Literary Exercise #6--Description

If you ever read Dickens, you'll notice straight off that description is a huge part of his writing style. He delights in bringing to light the most minute detail of existence. Description can be both exposition and imagery--and those two can intermarry and divorce at any point. The interesting thing is, while audiences have lost their taste for longer, descriptive sentences, they have become infatuated with imagery--images in film, media, modern art, and advertising. I can't speak authoritatively about the whole system, but I think that literary imagery was lost (along with poetry). Unfortunately. I don't know how we should reclaim it. I have suspicions that it will have to reflect the images--The Science of Sleep, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Dizzying camera movements, rapid scene changes, a sense of beautiful disorientation. We'll see. But until then (or during then), I offer my sixth exercise. May you fall in love with the nouns, verbs, adjectives of imagery--again or for the first time.

Sitting outside on my porch--my writer's porch, my thinking porch, my peaceful porch, it's easy to get reminiscent. I use the same tactic every time...a cigarette, a glass of water, and an inspiron 700m. Water can be subverted by beer, my laptop by a lined notebook, and cigarettes by self-control, but the approach, and result, are always the same. I don't come out here because I want to--because I need to. It's when you don't breathe to survive but to take in the cold, pure draughts atop a 6,000 foot mountain. It's when finding water in a desert becomes second to riding a camel across sun-baked sand deep into the Arabian night. It's when religion stops being a homework assignment and becomes a mystical journey. It's when your parents stop raising you and start living alongside your life.

It's because it's in me. I can't get away from it. My fingers are conduits, my nerves switches, my heart electricity that pumps neurons out to the page. I can't stop. It's part of me. It's living instead of existing. It's talking instead of responding. It's feeling, idealing, revealing, and healing. And it's reeling--for anyone able to cast out the line. I wish you could see it, and pick it up--rub the fine material with your dominant hand, and wrap it around your finger a couple of times. It's in this lighted cigarette, when the heat is white and the lighter an orange bic. It pulls back like a dragon and releases like a cloud. It comes with all the anemities you could ask for--that crackling, popping sound like a boyscout's box-fire, that comfortable position between your fingers a smoothly worn couch, and that glowing embers that points to more than just long cancer--imagination. Give me a riddled body with dying organs and an unstable hand--but give me a heart, and give me a mind. And let me explore the disconnect between the two until they're algamated into my soul. And give me ideas that flow like rivers, or strong, choppy waves in a harbor. A lighthouse to peer into the unknown. A cave to follow down to its roots. A life to lay in suns and moons--a love to bring it close to others. Give me all these things, and watch me try--watch me try to deny my nature for anything else. It cannot be done. It cannot be stopped. It cannot be lost for long...it can only be my long-lost love.

Literary Exercise # 3: A London Morning

One of the better skills of a writer is being concise. It's damn hard to do, and not even fun. Writers seem to be stricken with the illness to write beautifully, but readers are wary of the contagion of boredom, and will often not read your work to avoid the risk. How do you engage the audience without resorting to hypnosis? How do you keep their attention when, as a culture, we have moved back to an oral tradition? Well, by being damn good. By being good. Being good. Cut, cut, cutting, and snip, snip, snipping your words to the essentials. How? Rewrite. William Zinsser, in his book On Writing Well, said that the key to writing is rewriting. I'm liable to agree with him. And if I'm ever contaminated with that debilitating disease, I will be liable. I hope to never be the cause of that infection.

I named this exercise "A London Morning" to avoid copyright issues over "London Fog" but to get at the same idea. In it, I will be writing a paragraph(s) without paining myself to be concise, and then go back with my scissors and trim all the excess verbiage. Sounds good? Hedge trimmers are for more than just haircuts:

The weird thing about listening to an AC unit at 2:30 in the AM is that pretty soon it doesn't seem like you're listening to it anymore...it's more like it was always there...and people and noises blend in and out. It's like speaking with a fan-voice...that warbly, vibrato voice that sounds like it was sampled by regina spektor. It reminds me of when I was growing up in Minnesota. We lived on the river, and the trains ran on the other side. Every time their horn would blare I would swear that they were a part of me. The trains are you. A part of your experience, a part of your identity. Maybe that's why I like backgroud noise...low murmurs, street traffic, refrigerator hums...they all can be identified with...or maybe they identify with you.

Literary Exercise # 2

This exercise is geared towards providing as many alternatives as possible to a simple phrase. An example my professor gave me was, "She broke my heart." "She crushed my aorta like a can of Dr. Pepper." "She pole-axed my left ventricle." and so on. This exercise is helpful for stretching the writer, making him think outside of his literary toolbox, while at the same time, staying true to the subject matter. So here goes:



"He looked out the window into the garden."



"The window was his camera and the garden was his snapshot."



"He looked through a portal to the origin of evil."



"He looked through a trick mirror to the other side."



"He looked over the edge of the ledge into a row of hedges."



"In hindsight, he wished he would have gone for the bigger room."

Pen-ups

Well, the real purpose of this blog is to turn this writer of sorts into a great writer...which means there will be plenty of literary excercises. The sad things is, writers accrue as much flab as the ordinary person, and not just in the winter. It happens anytime they think amazing thoughts and decide not to write them down. As the would-be gym bum starts out at a slow languid pace, most of these exercises will be rough drafts. And just as the weight room jock slims down to the muscular frame hiding underneath, I will come back later on and edit them. Let's just say I'm in good need of some pen-ups. Fifteen. Maybe forty. Maybe I should just try for one.

Not the First Time

Everyone that starts a blog has a certain ceremony they use to christen their website. To get it started right. To get a blank piece of paper and press the led point down for the first time. To burn all those other crumpled heaps that were supposed to be the first time. To do things right.

Well, this is not my first. This is not even the best of my first. This is a haphazard project somewhere along the way--a middle-aged life (as a metaphor) too late to start over and too early to give up. This is what organized people hate--not quite systematized, not quite random, but somewhere in between. And this is where most of life is lived--at least mine anyway. See, the ironic thing is that as we have chased after the ideals of perfection, we've shirked and distanced ourselves from every good thing that we have at the present. It's ironic because I don't think anyone gets it. In a good college on your way to a good job? It's not good enough because you're not there yet. Married with a lovely wife and children? Well, you're not making enough money...and someone else is always more lovely. Working at a ministry that is reaching out to the hurting? You could do it better, so you start your own. The problem with a perfect world, though, is that there is no one to share it with. No one will ever understand you completely. No one will ever be able to tap into your dreams and emotions quite like you can. The only way to get that is by yourself, and to be by yourself.

I've thought about this a lot because I want that perfection. I want everything to fall with the exact subtle grace I envision in my mind. I want the freedom to stretch my mind to the limits, to be exactly where I want to be. But I don't want to be alone. Maybe the ideal is still possible--money can buy a stone castle in Ireland, rolling hills and meadows, a quiet study, sophisticated people. But I've come to the realization that it'll never be quite right--whether you're okay with that depends on your religious persuasion. I am.

I use to think that it was the most vain and meaningless thing to do something that wouldn't get any recognition. To read a poem that only the air hears. To sing a song that will never be remembered. It was in the legacy that the art reveled--it was in the legacy that the art was celebrated. We want to be remembered. We want to be understood. We have a lot to understand and remember about both those things. Now about that bottle of champagne.