Thoughts on writing

[valarltd]

I have a BA in English lit.
I got to thinking about this as yesterday was Bloomsday and I loathe Joyce. It's nothing personal. I loathe Woolf and Eliot and Sand and Pepys and Whitman too.

I do not have literary pretensions. You won't see a short story from me written in present tense. You won't see deliberate point of view weirdness. I don't play with spelling or grammar or much of anything. I don't believe "I can't understand it, so it must be GOOD!"

All of that froufrou gets in the way of telling your story.

In Stephen King's It, there's a scene where Bill Denborough confronts one of his professors who has what Mudd calls "English Major Damage" that ability to find layers of meaning never written or intended. Bill just wants to tell stories. The prof rages at him that no one JUST tells stories.

While I freely admit my stories advance a specific world-view, I would say I am more interested in the story itself. In the early 80's I subscribed to Asimov's. There were great stories. There were all right stories. There were stories I had no ability to follow, because I got lost in the froufrou.

A few years back, I did the Commie Pinko Short Story contest. We all wrote a story and contributed a prize. Winner took all. There were good stories. There were unreadable messes. And there were mediocre ones, full of authorial intrusion. I didn't win. But I like to think I turned in a readable story.

And that's at the heart of writing, really.
TELL A STORY AND MAKE IT READABLE

No one is going to remember you if you couch your stuff in so much metaphor, allusion, in-joke and obscure unreadable prose that the average person is left going "Was that about what might be a cow examining something in a field that may or may not have been an engine after a nuclear war that may or may not have happened?"

On the other hand, write something clean and simple like The Ballad of Jake the Snake and the Rock-and-roll Kid and people will remember it and quote it 20 years later, still getting goosebumps.
Some say you can go out on the prairie late at night and listen. It's always quiet there, except for the wind and the call of the prairie wolves. And if your ears are good and the moon is full, you'll hear him there: Jake the Snake, walking with his lady, and playing an eight-bar blues.


My advice to aspiring writers is always the same:
Write.
Write clearly.
Write something someone besides you can read and understand.
But most of all, WRITE!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

When I was young I enjoyed writing. It did not come simple to me because English is my second language, but I used to get great feed back. As I got older and the rules got tougher, I grew scared of writing, then confused, terrified and finally dormant. Always afraid of not following the correct format I just stopped. Thank you for what you wrote

[megleigh.livejournal.com]

Great post. For the most part, I try to tell a story the same way I would, if I was telling it to you orally. I came from a family where oral story telling was a tradition. My Grandfather was Welsh and loved to tell tall tales and true around a camp fire at night, so that's where I learned story telling.

When I started writing, I spent a fair amount of time being confused and thinking that writing had to be more formal or something, but then I just decided to simply tell a good yarn, and that's what I have done ever since. Feedback I get seems to indicate that this is the way to go.

Thanks for your thoughts.

[bittermint.livejournal.com]

Ten, twenty years ago, I used to read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy. But I don't anymore, mostly because it's become so cryptic and literary it's no longer any *fun* to read.

Although for the record, I did my senior thesis on finnegans wake. ;)

[kaethe.livejournal.com]

You know who I loathe? Emerson and Wordsworth. For exactly the same reasons you mentioned. I can deal with Whitman, though, mainly because he was so passionate about what he wrote, whether it was poetry or Walden or whatever.

[skogkatt.livejournal.com]

Which one was yours? I think this is very sound advice, although I do like Woolf. Joyce not so much.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

None of them are mine. The first is another It reference.
And I strongly recommend the second, hence the link.

[skogkatt.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry I wasn't clear. I meant in the Commie Pinko Contest. I was also a participant, so I'm curious. Of course if you'd prefer not to say, that's absolutely okay, too.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Mine was the vampire story.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

I love Eliot!

THEREFORE YOU ARE WRONG, QED!

;)

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Er, T. S. Eliot. I actually don't have an opinion on George Eliot.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

I adore TS Eliot.

George Eliot? bleh.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Oh! In that case:

THEREFORE YOU ARE CORRECT, QED.