The Lingering Joys of Camp Retro

There are things in life I prefer to avoid whenever possible.  Driving Houston freeways during rush hour is one. Listening to political commentators who raise my blood pressure is another. Above all, I try never to stop by the grocery at 6 p.m. to “pick up a few things for dinner”, although circumstance or my own lack of planning occasionally force me into the heart of the pre-suppertime pandemonium.

The night I made a pass through our local supermarket intending to get only milk, lettuce, broccoli and some kitty treats, lack of organization was the issue. As usual, shopping without a list meant I ended up with far more than I’d intended. By the time I reached the checkout line I’d thrown in some celery and carrots, English muffins, two pounds of sale-priced Peet’s French Roast, some assorted canned goods, yogurt and a totally unnecessary pint of key lime gelato.

Plunking down the little plastic bar meant to divide one customer’s purchases from the next I began unloading my cart, then suddenly remembered Ritz crackers. My mother’s quite  fond of them, and she’d asked if I’d pick up a box the next time I was in the store.

I pondered the cart belonging to the people ahead of me in line -  apparently a mother and two lovely daughters.  They’d done some heavy shopping and still were unloading their own items onto the conveyor.

“Excuse me,” I said to checker. “I forgot something. I’ll run and get it, and be right back.”  “No problem,” she said, glancing at the girls. “You’ve got time”.

Off I ran. The crackers were two aisles over and halfway to the meat department, but I knew Ritz were on the bottom shelf and I found them quickly. When I got back to my cart, the checker still was busy with the group ahead of me, and she was grinning. “Well,” I thought to myself. “She’s a pleasant one.”

Porch Poetry

I love porches, and have since childhood.  I love porch sitting, porch reading and even porch painting. Most of all, I love porch music. Simple or complex, played by a group or a single lonesome fiddler, it’s a delight. Even the most down-home instrument – a washtub bass, a ukelele, a buzzing, well-played comb – makes me smile.

One of my favorite musical groups is the E-Flat Porch Band from McKinney, Texas. They’ve made their way around the state for years, and it’s always a pleasure to hear them – so much so that I’ll actually get in the car and travel to have the chance. I would have introduced them to you sooner, but there hasn’t been a video available of any quality. Now there is.

As entertaining as porch music can be, other things happen on porches. People visit with their neighbors and snap beans. They discuss politics, watch the grandkids play in the yard and hope upon hope that no one comes along to remind them of undone chores. You can find breezes on the porch in summer, and watch leaves drift in the fall. You can drink coffee, check your email, scratch the dog’s ears and even take a nap, if you really trust your neighbors. Porches are for solitary dreaming and family chatter – they’re one of the semi-permeable membranes of human social life.

Blogging, Bon Jovi and Lent

Like a parent preparing a child for the first day of school, it takes nerve for any beginning blogger to gather together a few words, dress them up with an image or two and send them off to fend for themselves in the big, wide world. It’s an anxious and uncertain time.  There’s no way to know how those young words will be received, and impossible to predict whether they will be accepted, ridiculed or ignored. 

Parents know that some neighborhoods are tough and not everyone is kind. For every open smile and extended hand, there can be hidden agendas and mixed motives. Bloggers have to learn that, in the blogosphere as in the schoolyard, there are bullies as well as potential friends,  trouble-makers as well as peace-makers.  Programmers may tout the virtues of WYSIWYG, but sooner or later every blogger learns the hard lesson: what you see isn’t necessarily what you get.

The Writing Life – Practice Makes Human

During my first year of college, before I came to terms with the fact that I had neither the desire nor the drive to continue as a music major, I spent a good portion of my life in practice booths.  Tiny, tomb-like and entirely primitive by today’s standards,  they encased virtuoso and struggling beginner alike in soundproof solitude.   Hidden from prying eyes, protected from critical comments, we hauled ourselves through scales, arpeggios and etudes like half-mad mountaineers.  Climbing by half-steps up, sliding by half-steps down, we felt the hours tick by like the steady clicking of the metronome. 

Sometimes practice was enjoyable.  Occasionally, when fingers turned awkward and timing was off, it was frustrating beyond belief.   Progress was satisfying, but we never expected our solitary hours to be fun. We accepted the premise that the goal of practice was performance.  Emerging from the solitude and semi-gloom of our booths into the light of recital or concert halls, we put our carefully-honed techniques into the service of Beethoven, Mozart or Brahms.  Practice was private, performance was public, and those long hours of solitary practice were only a means to that quite public end.

When I think about writing and consider this week’s Write on Wednesday question (“Do you have a writing practice?  What’s it like?  How has it helped you become a better writer?” ), I realize how differently I approach my writing than I did my music. I don’t “practice” writing as a completely private act, hidden from public eyes.  While I sometimes work in an isolated silence that rivals any practice booth, in the process of writing, practice and performance collapse into a single event.  What I write, I post - for good or for ill.  There are no hours devoted to vocabulary scales or grammatical arpeggios.  There are only the literary equivalents to concerto, partita and sonata: writing, more writing and writing again, performed for anyone to see.

Because I write primarily for others and not for myself, the content of my writing and the readers I hope to engage are as important to me as the craft.  While the ability to structure an essay is important, and even though constructing interesting sentences and paragraphs is necessary, I’m equally concerned with the human qualities that shape my identity as a writer, and determine the nature of my work.

The qualities I consider important don’t come easily.  Discipline, perspective, perseverance, integrity, responsibility and confidence aren’t given at birth, like blue eyes or long fingers.  They require development over time, and a willingness to re-commit to their value over and over again.  In short, they require practice.

Discipline

Because I’m essentially flighty and undisciplined, easily distracted by the beautiful or interesting and more than willing to veer down roads that aren’t roads at all but merely footpaths through the grass, discipline is critical for me.  At its heart, discipline is about choices: I will do this, I won’t do that.  Choosing on a daily basis to read, to write and to think is important for any writer.   In the same way, decisions to engage fully in the disciplines of daily life and a willingness to respond to the needs of the world in which we live help form us as human beings, and as writers with something to say.  

Integrity

I’ve always considered integrity to be foundational for good writing.  I don’t mean this in a strictly moral or ethical sense, although questions of morality and ethics abound for anyone who writes.  Here, I mean integrity in the sense of wholeness, a consonance of word and deed so complete that who I am and what I say are obvious reflections of one another.

One of my favorite authors, Anne Morrow Lindberg, said it beautifully in her exquisite reflection, Gift From the Sea: “I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can…  I am seeking perhaps what Socrates asked for in the prayer from the Phaedrus when he said, “May the outward and inward man be at one.”  There is no doubt that outward and inward can be joined, but that, too, takes practice.

Perseverance

There is nothing mysterious about perseverance.  Perseverance is getting up at 4 a.m. in order to write.  Perseverance is coffee at midnight, because the paragraph is almost right.  Perseverance is meeting apathy with renewed effort, criticism with dignity, and failure with a firm commitment to re-set higher goals.  Perseverance can be a bit tiresome, but it’s as easily practiced as putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again.

Perspective      

Everyone has a perspective on life.  Not everyone shares my perspective – that our world is a gift to be treasured and preserved, that goodness and beauty are real, or that love and trust are worth even the discovery they may have been misplaced.  For that matter, not everyone believes that words matter, or that on the deepest levels they participate in the rich, complex and vibrant realities they represent.   In a world filled with cynicism and laziness, choosing the right word can be an act of artistic rebellion against the prevailing culture, but doing it effectively requires practice. 

Confidence

In time, a writer has to stop looking into the mirror of public response in order to begin trusting his or her own vision and nurturing a deeply personal sense of what is right and true.  Beyond that, there is tremendous freedom in communicating without hestitation or regret.  However strange it may seem, I’ve never asked someone to read my work before I publish it, and I’ve never removed any of the essays I’ve posted.  Instead, I write and re-write until I’m satisfied my words are ready to stand.  Then, I allow them to do so.  For now, it’s simply my way of practicing confidence.

Responsibility

Finally, words have meaning, and those who craft them are charged with using them responsibly.  Whether the final product is an essay or poem, a flight of fanciful fiction or a satirical screenplay, a novel or simple notations in a blog, the writer is called to understand how powerfully words affect the world, and use that power with wisdom and discretion. 

Discipline, integrity, perseverance, confidence and responsibility – when those qualities are developed in the hiddenness of life’s practice booth, they allow performances to shine.  William Faulkner had his own memorable perspective on these issues, and expressed them in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

“The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing, because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.  He must learn them again.  He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truth of the heart; the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.  It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.  The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

Faulkner’s words are so nearly perfect it seems impossible to improve upon them.  And yet, I would dare to add this – in order to write about the heart, you have to have a heart, a heart which is whole and responsible, disciplined enough to persevere, and confident in its conviction that the heart of the world is worth a lifetime of commitment.

That’s why I practice being a writer as well as doing my writing.  With a practiced heart, you can perform without fear, and let the sentences fall where they may.

 

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Longer Sentences, Bigger Words – A Writing Choice

 

Decades ago, one of my most cherished exercises as a grammar school tot was the vocabulary quiz.  Kindergarteners were exempt, but when we reached first grade we were expected to learn twenty new words each week – their spelling, correct pronunciation and proper use in a sentence.

As far as I was concerned, forty weekly words would have been acceptable.  Every word was a little key that unlocked another part of the world, a window that opened onto new and intriguing vistas. Words with multiple syllables were my favorites. Tumbling off the tongue like grade-schoolers at play, it seemed as though they could go on forever.  Walking to school in the morning, I’d rehearse them in my mind.  Perspicacity.  Archetype.  Lacuna.  Paraphernalia.  Abnegate. Chrysanthemums.

The learning process never varied.  My flashcards were white cardboard rectangles with words printed in red on one side and definitions printed in black on the other.  Each evening after supper, we’d linger at the table and flip through the cards.  Mom would give me a definition, and I’d tell her the word.  Then, we’d reverse the process.   Dad would give me a word; I’d attempt to spell it and give the definition.

Sometimes we made vocabulary drill even more of a game by using each word in the funniest sentence possible.  Now and then, if we were feeling creative, we’d punish each other with terrible plays on words.  Sometimes, I’d help myself remember a spelling by using a sentence as a clue.  It took weeks to learn how to spell chrysanthemum.  Finally, I thought of my friend Chris and used her name to help me spell the name of the flower: “Chrys an the Mums went to town for lunch…”

Because our new words had to be used, teachers nudged us toward writing, and we learned to diagram sentences. We started on the most basic level, identifying and properly placing subject, predicate, articles and prepositions.  Gradually, independent and dependent clauses appeared, and little stems, platforms and long lines reached out to the edge of meaning.

“The dog chased the cat” was where we started, but it wasn’t long before we were dissecting “The brown, mischievous dog chased the cat around the house until he caught her behind the blackberry bushes”. 

Eventually, “The brown mischievous dog, in a frenzy of doggie attitude, decided to chase the cat but gave up the effort after his frustrated and irritated owner came after him with a broom and threats of banishment.”

And we diagrammed it all. By the time we were done, the blackboard was covered with lines, slashes, dashes and arrows and a breathless class collapsed into giggles as the unfortunate grammarian finished and stepped back, awaiting the teacher’s verdict.

Behind the exercises, there was a pair of assumptions about language: that a bigger vocabulary is better, and that sentences which have a clear, firm structure can be loaded down with exquisite, shimmering words until they bow like picnic tables covered with hams, salads and cakes.

Those days of learning to love piled-high buffets of words and sentences came to mind recently when a friend mentioned he’d been attending class to learn how to write shorter sentences.  I suspect he was partly joking, or giving us only part of the story, but his remark led me to think about assorted bits of advice I’ve received since starting to write:

Short sentences are good, and shorter sentences are better.  
Don’t overwhelm your reader with complexity.
Don’t use words that require a dictionary. 
Remember that readers have short attention spans.
Write so a sixth grader can understand what you have to say.
Limit yourself to one or two syllable words whenever possible.
Don’t bloat your writing with adjectives and adverbs.
Never go over 300 words.

When these little bits are gathered up into one place and committed to the page, they appear to suggest one further bit of advice: remember you are writing for dunces.

If the same logic were applied to other fields, the absurdity would be obvious. Tell a painter to limit herself to primary colors and brush strokes no longer than one inch in length, and it’s a turpentine bath for you.  Tell a Master Gardener none of his plants can exceed six inches in height, or that he only can use perennials and you’ll be tossed onto the compost heap.  Suggest to a chef she restrict herself to recipes using five ingredients or fewer, or that no dish should take longer than ten minutes to prepare, and you’ll be eating frozen dinners – alone.

You still might have a picture to hang on the wall, a bit of color for your patio and dinner on the table, but the look and taste of life would be diminished immeasurably.

This isn’t meant to be an argument for incomprehensible paragraphs, the misuse of words or pretentious grammatical constructions.  I happen to be one of those throwbacks who believe spelling counts, complete sentences are good, and clarity makes writing more enjoyable for the reader.

On the other hand, while little words and short sentences have their legitimate role to play in everything from daily journalism to great literature, there is no reason that less-common words and more complex sentences can’t be chosen and structured in such a way that they communicate meaning clearly and memorably.

A writer isn’t called to choose little words over big words, or short sentences over long.  The writer is called to search for the right word, the right sentence and the right language to discover and communicate meaning – whatever form those words and sentences take.

There is a time – a perfectly acceptable time – for simple, understated prose:

He always had liked the weather.  He became a weatherman to earn a living, but discovered it had become his whole life.  He wanted to quit his job, but it didn’t seem the responsible thing to do.

But there also is a time for this:

While weather always had been a flirtation, a coy glance toward the effortless clouds and the steaming land left shining after rain, he never had intended prediction to become a habit, a means toward any end other than maintaining life and funding its strange necessities. 

He dreamed of leaving, turning from the constraints of time and deadline to the deliciousness of impulse, the effortless breathing through the day once known in youth but now denied to the years-weary toiler he had become.

For a writer, choosing the right approach is the trick.

 

 

Copyright © 2008 Linda L. Leinen.   All rights reserved.

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