On Writing, July 8, 2009

In his terrific memoir, The Tender Bar, J.R. Moehringer writes, “Above all I suffered from a naïve view that writing should be easy. I thought words were supposed to come unbidden. The idea that errors were stepping-stones to truth never once occurred to me…” Ah yes, there is that.

Guess what? It’s hard!

I’ve had a difficult and productive and frustrating and joyful day of revising my extended critical essay on how yearning induces empathy and compels action in memoir. My brain is a little tired, a little “tweaky” as my wife Gloria might say. But, I have produced words – some of them good, I think!

What makes them good? They are clear, specific, and absolutely the right word to express the precise idea(s) I am trying to convey. It’s hard, that. Finding the right word. Le mot juste, as Flaubert famously put it. It is also exhilarating when you succeed.

It’s been a rather gloomy day here in Chicago, with the skies looking more like October or even November than the second week of July. But the light rain and cool winds matter not when the words are flowing. The dogs have been mostly well-behaved today with a bare minimum of barking inside the house, and I rewarded them with some extra walks, during which I turned word over word in my head – do I want “consistently” or “systematically” to modify the phrase “thwarted wanting?” Perhaps both? They are different, after all. Do I go so far as to employ the word “perniciously?” Maybe so. Setting aside the near-constant injunction many writers hear to “never use adverbs,” sometimes they are precisely what are required. And, the New American Oxford Dictionary defines “pernicious” as: having a harmful effect, esp. in a gradual or subtle way. That might just be right. I’ll think on it some more, I suppose, but at least I have choices.

I’ve put in a solid day’s work and will shortly meet up with a friend and colleague for an adult beverage before returning home to share dinner with my wife. Things could be much worse.

Namaste.