Brain droppings

[nzilla]

The essay was written, well, in the last millennium, and I suspect many of the clichés presented in it were considerably more trite at the time of writing. Half of those aren't really used at all these days, and the rest, while recognizably clichés, aren't used especially often anymore (at least in American speech and writing, that is), and therefore don't sound as trite as something like "Avoid it like the plague." A writer would still of course want to think up their own descriptions and phrases, though.

[hgladney]

I fear I must put up my hand and insist this stuff is done on purpose.
Sometimes there is a distinct function to these horrible inventions. Many current phrases similar to Orwell's examples are used to inflate, pad, soften, twist, obfuscate, or completely disguise a factual statement in officialese. Or to avoid saying a factual statement of any kind.
You know, the mouth moves, isolated words that make sense fall out so that you think you're hearing actual statements, but when you look at the composite structure, it is robbed of meaning?
That's an even more specialized form of language than fiction.
Jon Stewart's show tends to skewer that stuff pretty well, from what little I've seen of him. In current political-speak you may notice some intriguing subtleties involved, particularly if you are aiming something like a political speech to say one thing to one audience, and quite a different thing to a different audience--it's sort of like a hologram that can represent two or three different pictures at different angles. (Badly done, it's really horrible.) I understand that enlisting the loyalties of particular sorts of fundamentalist or Evengelical political activists results in embedding certain sorts of code phrasings that mean quite different things to them than it does to other kinds of listeners.
Before anybody takes offense, I'll add that I haven't noticed the left wing being at all subtle about it. They're right out there with those awkward words and phrase that mean x or y, and in fact are eager to explain to you exactly what they mean, with figures and numbers and whatall.

[nzilla]

Unrelated to your post, but is there a reason why you have the Discworld guy's name spelled like that in your sig? Just asking.

[hgladney]

Because I mispelled it in the sig file, that's why. Then I spread it all over creation like that. Sorta like wearing your shirt inside out all day, without even noticing.

Thanks!

[felonius]

Politics and the English Language, part 4:

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an aire of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

[hgladney]

felonious, may I quote you on a writing thread?

I found it interesting what I started encountering this differences.
To quote the movie line in Princess Bride, "I do not think that means what you think it means."
It's difficult for a full-time writer who isn't hearing this stuff day in and day out to get it right.
I s'pose that's one reason why I haven't won the lottery yet so I can run away and work even longer hours writing whatever I like!
Umm, hey, wait a minute, there...

I rarely see *any* portraits of petit bourgeousie petty bureaucrats in fiction, except in some suspense novels where they're in the way, noting how boring they are. But they can be very strange animals indeed.
I could see where you could use the organizational peculiarities as the pivotal plot point in a murder mystery, for instance--understanding a key point because *nobody else in the case * would ever think that way, act that way, or produce recorded dialogue with those verbs. (Or that dificult and expensively circumlocuitous lack of active verbs.)
It's tough to get such a person's dialogue set up in that manner peculiarly distorted by their work, without making it so completely opaque to a lay person that it cannot be understood at all! They always fall back on their experience of their employer's accepted language, unless there's some new directive to simplify--but that often just means simplify down to avoiding extra explanations and using only the official company language, or the legally mandated language, which can be very difficult indeed. They retain odd verbs from the thieve's cant appropriate to that particular section, branch, department, or agency, sometimes for years.
In different eras of an organization, this fall-back bedrock language will be slightly different. Oldtimers may be using language developed from historical systems and processes that don't have to be done that way now, and the youngsters don't even know why they do that. Showing that sort of puzzlement is one of the cues for this sort of organizational structuring.

My impression has been that common sense and a view of the larger picture becomes more important with increasing rank and responsibility, but there are folks stopped out at various levels (Peter Principle? promoted to the level of their incompetence) who will *never* get it, who use rigid organizational guidelines as a substitute for those qualities they lack, and as a result, some of their answers will be very odd indeed compared to an outsider's view of the matter.

Maybe good sense at the top may *not* be common, I don't know. I do know certain sorts of corporate culture causes certain odd sorts of caution (no, can't do that, odd delay=Mr. Big is out of town), and other odd sorts of bold defense of boundaries (outright fights with co-workers over something that has to be 'fessed up to Mr. Big). Such folks don't think like folks in other professions. Certain kinds of work require odd sorts of precision (as when whatever you say can be held up in a court of law at some unknown future date) which will also affect how they speak and think and act upon things at home. My impression is that it grows ever thicker as you go up to higher levels, or you approach legal action based upon work done.

You'd think that simpler language would be used when someone has to explain things for attorneys who aren't as expert in that particular field. But no, they seem to expect attorneys to keep up, one way or another, and the attorneys themselves want the entire rich simmering effulgence of arcana tripping from an expert's mouth first. Then the simple version.

[felonius]

I like you, Heather.

[hgladney]

Why, thank you! I thought you might enjoy "circumlocuitous".
(Hmm, wonder why I thought that...)

Heck, I don't get to use it very often!!
You know, it's ever so nice to be able to cut loose withou having to worry if people will get it or not.
<hands felonious some herbal dressing to go with all that word salad>

[hgladney]

felonious said in an earlier post on this thread:

In my opinion I think the ideal to strive for is a little of both - a narrative that tells a compelling story with relative brevity but still leaves the reader mulling over vague mysteries of a moral or psychological sort, to paraphrase R.V. Cassill.

I don't believe stories should be difficult to read to be considered good, and I don't mean to wax didactical - but I do stand in respect to writers who craft compelling tales made even more compelling by their irony, subtlety, allusion, and the like. A to B just doesn't do it completely for me, even if it's a fun ride.

I also sometimes think that "atmosphere", if written well, can provide its own kind of "action" depending upon the character(s) sitting in that atmosphere and what they're thinking as they do so.

To paraphrase another writer, Pam Houston, it's when a moment of grace a story allows its characters comes so softly it feels almost accidental, though it's both complete and profound. Like water coming to its level behind a dam.

To which I have to say, that last one is really lovely.
I always used to think of it as a sent of dominoes going down, which is more the way one desires plots in suspense or mysteries, but for character-based atmospheric books, that's much more subtle.

one of felonious' earlier lines was:

"...tales made even more compelling by their irony, subtlety, allusion, and the like..."

I've been thinking lately about how to play with multiple shifting layers of interaction and meaning at once. Allusions to other texts, historical references, certainly do that. Reversals and irony and saying anything else besides what you actually mean can be very effective ways of displaying how important something is.
This is the sort of thing I see happening at work.
For example, there's the classic one where somebody will walk in, make an unwittingly pertinent remark completely out of context, completely unaware how it might fit in, and everybody roars.
Seems to me some of the Thirties 'tecs were very fond of that sort of scene.

Beginners go for binary, or stripes: A talks, B talks, A talks.
Folks who feel a litle more confident will start juggling three characters, and maybe get some interesting plaids there.
But I've been thinking about how to plant multiple cues at once in multi-party conversation.
Nonverbal actions are good for that. Give them something to do is a great way of keeping different characters sorted out by giving them things to do which are distinct--for instance, eating different things while they're talking at the table.
There's describing the actions of eating the food itself, what the social rules are, and so on. If you're being really obsessive, you can lay trails from one bit of action to the next which will link together into larger, almost holographic, pictures. (Nobody else flings bones for the dogs but A, who must be a slob who has no idea that other people would save the bones for a soup pot instead, but we never actually have to say so.)
You can also play with all the nonverbal communication there.
("Right, Herbert, *no* more sucking on that plum like that! Got it? Right! And the obscene slurping noises are right out, too!!")

You can give cultural background on it: tiny little infodumps of background on the food, how it got there, who sold it, the methods used to grow it, the economy, the labor involved, the social hierarchies in its consumption, if it is going to matter later on. Political motivations become important in some sorts of books, and if you're trying to support something rather odd or alien, it really helps to build up a world in which those motives make sense.

Then there's the multi-party conversation itself. You can get multiple threads going at once for this plaid stuff with how people respond to one another, or refuse to.
Lately I've been trying to do something past the usual two-character conversation, or their references to somebody else, or a three-party talk. I've been trying to juggle about four or five people all talking together, some of them talking past one another, or over someone else's head, and sometimes doing it in sign or in a different language than the main one.
I see all kinds of complex interactions like this at work all the time.
("Bob looks over the head of Mr. Dumb and looks at Joe, who rolls his eyes...")
But I so rarely see it happen in fiction. Done right, it's seamlessly invisible, the reader just accepts there's six people in the room, all jabbering at once.


Part of the difficulty is keeping everybody sorted out, making sure everybody's voice is distinctive enough, and avoiding total confusion.
You can also build up meta-structures from one conversation to others, with varying participants.

I could see that contextual method making up the body o an entire book, allowing the reader to figure things out in something like a suspense or mystery, for instance, without anybody ever coming outright and saying silly things like, "On the night of the Thirtieth, Miss Murchison, you picked up your pornographic novel, and you say that you absentmindedly fell downstairs due to your preoccupation with the text..."

It can be very funny, if it's working, if the reader is getting it.

But the continuity checks, oy vey! whenever you change something!!

Mod notice: added quote boxes - fel

[felonius]

I'm going to leave Orwell and come back to him later. Since I put up a review of John Gould's Kilter: 55 Fictions earlier today, I thought I'd post a few choice droppings from one of the stories, one called Vessel, in which a middle-aged woman talks to her aging and infirm husband while preparing him for bed:

Today I'll be exploring the uses of literature. Literature's useless, or course, that's why we love it, but if you're going to pursue it as a way of life you'll have to tell people something to keep them off your case.

I'm going to talk about two uses for literature - one ethical, one spiritual. Somebody - ten marks if you know the source - once said that "the great power of a good book is that it makes it harder to tell us from them."

If the ethical value of literature is that it makes other people real to us, the spiritual value of literature is that it makes us unreal to ourselves. To borrow a couple of Richard Rorty's words, the ethical burden of literature is solidarity, but the spiritual burden of literature is irony. Literature shows us that character is created out of context, out of contingency. It leads us to understand that we too...

Literature shows us that while fictional characters are real, real people are fictional. Real people too are "empty," as the Buddhists say, devoid of self-nature. A person isn't a thing - things aren't things either, of course - but a space, a clearing in which the rest of the world can take place. Literature helps purge us of the whole idea of a "self" or a "soul," the bizarre notion that there's some inviolable lump of goodness-knows-what at the core of us. Literature's the miracle cure for metaphysics, for the dream of absolute.

Literature teaches us that words like "body" and "soul" aren't names for separate entities, for discrete chunks of ourselves, but simply sounds we make to shape our attention. Literature teaches us that words like "I" and "you" aren't hatches to be used for hacking up the world, but - "

[hgladney]

So much intriguing stuff in that quote.
This one is so Zen it almost turns itself inside out:
"..."body" and "soul" aren't names for separate entities...but simply sounds we make to shape our attention..."

Shaping ourselves bodies, or minds, or hearts...

[felonius]

Feeling a little depressed today. Back-from-vacation-blahs, I suppose. Where better to be maudlin than a brain droppings thread? Here's a passage by Iain Banks from his novel The Crow Road - the narrator's having a bad day and is on a train looking out:

[quote]…â€

[felonius]

I found another nice one from Mr. Banks that I'd jotted down after reading it, from the same novel. The narrator is speaking of his recently-deceased father:

He taught us that there was, generally, a fire at the core of things, and that change was the only constant, and that we – like everybody else – were both the most important people in the universe, and utterly without significance, depending, and that individuals mattered before their institutions, and that people were people, much the same everywhere, and when they appeared to do things that were stupid or evil, often you hadn’t been told the whole story, but that sometimes people did behave badly, usually because some idea had taken hold of them and given them an excuse to regard other people as expendable (or bad), and that was part of who we were too, as a species, and it wasn’t always possible to know that you were right and they were wrong, but the important thing was to keep trying to find out, and always to face the truth. Because truth mattered.

Nice. A little obvious, but nice. I read it originally and wondered how much of it applied to Banks' real life father.

[mccormack44]

Today's quote comes close to describing my philosophy of life. About all you need to add is to try very hard to make things better (smoother, more comfortable in an honest way) wherever and whenever you can, no matter how small the action is.

But this (my philosophy of life) shouldn't surprise anyone who has been reading my posts for the past 5 months.

Sue

[felonius]

I've kind of let this thread go in the last several months, but I came across a series of Q&A-type interviews with one of my favourite American writers, Paul Auster, and wanted to put a bit more up.

Several of his close friends and colleagues were asked to pose questions to him about his thoughts on life and his craft. Here are the two questions and responses I enjoyed the most:

Question from Dave Eggers/author:

In an interview you once talked about how you aim to make every sentence of a given book central to that book. That is, every sentence should get to the heart of what that book is about. It was a bold statement because rarely do novelists think of every sentence as carrying out that sort of responsibility. But the more one thinks about it, the more it makes sense.

So I'm hoping you can reiterate or elaborate on that point, and then - and here's the trick - apply this m.o. to life in general. Can't we live our lives with the same sort of centrality? Shouldn't every day get right to the heart of everything that matters?

PA:

What a beautiful question. Let me answer the second part first. I think if one could actually live that way, one would be a saint, one would achieve some kind of human perfection that I'm not sure is possible. One can try to work as hard as one possibly can, give everything to the people you love and try to be an ethical person in all situations. Of course, we fail, we constantly fail.

But there's a very rewarding remark by Tarkovsky, the Russian film-maker, who said: "We make art because life isn't perfect." When you think about it, it's an extraordinary statement because, of course, if life was perfect we'd be satisfied with every moment and we wouldn't need to explore the dark parts of our souls, which is what art usually does.

In terms of writing, I meant to say that I try to write books in which every sentence in the book is essential to the book. A sentence where, if you took it out, it would injure the integrity of the book. So, in other words, everything has to count.

I know a lot of prose writers who are very gifted but they create these great walls of words, which in some sense block access to the text, to the story that is being told, for the reader. And I have always thought of novels as being a collaboration between the writer and the reader and I want the reader to be working, thinking, filling in the blanks, participating in the making of the work. It's that sense of effort that I think is so stimulating.


Question from Siri Hustvedt/author (and Auster's wife of the last 25 years):

It's been 25 years, but mysteries remain. A few years ago, at the dinner table, you quoted something that Samuel Beckett said about the difference between James Joyce and himself: "The more he knew, the more he could. The more I know, the less I can."

You paused for a second and then said, "For me, it's different: the less I know, the more I can."

Knowing, of course, includes not only world literature, but the other arts, sciences and world history. I think many writers understand that sometimes knowing too much can get in the way of making a book, but I think of your statement also as one about consciousness and unconsciousness. Were you saying that the more unconscious you are about what you're doing, the more productive you are? Or were you saying that a moment came when you became aware of the need to jettison the accumulated knowledge of the past in order to write your fiction?

PA:

Well, this is, of course, the best question, but she is such a smart girl. I think when I said "the less I know", it's more about letting the unconscious do the work. She gives two possible answers to it and that's the one that I would say because I was thwarted early on in my writing of fiction and prose by knowing too much. I had read too many books. I felt the burden of the literary past crushing me. It made for a very infelicitous result, I must say. I couldn't get out from under these people who had come before me. At a certain moment, when I was about 31, I managed to let it go. And letting go of all that and trusting my own unconscious to do the bulk of the work, I felt liberated and it has made me more productive.

[spiphany]

Friedrich Schlegel, from the Fragments

In order to write well about something, one shouldn't be interested in it any longer. To express an idea with due circumspection, one must have relegated it wholly to one's past; one must no longer be preoccupied with it. As long as the artist is in the process of discovery and inspiration, he is in a state which, as far as communication is concerned, is at the very least intolerant. He wants to blurt out everything, which is a fault of young geniuses or a legitimate prejudice of old bunglers. And so he fails to recognize the value and the dignity of self-restriction, which is after all, for the artist as well as the man, the first and last, the most necessary and the highest duty. Most necessary because wherever one does not restrict oneself, one is restricted by the world; and that makes on a slave.

An interesting and rather surprising position. Schlegel was involved with early romanticism in Germany, a genre which I tend to think of as placing emphasis on emotion, the poet as inspired prophet, so it's intriguing to see him advocating disinterest. There's also perhaps a Kantian influence here: he sees disinterest as a necessary requirement for a pure judgment of beauty.
My own motivation for writing comes very much from a close emotional involvement and immersion in my subject, so I can't agree entirely with him, but he probably also has a point (not complete lack of interest, but a certain distancing of oneself is necessary to be able to write).

People criticize Goethe's poems for being metrically careless. But are the laws of the German hexameter really supposed to be as consistent and universally valid as the character of Goethe's poetry?

Instead of description, one occasionally gets in poems a rubric announcing that here something or other should really have been described, but the artist was prevented from doing so and most humbly begs to be excused.

It's not clear whether he's criticising here, or simply making a statement; in any case, it seems like he's captured something essential about poetry.

Poetry is republican speech: a speech which is its own law and end unto itself, and in which all the parts are free citizens and have the right to vote.

People who write books and imagine that their readers are the public and that they must educate it soon arrive at the point not only of despising their so-called public but of hating it. Which leads nowhere.

Isn't it unnecessary to write more than one novel, unless the artist has become a new man? It's obvious that frequently all the novels of a particular author belong together an in a sense make up only one novel.

Publishing is to thinking as the maternity ward is to the first kiss.

[felonius]

...wherever one does not restrict oneself, one is restricted by the world; and that makes one a slave.

How wonderfully paradoxical!

Fragments has just been officially put on my 'to read' list. Thanks spiphany - I thought this thread was dead!

[Darb]

I love the entire quote ... no need to editorialize it at all.

In order to write well about something, one shouldn't be interested in it any longer. To express an idea with due circumspection, one must have relegated it wholly to one's past; one must no longer be preoccupied with it. As long as the artist is in the process of discovery and inspiration, he is in a state which, as far as communication is concerned, is at the very least intolerant. He wants to blurt out everything, which is a fault of young geniuses or a legitimate prejudice of old bunglers. And so he fails to recognize the value and the dignity of self-restriction, which is after all, for the artist as well as the man, the first and last, the most necessary and the highest duty. Most necessary because wherever one does not restrict oneself, one is restricted by the world; and that makes on a slave.

[felonius]

but he probably also has a point (not complete lack of interest, but a certain distancing of oneself is necessary to be able to write).

Jonathan Safran Froer, from Everything Is Illuminated:

I think this is why I relish writing so much - it makes it possible for me to be not like I am, but as I desire my younger brother to see me. I can be funny, because I have time to meditate about how to be funny, and I can repair my mistakes when I perform mistakes, and I can be a melancholy person in manners that are interesting, not only melancholy. With writing, we have second chances.

Paul Auster again:

Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from.

Alice Munro:

You might say, "Read," but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, "Don't read, don't think, just write," and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better.

[felonius]

Louise Erdrich, writing of her impressions in trying to learn more of her family's distant native language, Ojibwe:

This desire to deepen my alternate language puts me in an odd relationship to my first love, English. It is, after all, the language stuffed into my mother's ancestors' mouths. English is the reason she didn't speak her native language and the reason I can barely limp along in mine. English is an all-devouring language that has moved across North America like the fabulous plagues of locusts that darkened the sky and devoured even the handles of rakes and hoes. Yet the omnivorous nature of a colonial language is a writer's gift. Raised in the English language, I partake of a mongrel feast.

For years I saw only the surface of Ojibwemowin. With any study at all one looks deep into a stunning complex of verbs. Ojibwemowin is a language of verbs. All action. Two-thirds of the words are verbs, and for each verb there are as many as six thousand forms. The storm of verb forms makes it a wildly adaptive and powerfully precise language.

Changite-ige describes the way a duck tips itself up in the water butt first. There is a word for what would happen if a man fell off a motorcycle with a pipe in his mouth and the stem of it went through the back of his head. There can be a verb for anything.

Nouns are mainly designated as alive or dead, animate or inanimate. Stones are called grandfathers and grandmothers and are extremely important in Ojibwe philosophy. Once I began to think of stones as animate, I started to wonder whether I was picking up a stone or it was putting itself into my hand. Stones are not the same as they were to me in English. I can't write about a stone without considering it in Ojibwe and acknowledging that the Anishinable universe began with a conversation between stones.

Ojibwemowin is also a language of emotions; shades of feeling can be mixed like paints. There is a word for what occurs when your heart is silently shedding tears. Ojibwe is especially good at describing intellectual states and the fine points of moral responsibility.

Ozozamenimaa pertains to a misuse of one's talents getting out of control. Ozozamichige implies you can still set things right. There are many more kinds of love than there are in English. There are myriad shades of emotional meaning to designate various family and clan members. It is a language that also recognizes the humanity of a creaturely God, and the absurd and wondrous sexuality of even the most deeply religious beings.

The bit about stones putting themselves into our hands might explain the human fascination with skimming rocks on water...it might just be the rocks using us for joy rides...

[Ghost]

Great one - felonius!

This is from a Doug Giles' column on avoiding dating or marrying the wrong person:

Number Four: Get Virtuous.
Not letting the dillweed you just met hump your leg anytime soon is usually a sure-fire way to cudgel off the date from hell. This is no secret; the gibbering monkey that’s inside a guy’s pants wants inside of your pants, and he’ll do anything to get it there, muy pronto. Yes, Pollyanna, men will lie, swear, pretend, go to church, walk backwards, watch Marie Antoinette or Nell, listen to Mariah Carey or Celine Dion, etc., just to unleash the beast.

Here is the full article if you want to read it:

http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/Doug ... al_warning

[felonius]

I don't want this to turn into a Paul Auster thread, but here's another bit by him, from The New York Trilogy:

And then, as his eyes grow heavy and sleep begins to wash over him, he thinks how strange it is that everything has its own colour. Everything we see, everything we touch - everything in the world has its own colour.

Struggling to stay awake a little longer, he begins to make a list. Take blue for example, he says. There are bluebirds and blue jays and blue herons. There are cornflowers and periwinkles. There is noon over New York. There are blueberries, huckleberries, and the Pacific Ocean. There are blue devils and blue ribbons and blue bloods. There is a voice singing the blues. There is my father's police uniform. There are blue laws and blue movies. There are my eyes and my name.

He pauses, suddenly at a loss for more blue things, and then moves on to white. There are seagulls, he says, and terns and storks and cockatoos. There are the walls of this room and the sheets on my bed. There are lilies-of-the-valley, carnations, and the petals of daisies. There is the flag of peace and Chinese death. There is mother's milk and semen. There are my teeth. There are the whites of my eyes. There are white bass and white pines and white ants. There is the President's house and white rot. There are white lies and white heat.

Then, without hesitation, he moves on to black, beginning with black books, the black market, and the Black Hand. There is night over New York, he says. There are the Chicago Black Sox. There are blackberries and crows, blackouts and black marks, Black Tuesday and the Black Death. There is blackmail. There is my hair. There is the ink that comes out of a pen. There is the world a blind man sees.

Then, finally growing tired of the game, he begins to drift, saying to himself that there is no end to it. He falls asleep, dreams of things that happened long ago, and then, in the middle of the night, wakes up suddenly and begins pacing the room again, thinking about what he will do next.

I love his mind.

[felonius]

Ok. Some more stuff about writing. This is from a book that is been in print for more than forty years and is still widely regarded as unequalled: The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. This is taken from the fifth chapter written by White, the first of twenty-one points concerning effective writing style:

1. Place yourself in the background.

Write in a way that draws the readers's attention to the sense and substance of the writing, rather than to the mood and temper of the author. If the writing is solid and good, the mood and temper of the writer will eventually be revealed and not at the expense of the work. Therefore, the first piece of advice is this: to achieve style, begin by affecting none - that is, place yourself in the background. A careful and honest writer does not need to worry about style. As you become proficient in the use of language, your style will emerge, because you yourself will emerge, and when this happens you will find it increasingly easy to break through the barriers that separate you from other minds, other hearts - which is, of course, the purpose of writing, as well as its principal reward. Fortunately, the act of composition, or creation, disciplines the mind; writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain he mind but supply it, too.

[felonius]

To continue with E.B. White:

2. Write in a way that comes naturally.

Write in a way that comes easily and naturally to you, using words and phrases that come readily to hand. But do not assume that because you have acted naturally your product is without flaw.

The use of language begins with imitation. The infant imitates the sounds made by its parents; the child imitates first the spoken language, then the stuff of books. The imitative life continues long after the writer is secure in the language, for it is almost impossible to avoid imitating what one admires. Never imitate consciously, but do not worry about being an imitator; take pains instead to admire what is good. Then when you write in a way that comes naturally, you will echo the halloos that bear repeating.

3. Work from a suitable design.

Before beginning to compose something, gauge the nature and extent of the enterprise and work from a suitable design. Design informs even the simplest structure, whether of brick and steel or of prose. You raise a pup tent from one sort of vision, a cathedral from another. This does not mean that you must sit with a blueprint always in front of you, merely that you had best anticipate what you are getting into. To compose a laundry list, you can work directly from the pile of soiled garments, ticking them off one by one. But to write a biography, you will need at least a rough scheme; you cannot plunge in blindly and start ticking off fact after fact about your subject, lest you miss the forest for the trees and there be no end to your labours.

Sometimes, of course, impulse and emotion are more compelling than design. If you are deeply troubled and are composing a letter appealing for mercy or for love, you had best not attempt to organize your emotions; the prose will have a better chance if the emotions are left in disarray - which you'll probably have to do anyway, since feelings to not usually lend themselves to rearrangement. But even the kind of writing that is essentially adventurous and impetuous will on examination be found to have a secret plan: Columbus didn't just sail, he sailed west, and the New World took shape from this simple and, we now think, sensible design.

Emotions in disarray...but with a secret plan! I like it.


"What's with you today, Jeff? Something bothering you?"

"It's just part of a plan I have."

"A plan for what?"

"Shhh. I can't talk about it. It's a secret."

[felonius]

4. Write with nouns and verbs.

Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place. This is not to disparage adjectives and adverbs; they are indispensable parts of speech. Occasionally they surprise us with their power, as in

Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men...

The nouns mountain and glen are accurate enough, but had the mountain not become airy, the glen rushy, William Allingham might never have got off the ground with his poem. In general, however, it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and colour.


5. Revise and rewrite.

Revising is part of writing. Few writers are so expert that they can produce what they are after on the first try. Quite often you will discover, on examining the completed work, that there are serious flaws in the arrangement of the material, calling for transpositions. Some writers find that working with a printed copy of the manuscript helps them to visualize the process of change; others prefer to revise entirely on screen. Above all, do not be afraid to experiment with what you have written. Save both the original and the revised versions; you can always use the computer to restore the manuscript to its original condition, should that course seem best. Remember, it is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is a common occurrence in all writing, and among the best writers.