of argument.
Without argument, all that is left is mindless force, which is the only way stupidity can win.
Learn to argue. Please.
Category: Uncategorized
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My main vocation has been writing. I began on typewriters as a teenager, continued on them into my twenties. For years, changing even one sentence or paragraph in a manuscript could mean redoing the whole thing. This meant justifying every single word to myself because I was going to have to retype every single word. The result, I think, was more lean, succinct writing.
Word processors came along, and with them, novels, stories and screenplays that often had weirdly shaped plots with not one, but several climaxes and oddly extended denouments. Creating a manuscript was now so easy it took a while for writers to relearn editing. And for years after home computers and printers became widespread, we would still have to send hard manuscripts off using snail mail, carefully edit and format them, make sure there were no typos, put them in envelopes with SASEs. When they returned with rejections, as usual, I often had an envelope and SASE ready for the next editor.
Now it’s all blogging, email and document sharing, which, without question, makes sending out one’s writing easier. Unfortunately, this fosters the illusion that writing is easy.
It’s not. It’s hard. Even when you are a fast and accurate typist. Even when you can format a manuscript instantly, and send it to an agent or editor with the press of a button.
Constructing a readable, interesting story takes as much study, practice, and passion as does learning to play a musical instrument.
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Daily writing promptHow often do you say “no” to things that would interfere with your goals?
When I worked in telecom, I said “no” to a transfer to another state that would have offered a rise in pay and enabled me to afford a house. When I worked in real estate, I said “no” to an offer to work five rather than four days a week. At the Mechanics’ I said “no” to taking a course in marketing.
All of these things would have interfered with what I wanted to do. Which was not only to write, but to spend the bulk of my days doing something I considered interesting and worthwhile.
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I took French in college, and made an effort to keep up with it because I wanted to read Rostand, Zola, and Camus in the original. Once I’ve limbered up my vocabulary (which is actually similar to English) I can read French tolerably well, but I have a hard time understanding spoken French beyond a few scattered words. And my accent is atrocious.
There are other languages I think are more beautiful to hear. Russian, for one, and Italian. In my daydreams, I am accomplished in both.
The first, the language of Tolstoy and Chekhov, sounds to me like the thunder of a waterfall. The only drawback is that some people seem to respond viscerally to it. My mother-in-law, whose parents fled the Ukraine in the early 1900s, told me her own mother would shudder if she overheard Russian being spoken, and a relative who grew up in Eastern Europe told me last night she had a similar reaction. The legacy of a powerful, and bellicose country. I bet there are plenty of people in the world who react that way to hearing English.
Italian, the language of opera, always seems to have music behind its rise and fall, its light syllables, but getting beyond “Grazi” has always defeated me. I’ve visited Italy twice, and both times I usually dried when put on the spot about speaking the language. All I could remember were lines from Tosca. “Sospetti di spia!” and “Ti soffoca il sangue?” which are not easy phrases to slide into a casual conversation.
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They don’t happen often in California. We get some good wind-storms, but nothing like the tempests of the Gulf Coast, with weirdly-lit mountains of clouds rolling across the sky like a religious procession. Thunder never crashes here. It just sort of burps faintly.
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She was an English teacher I had as a freshman in high school. Most teachers look ancient to students, but Miss S. was especially aged, quite wrinkled and bent, though she tried to hide it with a tall red wig and liberally applied lipstick. She had taught my father when he was in high school and had been quite elderly then, so I was sure she must be a least one-hundred years old. Miss S. was notoriously stubborn. My father told me that when he was a student, he got into an argument with her about the meaning of a word, and brought in a dictionary the next day to prove his point. She told him the dictionary was wrong.
Miss S passionately loved the works she taught us, and she had a sly, understated way of imparting at least some measure of that passion to her students. Once, in the course of a class discussion on King Lear, a student hilariously mispronounced the name of one of Lear’s vicious daughters. There was a pause, and Miss S said, calmly, in her cracked voice, “You can call her ‘Gonorrhea’ if you want to.”
She taught us to look for turning points in stories, moments in which the plot pivots, the characters change. In King Lear, it was the line signalling Lear’s descent into madness, “What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?”
But what I remember most is her reading out loud “The Cask of Amontillado.” To this day, when I read the story, it’s Miss S’s voice I hear, almost gasping, “For the love of God, Montresor.” An old woman’s voice, but one that conveyed the horror, the despair, the shock of Fortunato better than any actor I’ve ever heard delivering the line.
It took years for me to realize that every time I watch a movie or play, read a novel, I still look for those moments, those turning points.
I did not truly get Miss S at the time. At fourteen I couldn’t realize she was forever changing the way I — and hopefully at least a few others in that class — understood and appreciated fiction. I just saw her as a silly old woman who thought the dictionary was wrong.
Now, when I think of that story Dad told me I’m inclined, against all reason, to side with Miss S.
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If I could, I would, but at my age it’s a bad idea. Drinking more than one cup of coffee a day will keep me awake long into the night, and too many sweets will make me fat and drive my blood pressure up. I like being able to sleep at night, and I feel better when I can walk briskly up and down the hills here.
But… if I could, when I go into a cafe to read, I’d order a capuccino and a cannoli. Every day. -
And even when I was younger, the idea of permanently marking my skin wasn’t appealing. In my twenties I saw a woman with a beautiful tattoo of a butterfly and was briefly tempted, but then I realized that A: Tattoos fade over time and need to be renewed and B: I am going to age and there’s a good chance it wouldn’t look the same after a few decades.
There’s something about the idea of permanently altering my appearance — even with something as minor as a tattoo — that I dislike.
I prefer to just go to hell in my own way.
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teller.
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This was on the last day of summer school. It was a store-front school with mostly Chinese or Chinese-American students, and classes typically dwindled to only a few kids by tne end of the summer.
My high school English class that day had only three students, two regulars and one more, a boy I’d never seen before, apparently a friend of one of the other’s who had just kind of wandered in. I asked him why he was there, and that was his answer.
Pam Troy 