Thursday, September 27, 2007

A tribute

At times, I've been given the big handshake at parties (which i like attending whenever possible) by someone who, then, with an air of gleeful conspiracy,will say, “You know, I've always wanted to write.”
I used to try to be polite.
These days I reply with the same jubilant excitement: “ You know, I've always wanted to be a call center agent.” (not really considering the fact that I WAS twice before,but sarcasm is such a dear friend of mine)
They look puzzled. It doesn't matter. There are a lot of puzzled people wandering around lately.
If you want to write, you write.
The only way to learn to write is by writing. And that would not be useful approach to being a call center agent.
Stephen King and Lawrence Sanders always wanted to write. And they write.
So they wrote Carrie and “Salem's Lot”, “The Shining”, “The First Deadly Sin” etc and other good short stories and other stupendous number of other stories and books and fragments and poems and essays and other unclassifiable things, most of them too wretched to ever be published.
Because that is the way it is done.
Because there is no other way to do it. Not one other way.
Compulsive diligence is almost enough. But not quite. You have to have a taste for words. Gluttony. You have to want to roll in them. You have to read millions of them written by other people. You read everything with grinding envy or a weary contempt.
You save the most contempt for the people who conceal ineptitude with long words, Germanic sentence structure, obtrusive symbols, and no sense of story, pace or character.
Then you have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.
Okay then, stupendous diligence, plus word-love, plus empathy and out of that can come, painfully, some objectivity. Never total objectivity.
At this frangible moment in time I am typing these worlds on a computer, knowing clearly the flavor and meaning I am hunting for, but not at all certain I am getting it.
As a writer that they are, they send books out into the world and it is very hard to shuck them out of the spirit. They are tangled children, trying to make their way in spite of the handicaps you have imposed on them. I am sure that Stephen King and Lawrence Sanders would give a pretty to get them all back home and take one last good swing at every one of them. Page by page. Digging and cleaning, brushing and furbishing. Tidying up.
Stephen King and Lawrence Sanders are far, far better writer at thirty when I'll reach thirty (of course!)
I am entitled to hate them a little bit for this.
And I think I know of a dozen demons hiding in the bushes where their path leads, and even if I had a way to warn them, it would do no good. They whip 'em away, or they whip them.
It is exactly that simple. Are we all together so far?
Diligence, word-lust, empathy equal growing objectivity and then what?
Of course, the Story.
Story is something happening to someone you have been led to care about. It can happen in any dimension-physical, mental, spiritual-and in combinations of those dimensions.
Without author intrusion.
There are a lot of slithering in here, and there is a maddened computer keyboard that haunts me, as it will you, and there are enough persuasively evil children to fill Disney World on any Sunday of December, but the main thing is story.
One is led to care.
Note this. Two of the most difficult areas to write in are humor and the occult. In clumsy hands the humor turns to dirge and the occult turns to funny.
But once you know, you can write in any area.
Stephen King and Lawrence Sanders never restricted themselves to their present field of intense interest.
They don't write to please us. They write to please themselves. I am going to please myself. When that happens, you will like my articles too. (*wish *wish)

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