Writing about Writing or alternatively The Story of My Stories

Also called 'The Story of my Writing' or 'Writing about my Stories'

This is a series of vignettes, which started as separate thoughts and ended up stringing themselves together like a garland.  I apologize for keeping you.  I’ve always got something to say, but I’d be speechless with appreciation if my chatter is worth your attention.

ON GRAMMAR

I feel very strongly about the rules of grammar: we should all use them.  Writing loses its credibility when sentences are unstructured and juvenile.  What you have to say could be the most intelligent and insightful thing I’ve ever heard, but I won’t trust it if it sounds written by an ESL middle schooler.  Irreverence toward grammar is unforgivable.  

The pun isn't even about grammar,
but that doesn't make it any less true.

Stylistically sidestepping the rules is another matter.  When I’m writing creatively I prefer winding run-ons that wrap around themselves like ribbons spinning from a spool.  I’ll use every splashy adjective in the rainbow to modify my subject, squish a verb for every step of an octave into my predicate, and adorn my objects and complements with description till they collapse like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree.  I make up phrases and skip in circles around what I’m actually saying so you’ll start to hear my words in my own voice, smiling with each syllable.

This brings me one step forward, two steps and a Maxie turn sideways to my next point.

ON THE PRETTINESS OF WORDS

I swoon over pretty words like I swoon over nothing else, except perhaps the climax of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme.  

A word could be aesthetically pretty, like whimsical or cacophony, or it could be symbolically pretty, like elysian or scintillating.  Oh, tell me I’m scintillating and I’m yours forever.  

Pretty arrangements of words stop my heart too, and that’s why I love poetry.

look up:and we’ll 

(for what were less than dead)dance,i and you;
high(are become more than alive)above
anybody and fate and even Our 
whisper it Selves but don’t look down and to 

-morrow and yesterday and everything except love

e e cummings

Did you smile?  I outright giggled.  Did you get it?  I sure as hell don’t.  I just love how it makes me feel.  Words make me giddy and weightless.  Any other girl’s heart might skip a beat when a boy smiles at her the right way.  Mine goes when a writer reaches for a pen.  

ON STORYTELLING

The memory I recall is never quite the story that comes out, because stories are different from memories.  I’m the protagonist in my memory, but I’m also the narrator in my story.  Narration provides insight.  The best stories are not memories told precisely as they happened; they're memories that have been best realized.  Take what you remember and figure out what really happened in the world and how it affected everything else.  Like so:

Related:
If I haven’t told you about the horror and the
hilarity of my orchestra years yet, ask me about them. 
In my freshman year of high school, there were 11 lewd,
rough-housing boys, 3 laid-back, lanky drug addicts,
one lesbian, and terrified me. 
It was the worst year of my life. 
I haven’t stopped laughing about it yet.

Before they became the story of how I fell in love with music, my memories of my middle and high school years are those of a brace-faced, socially inept, know-it-all tweenager who wanted to be the best at everything.  It’s only by the grace of God or Beethoven or the Muses that in my crusade to outplay everyone else, I found my life’s calling.  That part, of course, is the romantic story I tell.  No one wants to hear the details of the stick-in-the-mud Hermione part of my life and I hardly even want to remember it, so it gets re-written.

The problem with story-telling is that it’s so easy to replace my memories with my stories.  My 20/20 vision is made hazy by rose-colored glasses, and I live with a permanent filter on reality to keep ugly ideas and pessimistic vultures out.  I erase the errant smears that fall outside the lines of the life-story I’m sketching.  I’m so far past the frontier dividing fact and fiction that I wouldn’t know how to return to a life of veracity if I wanted to.

  

Washington Irving phrased it well: “I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.”

ON MY OWN STORY

My story-telling hobby has become such a habit and a heartbeat that I live comfortably in those terms.  I am the main character in my life story, the protagonist in my own bildungsroman.  I don’t mean that in a narcissistic Generation Y way.  Every person has his own nuanced and sensational story.  I happen to be living in this one, and I’m obsessed with appreciating everything and documenting life as it happens.  

"Everything before now, before now,
before now is just a story I carry around."
Chuck Palahniuk

As such, I take a bit of every character with me from everything I read.  I face this daunting, breathtaking, heartbreaking world armed or impaired with Alice’s curiosity, Harry’s selflessness, Elphaba’s defiance, Scout’s sense of justice, Gatsby’s delusions, Piggy’s intellect, Peter’s ignorance, Huck’s humor, and Equality’s ego.  Right now I’m still figuring all the pieces out, but one day I’ll have had enough characterization to be my own complete character.  Or maybe not.  I could go on re-writing and subtly shading myself anew forever.  How should I know?  I’m only in the formative stages of this epic, after all. 

ON THE COVENANT WITH THE AUTHOR

"Blue sky ocean to ocean,
blue ocean sky to sky. "
Rod McKuen

Whether I’m opening a book or an article on Thought Catalog, I’m agreeing to humor the author for a little while.  I will read what he has to say by understanding his words as he means them.  ‘Blue’ may not simply be blue.  ‘Blue’ could be anything from the clouded cobalt of a boy’s pretty eyes to a sunken hue in a midnight sea of sadness.   I try to accept the whole story of the author’s every word.   

Have faith in your narrator.  She’s trying to tell you something worth hearing.  Slip into her brain and hear her story as she means it.  Think in her thoughts, see in her colors, hear the world as it sings to her.  

Buy into my dramatic overreaches and the honest sincerity of my cliches.  Please don’t roll your eyes.  Understand just how genuinely and precisely I mean each nuanced word I choose.  Understand me.  Believe in me. 

“Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn,
 "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.”
Lewis Carroll

Language is just that powerful.  You can use it to let people come so close to you.  To invite someone to inhabit your own mind with you is, I think, the most intimate gesture you could ever make.  

Dear reader, I invite you into my life with each word I write, speak, or sing.  We can revel together in everything the world has to offer.  That’s all I really wanted to tell you: I’m blushing and flattered that you’re here with me.  

Boston Is

Boston is beautiful the first time you see its skyline from the Mass Pike ramp, and every time you see it after that too.  It’s crisp and cool, cobblestoned and historic, a metropolis for the young with a life story older than Paul Revere.  

Boston is an invigorating jog along the Charles by day or a scenic stroll by night.  It’s the posh shops of Newbury a block away from the landmark churches of Copley Square.  It’s the crooked streets and eerie cemeteries and old-town ambience of the North End. It’s all the college students living in an eclectic collection of colored houses on Mission Hill.  It’s the esteem of the Financial District next to the bustle of Downtown Crossing next to the enigma of ivy-veiled brick houses on Beacon Hill.  It’s a tapestry of storied neighborhoods and locales, each with their own history and subculture.  It’s stone cold outside, but with a warm hearth inside.  It’s the definition of New England. 

Boston is a sleepy Saturday morning watching TV with five roommates who don’t need to talk to enjoy each other’s company.  It’s retelling (or piecing together) last night over a strong cup of coffee, maybe over someone’s stash of Starbucks grinds if it’s a really good story.  It’s a stockpile of inside jokes that don’t make sense in conversation with anyone else.  It’s the collection of quirky posters and far-fetched memes I’ll never understand decorating the boys’ apartment like a modern art museum.  It’s the Tremont Street Raiders and the Sticky Six (though there are nine of us these days).  It’s getting all dolled up for the Symphony.  It’s a list of bizarre nicknames following increasingly bizarre stories.  It’s knocking on a friend’s door to say hello and staying hours longer than you meant to.  

Boston is an immeasurable number of bear hugs when you’re coming or going.  It’s a geographical coordinate that keeps us together in spirit when we’re separated by zip codes and state lines and oceans.  It’s a conglomeration of people from as far away as Australia and as local as Bridgewater, or as foreign as Kentucky and as familiar as Brooklyn.  It’s a communal agitation toward the T after midnight.  It’s a collective reverence for J. P. Licks.  

Boston is too much Dunkin Donuts coffee and not enough Starbucks.  It’s a convolution of streets named with no rhyme or reason, except for a small alphabetical grid in Back Bay.  It’s Newbury instead of 5th Avenue, a ‘theater district’ instead of Broadway, Symphony Hall instead of Lincoln Center, and the Common instead of Central Park.  It’s conservative and commemorative.   

Boston is, like anything else in the world, a subjective experience.  It’s a Chicken Cordon Lou from Chicken Lou’s for someone like it’s a Sunrise at Pavement for the next guy.  

Boston feels like home.  It’s manageable.  It’s got plenty of foliage, for a city.  It’s full of vibrantly blooming lives, too.  It’s welcoming.

Boston is not home, though, and never will be.  It’s just a love affair that I’m having, and a tragic one at that.  I’m enamored with everything about Boston: the city, the people, and the lifestyle.  Part of why I love Boston so much at this point in my life is the imminent certainty that I will never settle there.  Right now there’s so much to explore and test and find, but that all will run out one day.  In the end, I know New York is the city for me.  And so Boston means much more to me right now.  

What was I thinking then, running away to a beautiful, irresistible city for college, meeting the most extraordinary people, and having the time of my life, for a limited time only?  Well, Boston took me by surprise.  I had no idea I could fall so in love with it after growing up in New York.  Now my heart aches all over again every time I have to leave.  This love affair is indeed a tragedy.  It’s not the Romeo and Juliet type of tragic, although it certainly feels that way at times.  No, I know we’ll move on from each other in the end, Boston and me.  We’re closer to a 500 Days of Summer tragedy.  Boston is the experience of a lifetime, but with an expiration date circled on the calendar.  There will be bigger and better things one day.  For now though, I don’t look so far ahead.  There’s a commute into Manhattan waiting for me, but for the moment I’ve still got my eyes on the Green Monster, the Citgo sign, and the Boston skyline.