What Writing Is

I've been working this morning and was thinking, as I got up to get yet another cup of coffee, that people who don't write all the time must have a completely different idea of what "writing" is. Writing as a way of life. Writing as work. Writing as an art.

I am not the world's best writer. Far, far from it. I am too left-brained, too plodding, too given to thinking of writing almost mathematically. Not that I know anything about math, which would make thinking about math just the teensiest bit difficult. There are writers whose skill makes tears come to my eyes--sentences, even just phrases, that are so beautifully crafted that I want to lick them. Chew them up and swallow them. I don't know what that means, but that's true:  I see fabulous writing and want to consume it.

I don't mean flowery, glittery, emotive writing. I hate that. I hate writing that goes on and on and never gives me a single, graspable concrete image. Some of the most popular writers are very evocative and very emotive and colorful and flowery, but when I read their writing, I'm left feeling as if I've eaten cotton candy. All fluff, no substance. I don't like poetic prose. (I don't even like poetic poetry; I like narrative poetry.) If I can read something and come away with one or two perfect sentences, sentences that do what a sentence should do--tell you something clearly and succinctly and so wonderfully that you can see it or feel it or smell it or hear it or experience it exactly as the writer intended--then I'm happy. It's what I work for, in my plodding left-brain way.

What I was thinking this morning is that people who write but don't live it, don't think about it and love it and dream it--that they must believe writing is about laying out the information in a logical order, maybe tossing in some adjectives and adverbs to add a little zip. What I believe is that good writing occurs in the interstices. It's not the one sentence following the previous. That part is easy, if you pay attention. The part that's hard is the subtle connection between the two sentences. The reader has to believe that the thought or description or explanation is so seamless that there is no gap, no pause, no--well, no seam.

I was trying to explain what I was thinking about to The Ever-Gorgeous Earl, who is, in truth, my Everything. You think I'm being all sappy here:  My Everything. Nah. What I mean is that he does everything for me:  he cooks stuff that is healthy for me, he shops, he cleans, he drives me places. He's the person--the only person--to whom I can vent about things that drive me nuts. He listens to me rant, and then he cooks me some tofu. And he generously serves as Listener:  if I'm working on something important, something I want to be as nearly perfect as I can make it, the only way to tell what it sounds like is to read it out loud. While I can do that when I'm sitting here all alone, it's not the same--I tend to stop in the middle or pause to correct something. If you have a Listener, you read all the way through. All formal and stuff. You know.

This morning I was reading out loud to him while he was hanging out with the cats, and I stopped, and he said, "?" and I tried to explain that there was something missing between two sentences. They seemed to follow logically, but there was a gap, a little space between them that bothered me. I can't explain this because I can't put the paragraph here to illustrate it. It's something so subtle that sometimes just exchanging one word for a synonym will work. Sometimes it requires more than that. The worst is when you realize that the problem between the two sentences is a shift in tone or focus that's going to require that you rewrite a significant chunk of what you've already written and with which you have, almost certainly, fallen in love.

And that's the problem, especially with new writers. You work hard and craft something you can be proud of, paragraphs that can hold their own, and you fall in love with them. You've got this sentence here that you really worked on, and then this one here that fairly glows, it's so wonderful. You revised these maybe a dozen times. You love them like you love your favorite recipe, altered and tweaked until the flavors sing together.

Except this sentence isn't singing. In fact, it's not playing that well with its fellows; the neighbors on either side aren't taking it into their bosoms.

This morning I think I solved the problem with a parenthetical addition, "that connection with other people," that seemed to fill the interstice and make everything flow. Maybe not--now that I go back and read it again, it seems a little clunky. But for me, that's always a problem: I read something and love it. Then I realize it doesn't work. I sacrifice it, mourn a little, find something else that can take its place and shoulder the burden a little more elegantly. I think I'm done. I go back later and read it again and think, "Eh, maybe not." I try something else. That's it! I LOVE this!

Two hours later I read it again. What was I, on crack? Where did I get "onerous"? How does that fit into a how-to involving Play-Doh? Good lord, woman, you need to shut down the computer and go beg to be allowed back on the rolls of substitute teachers. While you're at it, you should maybe install a better thesaurus (I say "install," instead of "buy," because, really, who buys reference books any more? I ask you).

I don't know. Maybe I've solved the problem, and maybe I haven't. The good thing is that I adore thinking about this, about focusing my world down to one little patch of words, maybe half a dozen, and working with those and thinking about denotation and connotation and relationships, about assonance and repetition and alliteration and parallel structure.

Geek me.

The bad thing is that this will never make me rich, and it has made me very odd, and I spend way, way too much time thinking about things that no one else will ever notice.

The other good thing, though? It makes me very happy that I get to do it, anyway.