The Sentence is a Lonely Place

(Note: Apologies for the long post on the front page. Blogger's jump-cut tag is messing up our blog sidebar, so I took it out. Silly Blogger. I'll figure it out later.)

This post would have been more appropriate when we were all revising our pieces for Thrust, but I'm publishing it anyway, because God knows we writers are always revising.

Always! Revising!

Earlier this year, Believer Magazine published writer Gary Lutz's 2008 lecture at Columbia University. In it, Lutz argues that: "The sentence is the site of your enterprise with words, the locale where language either comes to a head or does not."

Lutz explains his own process of revising and polishing sentences, getting the words to "lean on each other, rub elbows, rub off on each other, feel each other up." and talks us through sentences by Christina Schutt, Gordon Lish, Don DeLillo, and Sam Lipsyte, explaining why these jewel-like examples are effing brilliant.

If you're unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, here are some links to his work online.

I'm a big fan of his stuff (yes, despite the fact that many of his characters are kaliedescopic copies of each other and the fact that his narratives, at times, just feel like sequences of unlinked events). You rarely read sentences built like his, and his stories' conclusions have a dreamy sort of imagistic logic.

In the lecture, Lutz says that after reading Barray Hannah:

...I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language -- the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself.

Pretentious? Uh, probably. But hell, if you write sentences like this one, from "SMTWTF:"

There was a girl beside him, a tall leg-crosser with a haphazardry of oranged hair.

Or this one, from "I Crawl Back to People:"

He had already burned through enough people without penalty, and I had a way, when passing alone through an entrance, of keeping the door held open a little behind me, in the event of a follower, anybody ridden with a misfit genitalium at a standstill.

Or this one, from "Contractions:"

I spent the night out with the kid who considered himself my boyfriend -- a gripless Puerto Rican who always had an unlit cigarette slanted apostrophically into his mouth.

...then I'm okay with your claims to "narratives of steep verbal topography." Because, really: Genitalium? Apostrophically? Haphazardry? Awesome. Anyone who uses words like these (and "palimsestic," and "befucked") has my vote.

These sentences, obviously, are the result of hours and hours of painstaking revisions. In the published lecture, Lutz explains how he undertakes revisions, playing with internal rhymes, assonance, "communities of sound and shape," and "pressing one part of speech into service as another." It's a fascinating primer on creating this sort of beautiful sentence. Well worth reading.

At the end of the lecture, Lutz admits:

Granted, there can be a downside to the kinds of isolative attentions to the sentence I have been advocating. Such a fixation on the individual sentence might threaten the enclosive forces of the larger structure in which the sentences reside.... A piece of writing consisting ultimately of an aggregation of loner sentences might well strike a reader as stupefyingly discontinuous, too dense to enchant.

This is my main problem with Lutz's work as well: the intensity of the fireworks overwhelm the narrative itself. I have to ingest his stories in small doses, and they frequently feel claustrophic, static, and, um, depressing.

But hey. Goddamn beautiful stuff.

Give his lecture a read when you're about to revise your stuff. It's intense. And helpful.

Putting it off

My strategies for avoiding work are as follows:

1) People. Social interaction feels like important preparation for creativity--even Kafka had friends, right?--but when there's an assignment due, it's really just an avoidance tactic. Shouldn't the writer be a lone waif in some dark hovel dying romantically of consumption while trying to type out few last golden words?

2) Self-medication. The most gonzo I ever felt was when I, stoned out of my gourd, excused myself from a full-on party to go write an article about an extremely boring band I'd just interviewed. As people slipped into the room to watch, the writing of the article became an event. It's probably the last time I'll ever hear cheers as I polish off a conclusion. Of course, the only person who thinks people are better writers stoned is also stoned. The numerous spelling mistakes and grammar problems made my editor very sad the next day.

3) Cleaning. This is a good one. It appeals to my sense of responsibility. It also wreaks havoc on my sense of self as I'm not naturally prone to tidying--the vertigo can be inspiring. I'll write about it once I'm done vacuuming the closets.

4) Baking. See above with yummier consequences.

5) The Internet. quod erat demonstrandum.

Any thoughts people?

Sage advice from Steven Pressfield

Hello CRWR 521! Just thought I'd let you know about a three-part question and answer that I'm doing with author and historian Steven Pressfield. I'm going to post one a week and the first one went up today on my personal blog: Write It Down. Check it out if you're interested (and spread the word).

I would also recommend visiting Pressfield's blog, and for our purposes, the "Writing Wednesdays" section of the site.

Cheers!

What the hell am I doing here?

At first glance, creativity and journalism appear to contradict one another.

The current state of journalism is changing. The usage of the term objectivity has become rather unfashionable due to its obvious shortcomings. If journalism is a conversation, then each participant views the news through a lens unique to that person. Each person has values and beliefs. Individuals all experience a certain up-bringing, an education and so on.

What is held in high regard is procedural journalism. Professionals need to consider the methods that they use, and the means by which they access their information.

The basic news report remains a bare bones report on daily events. In most cases such reporting requires little interpretation or analysis. The role of the news wire reporter is to present the facts from a well-rounded set of sources and view points.

The question remains, what is a journalist doing in a creative writing literary course?

I concede that creative writing is an undiscovered country for me. I know not the structures of poetry, nor the values attached to such constructs. I struggle with abstract thought. Yes, I am emotional, but I am being trained to shed that emotion while I build sound news reports, and conduct professional interviews.

I haven't the faintest about creating a fictional work. I do recognize the value of a healthy imagination, and the beauty associated with immersing myself into vacations to written fictions.

I was told recently that the pillars of journalism ought to be independence, originality and verification. I do not know yet how verification will fit into my hybrid approach, but relevance can be found in the other two.

Originality. This has obvious value in both journalism and creative writing. If you haven't created anything in both respects, then you have nothing. Originality presupposes creativity, innovation and curiousity.

Independence. As a creative writer I suspect you need to develop and maintain a voice. A voice that is yours and yours alone. You are forever connected to your work, and that work must be free from outside interests. Not an easy objective. A poet, or a songwriter, or a novelist all need to pay the bills. Introducing your work to the market is a complicated process, and a process that can pick melt away aspects of your work that are value-laden and writhe with messages.

The commercial business of journalism complicates matter for us too.

Two things are happening to journalism today. The first is that journalism is becoming alarmingly concentrated. It is increasingly difficult to find unique perspectives in the Canadian media, when television stations, newspapers and radio are operated under one banner.

According to its website Canwest alone operates 12 of Global TV's regional channels as well as 26 other "specialty networks." Canwest is "capturing 30.1% of commercial specialty network viewers in Canada."

Canwest, through its wide-reaching newspaper business also informs 4.9 million Canadians daily about what Canwest feels is newsworthy.

As a reporter working for one of Canwest's operations, how would I maintain my own sense of independence when I am but one member of an enormous conglomeration? I am vulnerable to the executives, and the executives are vulnerable to the commercial interests of their advertisers.

The other thing that is happening is that journalism is becoming increasingly fragmented. How can two completely contradictory events be happening in unison?

Technology, all built upon the foundation of the internet, is stripping down the mandate of media companies. Journalists emerging from schools today are equipped with the professional and procedural aspects of reporting and story-telling that is necessary for the ethical delivery of news, but they are also becoming equipped with the means to deliver that message free of corporate interests, and vast commercial interactions.

Through blogs, websites, podcasts, and social-networking it is becoming much easier to broadcast yourself to the world. It's as if all of us now possess our own printing press.

As a journalist I can blend professional ethics with the tools long held by artists. Creative writers can guide me down a road of curiousity, passion, imagination and new forms of story-telling.

Truth lives in these forms as well.