Forum / Essay on writing & language

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  Marcus Speh

  Feb 06, 01:45pm

  Awkword Paper Cut (founding editor: Michael Dickes) has just published an essay, "Negotiating Babel" that I wrote for Michelle Elvy's "Writers on Writing" column. Enjoy & leave a comment if you're so inclined!

  Link: http://bit.ly/babelword

• 
  Darryl Price

  Feb 06, 05:54pm

  "I feel as if I'm drifting around the edges of a giant ice shelf. I'm hoping to dislodge a floe, I'm waiting for an opening in the ice, I'm trying to be ready for it, but that is all. Writing has become an act of grace rather than of bricklaying. I have abandoned the Tower but I'll never be sorry that I was tempted by its splendor." Marcus has an interesting mind, a lucky mind, an inventive, curious mind that I admire. He's not afraid to be silly or serious or somewhere in between. He's not looking for excuses, but reasons, avenues, miracles, if you will, doorways. I like this, too, about his writing and his thought processes. So giving him this nugget to toss around was a brilliant idea on Michelle's part. She knew he would not be able to resist, to explore, to think, to fashion something out of the experience. That blessing is a good enough one for me.Marcus always does what all great writers do: he tempts you to do him one better.

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  James Lloyd Davis

  Feb 06, 06:53pm

  Language is a curious, complex, and confounding concept, on the one hand based in reality, on the other... an open door into the 'other', the nagual, the abstract, where unreality is the mirror of the real.

  Thankful I am that I do not have a facility for studied language other than English, though I did at one time slip over into Spanish long enough to begin to think in that language. A Mexican preacher told me it was "... el lenguaje de los angeles." The language of the angels. As well it may be. I've not, to my knowledge, ever conversed with angels, but...

  To the point, mastery of English was not enough for my writing, since vocabulary is never sufficient for the artistic. I try to write in the language of vision, in the simlicity of images, a pallet of words oddly mixed at times into tones and colors that can only approximate the vision but, and hopefully, in ways that translate well enough to be universally clear to the reader. To that end, language is art.

  Written language does not really parallel spoken language, except in dialogue.

  I remember watching a play, a drama in which Montezuma, emperor of Mexico and a prisoner of Cortes, first grasps the power and potential of the Spaniards' alphabet. He is stunned by the implications after a simple demonstration, by the idea that men can so easily transfer ideas and information across any distance through marks on paper. Even in the age of the internet, I still marvel at the potential of books, the transfer of information and dialogue from one mind to many through the medium of words. I am also aware of its limitations.

  Marcus will always make you think. That is his gift.

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Feb 09, 09:18pm

  This may or may not be important, but I've given this some more thought.

  When I write, I never think about the words, but try instead to translate the running video of a story in my mind. I see only pictures and my fingers write the words.

  That sounds simplistic and I don't really know if it makes sense, so I'll offer it up to consensus.

  Maybe it's a little like saying that... you walk with your eyes and your feet follow up out of habit.

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