I love the IDEA of writing. I love sitting at my laptop, deep thoughts (like Folgers vs. Starbucks) swirling in my brain as I make like a real artist of the written word. Talking about writing makes my mind go into overdrive. Try me some time. Most of you know my email or at least my phone number. Ring me up and say, “Mo? Salinger sucked compared to Fitzgerald.” Then listen to what happens, the upward tonality of my voice, the 39 reasons that The Four Books (as I shall ever and always refer to J.D.’s body of work) far outstrip any other American voice, let alone a spoiled, white-suit-wearing, Robert-Redford-played poseur. (Joke, kids, I don’t really have 39 reasons and I absolutely adore F. Scott Fitzgerald) Tender is the Night defined one very important summer for me, and the following quote convinced me, at least for THAT summer, that I WAS Rosemary:
“so that while Rosemary was a ‘simple’ child she was protected by a double sheath of her mother’s armor and her own – she had a mature distrust of the trivial, the facile and the vulgar.”
That’s some impressive writing. How long, though, do you think it took Fitzgerald to craft that line? Or this one, perhaps the most beautiful use of visualization any 20th century American writer has fashioned:
“so green and cool that the leaves and petals were curled with tender damp.”
And my favorite descriptive paragraph in the whole book, one that’s not even a full paragraph yet fully fleshes out the character for the reader, even if the reader needs a thesaurus to look up “monocle:”
“a bald man in a monocle and a pair of tights, his tufted chest thrown out, his brash navel sucked in, was regarding her attentively.”
I don’t know – can’t you just picture the creepy guy in the tights, probably smelling kind of like old salami, ogling while trying to suck his navel into his spine (and failing in epic fashion)?
I’ve always had a passion for the written word, used not only correctly but with such talent that it is truly beautiful, or ugly, or does SOMETHING to create a vivid emotion in the reader, and I’ll assume (I do that a lot) that since you’re reading a blog, you’re like me in that respect. You love to read the written word. And there’s a writer in you somewhere, struggling to get out, to have their words published somewhere (other than a free blog – the Vanity Press of the internet) for the world to see and absorb and learn about in some dry, dusty lecture hall 20 years from now (and maybe you might even be invited to do a seminar on your own book, wouldn’t THAT be a kick in the ass). So let’s be open about this. A little group therapy, if you will, for the frustrated blockbuster writers or simple artists among us.
Mister F. Scott Fitzgerald did not come up with Hairy Monocle Guy right off the bat. I can almost visualize his (and Salinger’s, and Irving’s, and tons of others’) studies or bedrooms or wherever they toiled at their craft. And in those cells where they offered their souls to the gods and goddessess of language, there were wastebaskets. And those wastebaskets were not only filled to the brim with crumpled paper, the floor around them was as well. Their desks quite likely had shit all over them, too. Snippets of sentences scrawled on napkins and matchbooks and the backs of shopping lists (I do that a lot – well, not the shopping list, I never shop with a list – but the scrap paper jotting). I have not a single doubt in my mind that Fitzgerald had a mental Polaroid (before the Polaroid was ever invented) of every fat, pervy, sweaty-palmed cocktail party-goer he’d ever met (the ones that always, ALWAYS try to make time with the pretty young things, who, not because they’re mean but just because they’re young, have no interest whatsoever in anything but the briefest polite exchange with a middle-aged guy who doesn’t seem to understand that he’s middle aged and should at least make some attempt at scraping his dignity offf his shoe) and likely spent a dozen pages writing variations on that description before it rang true. Same thing with the “curled with tender damp” line. A line so perfectly descriptive can, and does, occasionally pop into your consciousness fully formed and ready for the story line, but that’s rare.
From the time I could read, which was really early (my Dad read the NY Times to me every night while I sat on his lap pretending to understand, until I DID understand, which is how I was the only first grader at Sacred Heart Academy to know details of the Tet Offensive and have the ability to discuss them – the nuns hated me), I have wanted to be a writer. My Dad was an accountant and financial planner, but he had majored in journalism and was a wonderful black and white photographer, and he had a real “battered Underwood,” the mark of a true wordsmith, which he gave to me whe I was around 11 and he realized that I might have a modicum of talent.(Note: Manual typewriters like that are a bitch to write with, the keys have to be hit with the force of a sledgehammer.) I read incessantly, became the hero or heroine of whatever tome I was living my life in at the time – my poor family NEVER knew who would be at the dinner table on any given night – and made notes in the margins. I started a journal and, unlike lots of girls my age, my entries were not necessarily about boys and clothes, but about the book or books I was reading at the time, and how it pertained to my life, or questions I would have wanted to ask the author. In short, I’ve always wanted to be able to create art that could draw the reader into the world of my story, or article, or hell, even a film review, and hold them there, wishing they were still there when the piece had come to its conclusion. I always put “writer” down on those stupid “what do you want to be when you grow up” questions on standardized tests. I was told by primary school teachers, high school teachers (one of whom seemed to be talking to my nipples) and college profs that I had real talent. What I lacked, they all said (except Nipple Man) was MOTIVATION. Aye, to quote Willie S., there’s the rub.
The actual task of writing is a drag, let’s face it. Do you know how long it took me to genuinely start putting the words for this blog post into something other than a thought in my head? THREE DAYS, ladies and gentlemen. I talked about my new blog (because I was just so excited that it’s not a MySpace blog or some other crap); I scribbled notes on envelopes while I sat through rehearsals of a play written by The Love of My Life (we’ll just call him TLOML from now on, since women in their 40’s should never call their lovers “boyfriends,” particularly if they’re living with them and plan, in their hearts anyway, to spend the rest of their days living with them IN SIN- and “Manfriend” has, I believe, been copyrighted by my good friend Brandy, although I love that word and wish I’d come up with it first); I emailed back and forth with a new writer friend of mine about how I can help HER get her stuff seen. I even wrote down topics. But this is what I ended up with, kids – a blog by a writer about what a drag it is to write.
And the writing just becomes harder as the work goes one, especially once we’ve gotten just about finished with an initial draft. Because now we have to read what we’ve written and, worse, EDIT what we’ve written. Unleess we’re dually cursed and blessed with a professinal editor (or a live-in boyfried with an English degree who used to teach in which case our only hope for mercy is to learn the finer points of fellatio and put them into play before he opens the document). Editing is hard. Because we all know that each and every word that drips from our pen to the paper (or clatters its way from the keyboard to the screen – God, I hate trying to come up with great metaphors in this technologically artistic wasteland we call a century) is a rare pearl, and that every comma and every period not only belongs, it is integral to the story as a whole and, without it, the entire construct of our story will crumble like Pompeii under a sea of literary lava. On the other hand, if we edit and read as we go along with the task of composing our work, it’ll never get done. I used to do that. I’d write a sentence. Read the sentence. Deconstruct the sentence. Run every word in the sentence through the thesaurus. Call a friend and read them the sentence in all its many incarnations. Surf porn on the net. Read someone else’s blog. Look at more porn. And then it was dinner time and the sentence was still unfinished (althought I did learn some stuff from Jenna Jameson that TLOML appreciates to this day and has no idea where I learned it, so thank you, Jenna). So now I just write, and when I think it’s finished, that’s when I re-read and start to edit. And still, I can either never find anything that can be removed without destroying my masterpiece, or else the whole thing sounds like utter crap and I delete it and start over.
I’ve recently been given the opportunity to write FOR MONEY. The thought terrifies me, because it’s going to require that I stop talking about writing, stop thinking about writing, stop reading about writing, and, in point of fact, turn out a product that not only I think is fabulous, but that the reader is going to get past the first sentence without gagging on it.
Figured this blog, sitting here all empty with the pretty format, was as good a place as any to start. Feel free to comment (but know that, being the literary genius that I’m known to be, if your comments are rapacious or snide or do not offer what I consider to be constructive criticism, I’m going to delete them. Well, no I won’t. But it’ll hurt my sensitive artistic feelings, so if you’ve got some helpful advice, please try not to use words like “stupid,” “untalented” or, omg, “boring” or “irrelevant.”
And on that note, I am off to pick a topic from the list the editors sent me nearly a week ago and try to get started on my next masterpiece.
Or go watch some YouPorn.
Things That They Found Crawlin' Round My Brain 