Wednesday, February 7, 2007

good feedback = bad, worse, worst

Writing is not so much a lost art these days as it is an antediluvian, outmoded discipline that appears to have been supplanted by, like much else, a D-I-Y commerce; easily manufactured and readily available for the masses. New blogs are flung up on the web in almost unending succession; like tumors – the bad ones seem to sprout up faster and in much higher frequency than the good ones. These days, everyone seems to believe that they are a writer.

The error in logic here is that just because you have taken the time to spout out your personal opinions on the Super Bowl® ads, or the new high-rise in your neighborhood that obstructs the view of the park, you obviously must have something meaningful to say, ergo, you put it on your blog, and ergo, you are a writer. And while I am not dissing anyone’s genuinely heartfelt sentiments, I am still of the old school that concurs you must have the God-given talent, or at least put in the time and effort, to call yourself a writer and have the designation seem less than laughable.

While I do not normally read Stephen King, I did read his book ‘On Writing’ and found myself agreeing with most of it. One point that was relevant here was the answer to the question of how much should one write if one is to be a writer. His rather inarguable stance is that it must be every day (he only takes off for holidays, if that), and it must be uninterrupted. While I don’t know if all of us have the luxury of taking hours and hours of time out of the day to write to said requirements, the guy has a good point.

There is no reason to call yourself a writer if you don’t make writing a regular habit. Blogging doesn’t count. To me, blogging is just practice on a more accessible scale. If you started writing on a blog because of a life impetus such as depression, your dog, or someone laughed at an email you wrote once, you are still not a writer. Indeed, if blogging is the only form of writing you’ve ever done, aside from a short required essay on The Canterbury Tales in Miss Milton’s 10th grade English class, you are a card-carrying non-writer who is keeping an online diary in hopes that a certain audience that perhaps you have cultivated will give you enough positive reinforcement to convince you that you are.

The dangerous trap here is this positive reinforcement, and I guarantee that those are the folks who turn off all the negative feedback on their site so that they can pretend everyone who visits is basking in the 100-watt glare of their literary brilliance. It is the most blatant yet insidious form of self-congratulation and navel-gazing I can think of. On the contrary, the true test of whether or not you are a writer is the biggest leap of all: exposing yourself to the potentially cold hard truth that you are not.

When I was in one of my journalism classes in college, my professor was a kindly man who was a savage with the red pen. He drilled the rules of the Style Guide into our heads so hard that I still have a divot in the back of mine to this day, and sometimes spontaneously wonder if I am leading a paragraph with the most important fact. My papers would always come back afloat in a sea of red, even when I was so sure my every title and comma was airtight. But here’s the thing – I got better. I grew as a writer and why? Because I had a critical eye on it. Because he wasn’t making comments like this:
“You are such a beautiful master of words, (insert name here). I just know that a shining talent like yours will always prevail, despite your recent problems with depression.”
This kind of syncophantic blather can nearly always be found peppering every hack’s blog. But I guarantee that if the same entry which avid admirers so readily heap praise upon was brought before a teacher in the Language Arts, they would receive nothing more than a big red C, D, or F with comments more to the tune of, “Composition and syntax problems. Material is trite and unoriginal; read Woolf or Salinger for examples on narrative flow.”

The ironic final thought here is that I, in writing this Molotov cocktail love note to a portion of bloggers out there, am myself using the same medium which I just now lambasted. But frankly, this is just practice for me. I write full-time, 8-12 hours a day for a living and my position is defensible. Can I get better as a writer? Of course. Does it take practice, perhaps a lifetime of it? As the old fortunetelling black ball says, signs point to yes. Will I incur negative feedback here precisely because of the subject matter? Probably so.

But you know what? At least I’m not turning it off.

Now. I’m taking my toys and going home. Pbtpbtpbtpbtp!!!!!

Monday, January 8, 2007

hi, i'm a book sniffer

As a kid, one of my favorite things to do when my mom took me to the local bookstore was sniffing books. Sounds a bit quirky, or obsessive/compulsive depending on how you view the world, but it was just one of many weird little rituals I held dear.

The best were the paperbacks, especially the older ones that had been collecting dust on the shelf for quite a while and were clearly not bestsellers. I would thumb one down from the shelves, then quickly and assiduously push my nose directly above the open pages while my hand flipped across them, releasing this oaky yet dusty smell that as long as I live, I will never forget. I would do this several times, and on a few embarrassing occasions, my book purchasing decision was directly proportional to how good the book smelt.

Now, I have to say that I had the art of smelling books down to a fine art. My favorites were the older ones that were taking up space on the shelves. I liked their rustic warmth, the grain seeded between the sheaves, the evocative, undeniable smell of newly-turned fall leaves, of wisdom and import coiled, waiting, in between delicately yellowing paper. I could never be bothered with the newer ones from a popular press because somehow their sheaves had a more manufactured, pungent aroma, uninviting and cold to my keen olfactory tools. Don’t even get me started on hard-back books.

And for sheer masochism, for some reason just a light sniffing was not enough. I behaved obsessively, as if sniffing crack, pursing my nostrils as hard as I could and inhaling deeply, convulsively. I really shoved my nose up into the pliable pages, perching it right against the seam glue that held them together. One of my biggest fears was onlookers, so I surreptitiously made sure I was out of the line of wandering eyes before I would feast my nose on as many books as I could get hold of.

To this day, sometimes the urge still strikes me to sniff a good book. I still love that little miracle of flipping the pages and watching the dust motes fly out like an unhomed nest, their trajectory into light almost transparent. I like the satisfactory smell of must and age; like a fine wine, an older book that has been sitting on a bookshelf awaiting its turn also opens with a certain nose, and finishes beautifully.

Even if you don’t like reading very much, I guarantee you will like the zippy, staccato sound of pages being flipped in tumultuous succession. The comforting, oaky nose. The smell of knowledge flying out from the coarse, typeset sheaf. So go ahead, try it next time you are at your local bookstore. I promise no one’s watching.