah eloquently suggested. Fail gloriously, knowing that nobody has to see those glorious failures if you don't want them to. Reduce the fat content of your words (which is not the same as trying to turn lush prose into cult of brevity prose). Repeat as needed. And repeat and repeat and repeat.

Writing is the best writing teacher I have ever had.