So, a funny thing is happening.
Sometime last fall, Matt Klam shared with the workshop some quote from some old(er) British writer that said something like, If you ever write a sentence that makes you satisfied--because it's nice, or deft, or cute, or knowing, or brilliant, and you get the picture--then you should immediately throw it out. Delete it. Banished.
Why? I don't know why, not exactly, just like I don't know exactly what the quote was, but I think the reasoning went something like this: We're not here to come up with zingers; we're here to say something honest. We're here to try, just once, to say something honest.
I think that's what he meant. And I'm pretty damn sure that's what Klam intended for us to think it meant. (He was big on cutting to chases, not being ornate.) Either way, that's pretty much what I, sitting in that Angell Hall classroom, took it to mean, and I remember thinking at the time, What horseshit. And I remember thinking at the time, Leave it to the scientists and the anthropologists to write truth unvarnished and -adorned, ugly and plain like those news anchors on Batman (the first one, people) after the make-up scare courtesy of the Joker. Splotched. Ashy. Etiolated. We're writers; half of what we do is make it sound nice. Otherwise any nitwit with an email account and enough fingers to type can be widely, and satisfyingly, read (forget for a moment blogs, okay?).
But a funny thing is happening. I'm starting to...if not agree with Klam and his limey hero, then at least, I don't know, at least I'm beginning to not stand up and scoff and shout against this position. And I'm beginning to tire a little of paper thin back flips.
Definition of terms: I'm not calling for owner's manual prose here. I'm not demanding that it be pared down. This is not a banner for clauseless sentences, I in no way want to do away with metaphors, similes, allegories, what I'm talking about is not gettothepointpeople. Rather, it's just....
I'm reading this book right now. The galleys, or the advanced reader's copy, or whatever they call it (love the bookstore job)--Which Brings Me to You, by Steve Almond and Julianna Baggott (man, would you check out the consonants on that girl??), "a novel in confessions." Boy and girl meet up at a wedding, both single and alienated (subtext: both single and alienating), they don't have sex in the coat closet because he thinks he likes her, they agree to send each other confessions in the form of letters. The trail of dead in their love lives. I didn't say it was plausible, but that's not the point.
The point is this: leaving Almond aside, I like the way this girl writes, but that's the problem. I like the way she writes. Understand? I like the way she writes. Eh? As in, she's writing, right, and I'm trying to feel something close to true; as in, she's writing, and I can feel her wanting to make those sentences, and not that those sentences are making her write themselves.
About a month ago I got a gift in the mail from a friend who was then traveling in Poland. A Soviet cigarette case with a lighter inside it, so that when you closed the case after extracting your cigarettes you could pull at a button/trigger/flange and light your cigarette. Way cool I thought, loved it so much that I decided to not continue quitting smoking like I'd started to, and when I busted it out a week later one of my friends out here, an Italian guy named Manlio (not a typo--pronounced 'Mah-lee-oh'), he said, Ohh, dees peece of sheet is yours?? I was flabergasted. How could he? What a great thing this was, what a babe magnet and what a party trick, and how could anyone but think that I possessed so much coolness to own such a thing, it was great.
But he was right. It is a piece of shit. The lighter stopped working two weeks ago, and it looks like if I want to use the lighter--that cute, fantastic sentence that makes people go aww--I'll have to fill it up with butane every fortnight. Dees peece of sheet.
I don't know I don't know, maybe it's because 45k words into my novel and so few of them are precious, so few sentences are the kind of beautiful I always hoped a child of mine would be, and so now I'm making a virtue of necessity, but maybe it's not that? Maybe language should be less about impressing people, and more about getting it right, whatever it is that's in our heads?
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Sometimes she's good, though--I don't want to make her seem all dreadful. For instance this:
My father, a saintly man (in fact, maybe the patron saint of exact change for toll booths), knocker her up, forcing the marriage. She'd come from money and he'd never really do. She had this glowing rounded bulb look and my father beat around her like an exhausted moth.
And this:
I'd prayed for Michael Hanrahan, for a release from this excruciating on and on of things.
And because I need to give Steve Almond his due, too:
I had, back then, the body of a nineteen year old. I was lean and muscled and terribly insecure. If a girl was within fifty feet of me, I flexed everything.
As well as:
"You're no savage, right?" That's what you asked me. But you know as well as I do that we're all savages in due course. Our love gets hammered into something sharp and we stab the people around us, for the unpardonable crime of refusing to abandon us.
Or maybe that just means the world to me....
Good night everyone. And good morning.
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