scrawls.

scrawls

still cheaper than therapy*

19.6.06

ages ago when i had an actual writing class - or, i suppose, i had several - it was the sort of writing class in which everyone brings in sixteen copies of something and we all criticize each of them and you can very definitely tell who is a decent writer and who was drunk when they forgot to spell-check and there were enough English majors in the class that the people who forgot to spell-check got some very dirty looks. i cannot tell if the affronted English majors were able to affect the non-spell-checkers at all in the long run. but. each of us had a certain style of writing, certainly; you could start reading one of the stories or poems or essays or whatever the assignment had happened to be and almost immediately tell who had written it without looking at the top (some of them were actually deliberately left "anonymous," as part of the class, but that never worked). And after a bit it became clear that not only did each of us have a particular way of playing with (or in some cases, fighting with and ultimately losing to) words, but that each of us also had a favorite topic in mind, whether or not any of them realized it. Punk Rock Grrl wrote about abortion. Mr Baseball Hat wrote about his father. Whatever-is-the-singular-of-Womyn wrote about I AM LESBIAN. Farm kid wrote about horses. Boring Goth wrote about vampires every fucking chance he got, which as one can easily imagine got very tiresome very quickly. (it was particularly funny when after one assignment, Punk Rock Grrl, as usual, wrote about abortion, only without ever actually mentioning it, and when we were discussing the paper none of the men in the class, including the teacher, had any idea what was going on in this little three-page anectode; and they said this, that they were confused, and all the women in the class looked at them in astonishment that they were so fucking dense and we all said at exactly the same time, she's having an abortion, and then all the men in the class looked awfully sheepish. but i digress.)

The best writers were the ones who didn't have immediately recognizable topics, or whose themes were particularly vague. And so of course once you guess what themes the two-thirds of the class who can't write properly are going with, you want to see if the decent writers have them too. Eventually you realize: the West Virginian wrote about Spain. Halfway Decent Goth wrote about marital discord (surprise, surprise, eh?). Brainiac Pothead, probably the most talented of us, wrote about discrimination. and of course it takes you the longest to figure out your own, because of course it's a blind spot; who would deliberately write about the same thing over and over again and assume that it would continue to be even a little bit interesting? because whatever you're writing about obsessively is going to be so basic, so essential to you, that it doesn't even occur to you that it's there, like breathing. and it took forever and then at some point (after the class was over, actually) you manage to guess and it's been glaringly obvious the entire time to an extent at which you get a little embarrased and wonder who else noticed it: i wrote about loneliness. Plain and simple. and you go oh, That's why i like hemingway, then.

and here is the problem with writing real stories, or a novel like FIL wants, or anything: i'm not lonely now. and so i can't write it. all i can do is rant about shit and pretend to be funny. besides, a novel about loneliness couldn't help but end happy, and i'd hate that.

scrawled @ 17:19