Practicing

I was thinking of not writing while I'm on vacation but the hours have stretched out long enough in the summer sun that I have found myself with enough time and space to explore the practice of writing prose.

I have been reading about a chapter a day of Le Guin's Steering the Craft and tracing over the exercises. I remember picking up the book in college for a creative writing class, so it has felt familiar coming back to it. I'm not trying to push myself to complete the book by the end of my vacation and I'm not going back to perfect each exercise. I'm simply reading the book, doing the exercise, and noting how I did.

I may come back later with fresh eyes to flesh out a short story or two, some of the exercises have been genuinely surprising and fun, but it's more so a fancy I'm having in my good spirits.

Things I've Noticed

The book highlights a lot of commonplace writing rules and how, if taken as absolutes, they can constrain one's creative writing. I remember a few of the rules, but I don't think I ever got to closely examine how they affect my writing. At the time I took this creative writing class, I was nearing the end of my undergrad and I remember feeling a quiet grief that I would soon find myself without this writing space and I was too devastated by that thought to really think of much else about my writing.

Concision

The one writing rule I do remember is being concise. To be concise, you have to cut all the filler and simply say what you mean. It means folding your words into little origami pieces; beautiful to look at, complicated to fold into.

I was good at it; it was one of the first things I felt I got right. But the issue I see with it now is that I mistook it for virtue. When I wrote poetry, I was always quick to fold my poems in half. I was too focused on what was left unsaid, how the white space surrounded my stanzas, where to cut lines for good juxtaposition. Most folks who liked my poems liked these aspects about my poems and I assumed from that feedback that being concise was good rather than hey I wrote something good.

Looking back on it now, I can see how concision became a metric. It's an easy tool to employ when writing essays because it distinguishes the word fluff from the arguments. Beyond that, concision felt right because my behavioral self-censuring liked undermining what I had to say. If the words weren't dense enough, if I hadn't simmered the thought down to a sentence, it was not worth mentioning. I was too cruel with my words. I worry that when I feel doubt over the things I have to say or write I default to this style of writing, this style of thinking.

To be clear, when I say being concise, I'm not just pointing to the reduction of literal word count, but also every half-sentence and unfulfilled claim that one has when writing. The small ideas that pool at the bottom of your screen when writing something that doesn't quite make it to the final piece. I find that a lot of my more honest thoughts never make it to what I write. So it's not like the practice of being concise did anything wrong, I'm just saying I've been misusing it to some extent.

Sound-led drafting

Concision isn't my only style. When I'm not hyperfocused on meaning density and word value, I am more loose and relaxed. But this side of me comes from somewhere else. It comes from my mind's ear and how it developed during college.

Hopefully it doesn't sound too strange. But I have this sort of sound-led drafting phoneme game. I'm not sure exactly when or how I picked it up, perhaps before college, but I used it a lot. It goes a little like this:

I'm writing the sentence. I see i and e, now an a, but at the next conjunction o and t slow me down, now w feels like a thing worth noting. And it's not like I'm repeating a particular word or phrase, I'm now no longer thinking of the phonemes at all, but every so often the game comes back like a ball I'm juggling. A funny thing about it, it leads me to misspell some words with their homonyms. It's also one-eighty from being concise. But it's not a worry I have right now. Ideas can be concise, the words that join them don't need to be and in this space I feel okay to spread words as far as the horizon. But they're not words I read on the screen as I write them. I can see the letters there, of course, but it's more of a sound in my head, not my usual voice but a voice I kind of like to slip into from time to time. They're like words you might whisper under your breath; fingers keeping up with your pace of thought. And it's particular. It fancies one consonant and vowel combo or a focus on one letter, it flips between phoneme diversity or stacked syncopation, but it's also playing with expectations, playing with the length. And it's not hard to do. Perhaps it appears aimless. But in this little game, there are no penalties. You don't even have to follow the rules, they're only there for when you want them. It's really only one rule: try to use words with letters or phonemes based on the last few words in the current sentence. Almost like you're dancing in the mirror. One issue with this game, it can sound monotonous aloud. It can feel like there's a soundrange you're not reaching. But dang do the words flow smooth enough when I want words to splish splash across the page.

I don't know what I'll do with this game now, but it is something that came up!

Tangentially, I also noticed from exercise 2 that I really do use punctuation as lineart from my writing, often doubling not just for grammatical cleanliness, but grammatical style. I might even say punctuations are kind of like my way of expressing some part of my voice, like a grammatical tone. This, I think, leads me to break some rules when it comes to commas, sorry, not sorry.

A thought: Lucky me I didn't pick up on em-dashes

I probably should read Eats, Shoots & Leaves and The Elements of Style before expanding on this idea.

Conclusion

Now on the face of it, the phoneme game or being concise aren't bad things. But for writing prose, they have been restrictive. I struggle to transition between prose and dialogue and back again. I don't know how to give characters their own voices or how to write in a narrative style. I'm going to keep trying, but it was nice to be able to write down a few things of where my writing is at.

Anyways, I can smell dinner and I'm pretty hungry from paddle boarding. Bye!