Forum / How to Write

Darryl Price
Apr 29, 10:01am

How to Write

Words are a pile of holy crap. It's like some kind of goopy grey clay you can't rely on to maintain its shape run through the fingers of a short-attention span puppet parade for children. Show me the good enough person who remembers the truth about the given day and that solid person won't need to preserve it on a painting.They are it it is them. Fat or starving we just want to fortify the air around us with stories.It's the oldest con in the book. Who knew we'd be running in and out of the pages like this, like a bunch of wood eating bugs? Shakespeare knew. That's one. If there's one there's two and if there's two there's three. Everybody knows.And still we go to the x and await our golden moments like well-trained little actors.Because we're afraid to die without delivering our lines first.I say forget all that. You're already in the world.Write because you are free, because you are breathing, because you want to find love is real it's really real,because the moon is sometimes perfectly round,because you don't agree with me not at all,because I'm a lying cynical bastard,because your feet hurt,because you saw a red bird in a green tree.Not because you've studied hard and memorized all the rules even the ones in small print. And not because you just want to be left alone in your gated garden with its idolized statues of saints preaching to the smartest birds in the forest.You're still no bigger than the smallest atom anywhere else in the universe.And yet you may make a difference then. You could be the butterfly's wings powering the sun. You could be that elusive sound of the tree falling in the forgotten or lost forest. The breakdown of Autumn's leaves into Winter's undercrust.The laughter heard just above the snow like quickly freezing bells.You could be sanity. Comedy. The Muse walks into you and you no longer regret that your body can't live forever. The Muse kisses your cheek and suddenly your mind believes it can create things out of thin air that will live and jump and play all around the room for a very long time to come.

Darryl Price 042910

Sam Rasnake
Apr 29, 10:57am

Great point, DP - The central character in Eliot's fragmented but wonderful poem - Sweeney Agonistes - kills a person. Explaining why he has to kill - he says I have to use words when I talk to you.

Words approach what I want to write or say but never form exactly as I want. Not at all when compared to what's in my head, eye, or ear. Or heart, wherever that is. But, I have no plans whatsoever to kill.

Good thread.

eamon byrne
Apr 29, 05:05pm

Nice riff Darryl. You've thought about what you you've written here. This would make a good post into the 'essays' group.

Walter Bjorkman
Apr 29, 06:23pm

sometimes words take over, they leap ahead of thought. of course there are synapses and dendrites doing their thing, but like the oblongata with touch, it bypasses the conscious. That's probably why I write - its a rush, with all the accompaning emotions and memories and projections that can exist in that boundless world that no one enters until you have left. Then the conscious takes over and we read, clean bathrooms, post our stories and poems, and comment and read more, all storing it away until the next rush, waiting to pounce at any time, the craw in your stomach, that fix, that you need more than lentil soup.

sara t.
Apr 29, 07:16pm

Nice. Show offs!!

Matt Dennison
Apr 29, 08:05pm

DEVIL 37

Having a poem laid 'cross my desk
doth render me a total wreck.

'Tis why I seek the calm effect
of whiskey poured straight down my neck

as I judge and weigh, weigh and judge,
'till finally—-almost!—-accept.

David Ackley
Apr 30, 08:05am

1) Treasure your delete button. (Paraphrase of Susan Tepper.)

2)No Cheap Tricks.(Cited by Raymond Carver.)

3)Break any...rule rather than say anything outright barbarous. (George Orwell)

4)Try to make the reader see.(from Joseph Conrad)

5)Steal from your betters, but make it your own.

6)Remember that the object is to make a peacock.

"What's riches to him

That has made a great peacock

With the pride of his eye?

The wind-beat grey-stone

And desolate Three Rock

would nourish his whim,

Live he or die.

Amid wet rocks or heather,

His ghost will be gay

Adding feather to feather

For the pride of his eye."

W.B. Yeats

David Ackley
Apr 30, 08:08am

Correction:

" The wind beat, stone grey..."

Darryl Price
Apr 30, 01:15pm

“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.”
Dr. Seuss

JM Prescott
Apr 30, 01:51pm

Great quote Darryl.

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." - Mark Twain

and

"We all know that art isn't' the truth, art is a lie that makes us realize the truth." - Pablo Picasso

Darryl Price
Apr 30, 02:14pm

Yeah--I'm so glad that people are getting the playful nature of this offering. It's simply meant to get us talking and thinking and talking about talking and thinking.

Matt Dennison
May 01, 10:14pm

All of us can ask directions or remark that it looks like snow. When we wish to embody in language a complex of feelings or sensations or ideas, we fall into inarticulateness; attempting to speak, in the heat of love or argument, we say nothing or we say what we do not intend. Poets encounter inarticulateness as much as anybody, or maybe more: They are aware of the word’s inadequacy because they spend their lives struggling to say the unsayable. From time to time, in decades of devotion to their art, poets succeed in defeating the enemies of ignorance, deceit, and ugliness. The poets we honor most are those who—by studious imagination, by continuous connection to the sensuous body, and by spirit steeped in the practice and learning of language—publish in their work the unsayable said.

-– Donald Hall

Walter Bjorkman
May 01, 10:32pm

I write because the voice of my long gone Mom resonates in my ear: "You're wasting your degree."

Marc Nash
May 02, 05:47pm

Words are slippery, elusive. As much as they are charged with facilitating communication between us, they mask meaning and obfuscate. That's why there is so much misunderstanding between people. Elisions, bifurcations, lacuna etc etc. Thought is not linear, but plodding language sadly is, a very poor tool for encapsulating the output of our brains.

At least with movie scripts, you have the visual prompts of the actor's expressions, gestures, inflection... In a novel you are hard pressed to reproduce this through description, without grinding the pace to a halt. In any line of dialogue, I want to know what the listener is doing with his/her hands.

For me words are not about telling a story. They are for throttling to within an inch of their life in order to make them do their damn duty; to communicate.

Walter Bjorkman
May 02, 06:59pm

and to ease the way for the reader to slip into mode - as author, protagonist, neutral observer,etc. which requires an overall feeling, setting, emotion - and which can vary throuhout, rather than pure (or mere) description. If the reader feels it, smells it, hears it, tastes it, he will see it.

Marc Nash
May 02, 07:04pm

Take a look at a thesaurus. Look up 'drunk' or 'chastise'. Count the number of synonyms for these and compare that to those listed for the basal emotions like 'happy' or 'sad'.

No wonder der youth resort to smiley faced emoticons to express their feelings. We have failed them with their linguistic inheritance.

Jacobean humours, melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine and whatever the fourth one is, that's no less sophisticated an understanding human emotion than we possess now.

Words yeah? Barely worth the paper they're written on...

Bill Yarrow
May 04, 09:23pm

A piece I have about writing on Writinghood:

http://writinghood.com/style/how-to/advice-to-writers/
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