“There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences.”

- Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

——————

Iaeger, West Virginia. Nineteen seventy nine. The old bus terminal that use to sit somewhere along the river bank. Maybe next to Sears & Roebuck? Maybe not. Maybe Sears & Roebuck came after it was already gone? I can’t remember. But I do remember the terminal; the diner it held. And it’s a memory from this diner that’s running away from me.

I keep trying to get my head around it. To see all the things I can already hear and smell and taste. But all I see is a plate. White. With a blue racing stripe around its edge.

The room smells of beef. The real kind. And of lettuce. It sounds like my grandfather. Loud and laughing. He’s sitting beside me. Telling a story. To men or to the air. I can’t see him; all I see is the plate. But he’s there. Just like the sun. Breaking through the windows, fracturing over hands and faces, lighting up the room.

My grandmother tells me to put my legs together. I’m in a dress. It’s Sunday. The day her husband doesn’t work. Church is over. She doesn’t use words, but I feel her hands on my knees and I know what they mean. They say things, my grandma’s hands. Like…

“Always be a lady; but be a smart one.”
“Men will fool you; but they will love you too.”
“Do and become; because I could not.”

Open up your mind to the possibility that 1+1 can equal 48, a Mercedes-Benz, an apple pie, a blue horse. Don’t tell your autobiography with facts, such as “I am in sixth grade. I am a boy. I live in Owatonna. I have a mother and father.” Tell me who you really are: “I am the frost on the window, the cry of a young wolf, the thin blade of grass.”

– Natalie Goldberg

“Each day is like an enormous rock that I’m trying to push up this hill. I get it up a fair distance, it rolls back a little bit, and I keep pushing it, hoping I’ll get it to the top of the hill and that it will go on its own momentum…I’ve never given up. I’ve always kept going. I don’t feel that I could afford to give up.”

- Joyce Carol Oates

———————

This has helped tremendously today. I feel like I’ve got a boulder on my back. My knees are about to buckle. I have to spend every ounce of energy I have in an effort to breathe - forget about being able to create.

It’s a hypothetical boulder, of course. Life is good and I’ve no real burden to bear. But the phrase ’squeezing blood out of a stone’ keeps coming to mind every time I sit down to write. It’s been this way for three days. I grow weary.

British novelist Arthur Quiller-Couch (pen name “Q”) published a series of lectures titled On the Art of Writing (1916) while serving as a professor of English at Cambridge University. Here he warns of purple prose…

“To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style is not; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not–can never be–extraneous Ornament … ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it –whole-heartedly–and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. ‘Murder your darlings.’

“…’How excellent a thing is sleep,’ sighed Sancho Panza; ‘it wraps a man round like a cloak’–an excellent example…of how to say a thing concretely: a Jargoneer would have said that ‘among the beneficent qualities of sleep its capacity for withdrawing the human consciousness from the contemplation of immediate circumstances may perhaps be accounted not the least remarkable.’ How vile a thing…!”

On the Art of Writing

“It is folly to believe that you can bring the psychology of an individual successfully to life without putting him very firmly in a social setting.”

- Tom Wolfe

It’s a shadow at the back of the mind. Just on the verge of being.

A heavy cloud that settles at the base of who and what we are before flying off, upward and onward. Taking our breath away just as sure as it put it there in the first place.

A vague, willowy figure that almost isn’t.

It’s where the whole reaper image comes from.

If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. The consistency, the monotony, the certainty, all vagaries and passions are covered by this daily reoccurrence…Sleep comes to you each day, and so does the muse. So says Walter Mosley.

A few months ago I was watching John Grisham on one of the network morning shows. He was plugging his new book, talking about his first literary ‘foray’ into politics and saying things like ‘this sort of thing is already happening in West Virginia’ when someone asked if he had any advice for aspiring writers. His reply was as matter of fact as the man himself.

If you want to get published, you have to write a page a day. If you can’t do that, you’ll never write a book.

Now, back to writing. No more of this bumbling Boris blog type stuff. I’d forgotten why I started Plain Simple English in the first place.

The man defined by his hair - who comes from a line of blond Turks - now runs London.

Just watching his dad on television. He’s basically saying his son ‘has been without a drink for over a year..that’s how serious he is about running the capital,’ which I find sort of amusing.

It’s true Boris Johnson makes good copy. Good T.V. In fact - politics aside - I developed a little crush on him during his Have I Got News for You stints.

Apparently, I’m not the only one.

“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly: sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”

- Ernest Hemingway

The evening was a strange one. Darcy danced on her two sore feet to an out of tune fiddle played by the neighbor’s cat. Her brother slid across the floor on his belly making hissing noises and laughing out loud. I got scared and started writing a story about Old Lady Filmore and how she was blind. And smelled of turpentine.