Small Writing 8.17.08

"All literature is gossip"--Truman Capote

Writing for me has always been a form of imitation. Writing in high school was wanting so desperately to write something as pure and true as JD Salinger. I wanted that so bad that I wanted my life to seem worse than it actually was so that I could have somewhere deep from which to write. What I found was that it made my writing contrived and fake. When I was in Europe, I wrote for posterity, or because I didn't feel I had anyone to really talk to or relate to. It felt good to write then because I actually had something to write about. It was about my loneliness, my sadness, my elation, my fear and all of the extreme ends of the emotional spectrum.

Writing is personal experience strained through the filter of the limitations and constraints of words. How could I express seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time, or landing in the United States after having been gone for so long? These are the limitations we, as writers, must confront. The English language is as dynamic as they come. New words are added and new meanings are ascrbied to old words every day. The average vocabulary is probably ten times as big as Shakespeares. We now have Spanish words, Native American words, French derivations, German derivations (or even German words like Kindergarten). But within these boundaries, we are asked to describe the indescribable. We are asked to desctribe passion, love, sex, hate, fear, indifference. But somehow we manage and occasionally, a nugget of truth will come out. The right combination of words are written on a page and the exact feeling of a very specific moment is imparted on the reader and understanding is gained.

Sometimes the meaning can be expressed in a few words like "immutable desire" and the reader is stunned that someone else, some unknown person also has felt what the reader was unable to put into words. Other meanings are purely contextual and can bring up feeling of despair and sadness like "cancer" or "chemo." Other times, a write must use more abstract aproaches like metaphors or similes. "I felt like all of the systems that make my body work immediately and simultaneously ceased functioning and every cell in my body contracted as if every atom were waiting for the response. And then it all relaxed after hearing the word "yes." Writers exaggerate of course. Shakespeare was an amazing writer, but I never once believed that he would kill himself for a woman (or that he would ever want to have sex with one).

Writing has brought me a lot of clarity, but it has also made things seem more complicated than they needed to be. There's a bunlde of note book pages that has stuck with me since high school--random writings that I spent long nicotine-feuled nights creating. Chain-smoking and wishing so badly I could write something good, trying to be so dramatic, trying so hard to sound cool. Now I write just to sound genuine. My dad told me in high school that a good writer has to have something good to write about. Now, after having graduated from college and spent the past two years either managing a locally operated coffee shop and living in Munich, Germany I ask myself...Do I have something to write about now? Have I ever really risked anything? Have I ever lived? Does it make a difference? Should a writer end a paper with a question?