Tag: Language

The drudgery, and joy, of writing

~ Chris ~ 4 Comments

Last month or so, I was reading a terrific book about the making of the classic movie “Chinatown” titled “The Big Goodbye: ‘Chinatown’ and the Last Years of Hollywood,” by Sam Wasson, and I had to grin at this quote from legendary screenwriter Robert Towne: “So much of writing is trying to avoid facing it.”

That’s hardly the most original thing uttered about the writer’s penchant for procrastination and craven dread of the blank page — Hemingway summed it up: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” — but it was a reassuring reminder that cooking up stuff for a readership, a nervously performative act, isn’t always a joyride, or particularly easy. It can be a grind. It can be depressing. It can sap the soul. 

But it can also be exhilarating and, when things are flowing, a blast. Well, let’s not get carried away. How about … satisfying? Said great journalist Russell Baker: “I’ve always found that when writing is fun, it’s not very good. If you haven’t sweated over it, it’s probably not worth it.”

I don’t know how you reconcile that dichotomy, the yin and yang of good and rotten, delight and drudgery, but they seem to jibe. There’s a fruitful friction. Good days, bad days, middling days. (That last line? Lazy writing. Bad writing. I left it there as a specimen of what can go wrong.) 

I always want to write, but once I sit down and face the empty page that sneers, “Go ahead, try and fill me,” I tend to constrict, choke, unless I’m especially inspired and know how I’ll begin and where I’m (generally) going. Those days are the exception. Right now, I’m winging it. I had that Robert Towne quote in my head and started riffing. (Help!) 

There’s no map. There’s only this: Get it down. The prose may be raw and bloody — embarrassing, eye-sizzling — but the ideas matter and the words, those painstakingly chosen few, will be chiseled out of the viscous blob of verbiage. Editors are helpful at this stage, and I’ve worked with many who have saved my prolix ass. But here on this free-floating blog I’m on my own. I am judge, jury, executioner. And I probably should have executed that sentence. 

Point is, writing, like any creative endeavor, is a messy enterprise, hard to do but at times truly rewarding (I have ten journalism awards that bear that out, he crowed). You have to dive in head first, and toil to make a splash. Taking pride in your work is mandatory — read tons, write multiple drafts, and use spell check for chrissakes — the only way you’ll do anything worth a damn.

First you must conquer that blank page, which requires actually facing the music, not dodging it, as Towne noted. I’m working on a writing project that I approach tentatively, with baby steps, not because I’m indolent but because I am, frankly, a little scared. 

There’s a cure for that. It’s simple yet courageous: Sit down, stare at the page, and bleed.

You must win the staring contest with the blank page. Despair is likely. So is reward.

Getting fussy about fun

~ Chris ~ 3 Comments

Talking on the phone with my Dad once in my early twenties, I used the word “funner” as an adjective and, stickler that he was, he busted me. 

“That’s not a word,” he intoned. 

Oh. I sat there chastened, my cheeks pink.

I was a burgeoning word freak but Dad was the authority, the maestro, a journalist and wordsmith for decades who loved dissecting language, adored puns (he was the worst!), and collected clichés with a far-flung dream of making a board game out of all the hoary, hackneyed maxims, platitudes and banalities he scribbled down on everything from receipts to cocktail napkins. 

Say something nakedly trite and he would call you out — ha! — scramble for a pencil and jot down the howling cliché you dared utter. Can you imagine what kind of game that would be? Either brilliant. Or inordinately annoying. Anyway, it never came to be.

Back to “funner.” Apparently that isn’t a real word. At least according to my father. And that has stuck ever since. I never say “funner.” Yesterday my brother used the word “funnest” and I pulled a Dad and said that’s not a word. My brother gave me the stink-eye and started making a voodoo doll of me.

But I was wrong. Sort of.

Here’s what the New Oxford American Dictionary says: “The comparative and superlative forms funner and funnest should only be used in very informal contexts, typically speech.”

That’s good news — informal contexts, typically speech. Just how I used funner.

However, an online teacher says this: “The next time students ask why they can’t say ‘funner,’ I say it’s because ‘fun’ was originally only a noun and the -er and -est forms are not commonly accepted. Stick to ‘more fun’ and ‘the most fun.’ ”

And another site avers: “There’s something funny about the word funner. It has the sound of a word twisted for the sake of a game of Scrabble, and any mention of it is liable to draw the response of, ‘Do you mean more fun?”

No! I mean funner! There, I said it, so many years later. Funner.

So, Dad, on this count you might have been off. I’m using funner as an adjective — better late than never. And with that phrase I’ve given you a moldy cliché for your board game, which would have surely been the funnest game of clichés ever.

Language is always evolving, especially between the formal and the colloquial. Take “over” vs. “more than,” for example. Both are now used to mean more than if used before a number or quantity, as in “This cost over four dollars.” That once was a stylistic no-no, but increasingly “over” is an acceptable substitute. 

I’m a word nerd. Love the language, love quips, innuendos, alliteration, even puns, which come tragically easy to me. I like big hairy words that have tentacles and teeth.

I do indeed find words fun. I find writing funner. I find finishing writing funnest of all. 

 

On language: quote of the day

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

“Rather than make one’s argument come alive, clichés do the reverse. They capture a morsel of thought, cover it in batter, and fry it into mush.” — Mark Abley in The Walrus

For good measure, here’s a rogue’s gallery of flagrant clichés. As language guru William Safire put it (with a sardonic wink): “Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague.”

Don’t cry over spilt milk; Selling like hotcakes; The rest is history; Every cloud has a silver lining; When it rains it pours; Don’t judge a book by its cover; Don’t beat around the bush; Don’t count your chickens before they hatch; It’s a dog eat dog world; To be honest; Basically; With all due respect; Giving it 110%. It is what it is; Paradigm shift; Walk the walk; Pushing the envelope; Thinking outside the box; The elephant in the room.

elephant-abley

It’s OK, you don’t have to read that

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

Idea of the week: “Some real talk: most writing isn’t worth consuming.”

This both striking and self-evident statement was plucked from a purposely (and pleasingly) provocative essay titled “The Case Against Reading Everything,” by Jason Guriel at The Walrus. It’s a good line, because it’s irrefutably true, and because it comes from a site called … The Walrus.

books4.jpg
No way.

Guriel is impugning the moldy axiom that all honest writers must “read widely” — that is, indiscriminately, catholically, voraciously, hoovering the latest hardbacks, pounding down poetry, gobbling it all, from Bellow and obituaries to Cervantes and cereal boxes. It’s the old “balanced diet” theory. He’s not having it.

Neither am I. It’s an unrealistic ideal, reading it all, though I freely admit to reading obits and cereal boxes. In my twenties, I tried strenuously to read wide and far, from the gilded canon to contemporary classics, and I about hurt myself. The volume of verbiage is simply too monstrous, overwhelming and intimidating. I now embrace my blindspots (“Infinite Jest,” sci-fi, “Ulysses,” anything by J.K. Rowling) and guiltlessly shun writers I don’t feel a quick kinship with.

In college, a tough-minded journalism professor chuckled when I told him about the stacks of books taunting me and my ironclad will to conquer them. “You must be selective,” he said, and I deemed him very wise.

To this day, with impunity, I put down books that don’t regale me 110-percent, even if I’m half-way through them. Long ago, I literally dropped in the garbage John Grisham’s “The Firm” with only 50 pages out of 544 pages left. (A bratty gesture, I know, yet one unencumbered with regrets.)

It’s the quality, the intensity, not the breadth of one’s reading that counts. It’s about focus and concentration — concentrating on the works and writers that nail your sweet spot and eschewing inconsequential distractions. Says Guriel:

“The call to ‘read widely’ is a failure to make judgments. It disperses our attention across an ever-increasing black hole of mostly undeserving books. Whatever else you do, you should not be reading the many, many new releases of middling poetry and fiction that will be vying for your attention over the next year or so out of some obligation to submit your ear to a variety of voices. … Instead, shutter your ear against mediocrity. To fall in love with language, don’t fan out. Fall down a rabbit hole. Cynthia Ozick wanted to be Henry James. Nicholson Baker has a whole book about his obsession with John Updike.”

I’ve fallen down many rabbit holes, becoming a near completist of Philip Roth and, yes, Nicholson Baker. I was religious in my ardor for former San Francisco Chronicle humor columnist Jon Carroll, and marveled at New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane’s linguistic paradiddles (until, that is, he became wearisome, cutesy and gassy, a fallen hero).

Rabbit holes are thrilling. I most recently tumbled into that of L.A.-centric novelist Eve Babitz, snarfing up five of her groovily stylish books in a matter of weeks. I did what Guriel suggests, fell in love with the language, shuttered my ear against mediocrity. It was to me what reading is all about. It was like a spell — a love affair without the doom.