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August 15, 2003
How I Write
(from the archives - august 2002)
somebody asked who were my idol writers...
that's hard. aside from amis and boyle, i'd say delillo because of the last paragraph in this posting and also umberto eco and borges because this paragraph was written last. finally i'd say jean toomer because i think he and i think about ourselves in the same way.
i would have to say my father probably influenced the beginning of the structure of what i *think* is poetic. he wrote poetry and i'm sure i copied his substance and some of his style. he has a thing for consonance that's constantly causing conniptions. he also gets wacky with deconstructing words which is sometimes pun-ishing. all that, i think is subconscious in my writing. when i finally, within the past 6 months, saw a videotape of amiri baraka performing, i saw where all of that came from in its distilled form.
so when i write, i believe that i start there. this is unconsiously what sounds to me like the beginnings of trying to be creative. so i move past what immediately comes into my head in that bowen/baraka vein and try to make it more subtle. so like duke ellington who says all music must be danceable, there is that poetic swing underneath everything i write. it has a rythmic sound. all my creative writing is spoken in my head, so i'm conscious of the meter of it.
i am also drawn to british english. i spent a great deal of time listening to upstairs downstairs on the radio, as well as the bertie wooster stuff. whomever wrote that was very clever in loading a very precise amount of meaning into an economy of words. when i heard it often enough, i found it changing how i spoke. there is something to that kind of english usage which *is* more universal, and i've found it helps a great deal when communicating with non-native speakers. there's a bit of 'hear me out gentle reader' in my prose.
h.l. mencken also directed my invective. i very much enjoy raspy wit and direct declarations. i studiously try to avoid the 'in my opinion'. i'm writing it, it's my opinion. argument as a statement of fact has weight in my writing.
when i believe that i am doing my best writing, i bring the reader inside my head when i am in a certain groove of thinking. i have become x (as above) for the sake of argument and i am making you x. i am putting words in your mouth and making you rant. but the rant will have a melodic combinatory essense to it. it will be like dancing with a partner, and when it is sweeping well around the ballroom and i am at full power, then i want it to flow as the words of toni morrison do. whenever morrison gets into a large paragraph, you get the feeling that it's like a saxophone solo - something that can't be broken up or disected. it just keeps going and pushing you further into itself and then it turns you uniquely. the process is more like ice dancing in an arc with intricate footsteps into a decreasing radius. there is a narrative force in it that propels you forward, the footsteps are the choices of words, and the arc is the theme of the paragraph and suddenly near the end of it you are swooped into a new dimension of conclusion, perhaps even facing backwards. you've navigated meaning, danced with it, and the words are the music. that's what morrison does. i try to do that.
Posted by mbowen at August 15, 2003 11:08 AM
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Posted by: news- at August 29, 2004 11:00 PM