valarltd | Thoughts on writing

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!