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.