Tag: Writing

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.

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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.

Dying is easy, writing is hard.

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

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The quote about writing from “Death in Venice” novelist Mann has for decades been my favorite assessment of the craft, even, if you will, my mantra. I present it because just days ago in The New York Times an op-ed writer echoed it crisply: “If you find writing easy, you’re doing it wrong.” This is something I have staunchly believed, and still do. Writing’s a bitch.

I’ve written so long and hard that my head hurt, that I’ve become physically wobbly, a wet noodle. And compounding the physical complaints was the inexorably depressing notion that what I just spent hours extracting, exhuming, molding and crafting was irrefutable crap.

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway

A journalist colleague once called me a bleeder, because I am so slow and painstaking a writer. I’ve spent six hours on a 700-word article, I’m ashamed to admit. That isn’t the norm, but it also isn’t uncommon. Every word — no: every syllable — counts.

My best friend as a writer is so rudimentary I shouldn’t even have to mention it, and that’s reading. Yet I know many writers who don’t get this. What reliably dumbfounds me is how little so many of them actually, actively read. Television has usurped reading as a cultural pastime, confused as literature as it is. I guarantee watching TV is not going to improve one’s prose skills (teleplay-writing skills, maybe). Too many would-be writers are aspiring illiterates. A fact.

As the greats have harrumphed :

“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” — Samuel Johnson

“Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.” — Larry L. King

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” —  Stephen King

26stephens-web-blog4277Done correctly, writing is work, grueling toil. It’s fun (when it’s going well), but not that much fun. Still, creating and thinking are so gratifying that it’s worth it. It takes time, hours and hours. Listen to Louis Menand of The New Yorker:

“Writing, for 99-percent of people who do it, is the opposite of spontaneous. Chattiness, slanginess, in-your-face-ness, and any other features of writing that are conventionally characterized as ‘like speech’ are usually the results of laborious experimentation, revision, calibration, walks around the block, and recalibration. … Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.”

That’s as hard as it sounds, and, without the most gimlet-eyed editor, failure is inevitable. But we try. We do the work. We grind, grope for the felicitous simile and metaphor, strive for the perfect punctuation, the poetic stroke, the tickling aside. We do, yes, bleed. Sympathy is unfitting for such a self-involved venture. The only reward is to be read.