On Writing
Cover of The Elements of Style, considered the writer’s language bible.
I am not a writer. I write, read and admire people who are real writers, such as all the writers in the recent New York Times celebration of 125 years of the Book Review. I mostly read either science or science fiction and have no patience for bad writing in the former. I define bad writing as shallow characters, lack of narrative tension, too much sex & violence, absence of any compelling question, like, what if dogs ruled the planet and humans chased balls? But in the process of writing two books recently, one of my own and another a co-edited anthology, I have learned a lot about writing.
In the beginning, the task of creative writing, which includes a memoir, is simple: put words down on paper or a screen that empties out your mind of whatever is ready to burst through your brain.
Then one becomes mindful of structure, perhaps building an argument or unveiling a dramatic story. One begins to consider what mind charm or intrigue a reader. Will the “hero/ heroine” die? Will we care? Will that intriguing minor character stick around? Any memoir is a mirror crafted by the author in which the reader can only see the reflection of reality, not the original. Writing is what makes the image in the mirror appear real to others. In my book, I think the narrative tension was primarily psychological, a bit of a bildungsroman: will life test the young, privileged girl I was at the beginning, and will she pass her tests to grow up to be a responsible adult in a complex world? Will she accomplish anything that contributes in any way to anyone else she cares about besides her personal survival? Did it happen in interesting places with interesting people?
In the writings in this Sunday’s NY Times Book Review, each word is like a cut diamond polished by an author, honed by crack editors. These are writers who instinctively understand the power and sheen of language. They know how to weave a web that captures a universe in a sentence. I can’t do that. I can tell a story, explain a thought or craft a quip. I like writing. I like the puzzle of how grammar can build a mood just by where you put a gerund or the precision of one word over another. An example in my Introduction I’m quite proud of is the fine word, “crestfallen.” Crestfallen evokes an image for me of a bright bird caught in the rain. In my book, crestfallen references a clear moment of humility in my life, a moment of failure that made me teachable. One word, however, does not a writer make.
In this NY Times Book Review issue, each writer is a genius at cutting a sentence, crafting a paragraph, retrieving a perfect word. I can open the issue to any part of any page and find one of those jewels. For example, on page 26, Kurt Vonnegut in a 1965 essay “On Writing Science Fiction,” wrote: “Years ago I was working in Schenectady for General Electric, completely surrounded by machines and ideas for machines, so I wrote a novel about people and machines, and machines frequently got the best of it, as machines will.” In one sentence, Vonnegut created three universes, seamlessly co-existing side by side: 1. General Electric, 2. a writers mind and 3. a world where machines rule.
Lucy Lippard has written the Foreword to my book. Lucy is a writer. She titled what she wrote, HOPING FOR A NEW LANDSCAPE OF HOPE. In seven words she caught 376 pages of my message. Later in her text she quotes me as searching for, “the trigger point I’m trying to find for hope,” in a world where AND and with determine outcomes. In my private response to her I wrote, “I think you hit the nail on the head with your title: "HOPING FOR A NEW LANDSCAPE OF HOPE," which I translate as, hope is a function of time. It’s conditional. Hoping is a gerund. To me, it implies the arrow of time extending into the future. Then at the end you write, ‘...in the long run, the subject of this book.’ The subject is the long run.” In the long run, hope AND with time is what may reveal our new landscape of hope. The balance of the approximately 105 000 words of my book Lucy caught in seven, details where and how we might note the relationships that could lead us to a path into that landscape.