Pausing from a marathon session on my WIP, I thought I'd take time out to honor the Reader in me.
It is the Reader that is the lover of great books, and more so of great writing. He may not always be able to articulate what constitutes great writing, but like pornography, he knows it when he sees it: crisp, forceful sentence structure, wielded with all the care and precision of a surgeon's scalpel. The Reader understands that the masters do not use words to paint gloriously vivid scenes in which each and every detail is clearly visible, but instead draw simple sketches, that when viewed by the reader... are seen in the mind’s eye as gloriously vivid scenes, in which each and every detail is clearly visible.
The writer, by comparison, is an ego driven beast, convinced that it is his misfortune to write for the great unwashed masses, those too dim to recognize, let alone appreciate, the genius of his heavy, bloated, adjective laden prose. He is adoring of alliteration, and prideful of the ponderous purple prose that hefts its way through his work with all the grace and art of a three hundred pound ballerina. He strews punctuation indiscriminately, like some literary Johnny Appleseed, as though the commas, colons, parentheses, and apostrophes that litter the page, might grow and bear fruit; he never met a semi-colon he didn’t like. Metaphors hang from his lips like so many strands of uneaten spaghetti.
On occasion, when my mind is weary and my attention diverted (like now), the beast escapes, banging away at the keyboard like the proverbial infinite number of monkeys. If I am suffering from a bout of the dreaded “writer’s block”, I may let him continue for a while, hoping to find a nugget of useful material in the detris. But eventually the novelty wears thin, and the Reader in me does what it must: it pulls out the biggest stick it can find and beats the beast mercilessly, driving him back into submission.
Spare no pity on him however, for the beast knows that in the end, it is he, and not the Reader, that will garner whatever laurels the finished work may earn. “What is it you do?” the questioner asks. “I’m a writer,” the beast answers, his chest swelling, without even a hint of shame.
Well, it’s time to get back to work. Sorry for the interruption, but the beast needed to go for a walk, and better your yard than mine. I’d pick up after him, but I didn’t bring a scooper. Try not to step in anything.
Sincerely,
The Reader
It is the Reader that is the lover of great books, and more so of great writing. He may not always be able to articulate what constitutes great writing, but like pornography, he knows it when he sees it: crisp, forceful sentence structure, wielded with all the care and precision of a surgeon's scalpel. The Reader understands that the masters do not use words to paint gloriously vivid scenes in which each and every detail is clearly visible, but instead draw simple sketches, that when viewed by the reader... are seen in the mind’s eye as gloriously vivid scenes, in which each and every detail is clearly visible.
The writer, by comparison, is an ego driven beast, convinced that it is his misfortune to write for the great unwashed masses, those too dim to recognize, let alone appreciate, the genius of his heavy, bloated, adjective laden prose. He is adoring of alliteration, and prideful of the ponderous purple prose that hefts its way through his work with all the grace and art of a three hundred pound ballerina. He strews punctuation indiscriminately, like some literary Johnny Appleseed, as though the commas, colons, parentheses, and apostrophes that litter the page, might grow and bear fruit; he never met a semi-colon he didn’t like. Metaphors hang from his lips like so many strands of uneaten spaghetti.
On occasion, when my mind is weary and my attention diverted (like now), the beast escapes, banging away at the keyboard like the proverbial infinite number of monkeys. If I am suffering from a bout of the dreaded “writer’s block”, I may let him continue for a while, hoping to find a nugget of useful material in the detris. But eventually the novelty wears thin, and the Reader in me does what it must: it pulls out the biggest stick it can find and beats the beast mercilessly, driving him back into submission.
Spare no pity on him however, for the beast knows that in the end, it is he, and not the Reader, that will garner whatever laurels the finished work may earn. “What is it you do?” the questioner asks. “I’m a writer,” the beast answers, his chest swelling, without even a hint of shame.
Well, it’s time to get back to work. Sorry for the interruption, but the beast needed to go for a walk, and better your yard than mine. I’d pick up after him, but I didn’t bring a scooper. Try not to step in anything.
Sincerely,
The Reader
