Skip to main content

Reading Writers

A ripe bunch of dreamers, writers are. My aunt gave me a collection of essays written by contemporary writers (Joyce Carol Oates, Saul Bellow, Alice Walker, etc.) from the New York Times, essays from the series, "Writers on Writing." The "big contemporaries" write about inspiration, dialogue, fictional forms, "the craft", motivation, phrasing, teaching english, loving literature - anything and everything about writing. Being brave, excellent writers, they traipse through random thoughts with extreme clarity and use functional words when big ones might do better. They take minutiae and exalt its detail, then swing through "big-ticket items" of purpose in a sentence and leave the lessons in the barrel of details. They do this in a matter of 3-5 pages, whose genesis is either hand- or type-written (not so many computer users among the big contemporaries). They do this sporadically when the mania of storytelling takes its deathly grip and does not let go until it is released and barren, exposed on the page.
I find the exercise they describe invigorating and frustrating, but I wonder how their struggles and resulting output are universal as they tempt the imagination. Their sensations apply to all artists alike - some just happen to inhabit the imagined world more frequently and intensely than others. But the struggle is the thing, and amidst its tension emerges the certain story, a coercion of the imagination with enough motivation to wrestle it from the shadows of the psyche. Cruel, though, that once imagination is captured, it becomes a degree of ridicule and misunderstanding, since the exposed imagination of one (remember the sacrifice for its clarity?) is the intrusion on concealed imagination of another (whose formation is only confined to the mind and much less threatening).
Perhaps, it is each writer's imagination articulated that unlocks the commonality of our collective imagination; they are merely the messengers that carry it forward amongst us. Dreams are all different, but they share the same value - as childish and beautiful as catching butterflies. Some, like the big contemporaries, just know better how to swing the nets.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...