January 12th, 2009
Fire in Japanese
Kaji da!
I’m not waiting on a lady / I’m just waiting on a friend
RR
January 10th, 2009
On Diction
A tip: When something has gone catastrophically wrong in the life of a writer, do not offer the comfort that this turn of events will be “excellent material.” While the disaster in question may in fact someday be a topic for writing, that is a pretty tarnished silver lining when one has just lost their job, heart or luggage. I guess I can’t speak for everybody, but certainly, these things matter to me far more in and of themselves then for their potential as stories. If the adage “tragedy + time = comedy,” it’s a lot of time, even if the story won’t wind up being all that funny.
I find events and anecdotes to be the easiest part of writing, anyway. If you buy the “1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” theory of writing, the inspiration is for me is the idea, the thing the stories supposed to be about. And ideas are pretty thick on the ground, catastrophe or not, reality-based or not. Everything else, that 99% of sweat and struggle, is finding the words and structure and voice to show that idea on the page in some way ressembling how I see it and feel it in my head.
When I find something in real life that that seems like material, it’s usually not a thing that happened, but words: a way of saying things that’s new to me, or a new thing to say entirely. Vibrant writing, I think, comes from language in tune with who the characters are, their vocabulary and emotions, articulateness, vernacular: diction.
I like to go places where language is used differently from how I use it . No one at my doctor’s office would use the word “diction” but they might use the words “incidence,” “ameliorate,” “aggressive therapy,” “monitoring” or “gown” in a very different sense than I would normally encounter them, if I encountered them at all. This is why I can’t leave anyone alone who works in medical profession–sorry, guys!
Lately, I’m in love with yoga-diction, even though I’ve never been the biggest fan of yoga, nor very good, either, since flexible+clumsy+poor equilibrium=floppy. And I do not enjoy all the pressure to relax–tension is one of the core components of my personality, thank you.
Anyway!
In an intro yoga class, they mention the Sanskrit words for the postures, but genially and loosely translate them for the neophytes. I love this stuff–it’s direct quotes, near as I can reconstitute it: “Ok, now for Cow Face, first we’re going to form the lips of the cow with our crossed legs, like so…ok, great! And now, for the ears, let’s reach our right hands up into the sky…” There’s something you don’t hear elsewhere.
Yoga or any sort of organized physical training give me a chance to look at bodies and body parts with scrutiny that I don’t usually give them. “Make sure your ankle isn’t sickling,” “Look up at your biceps,” “Let’s tighten up those lower abdominal muscles,” “How close together can you get your shoulder blades?”
This stuff is strange and not very relevant to most action, but it’s useful to be able to see things from such a radically new angle (from the floor, with your legs in the air above you and your knees resting on your forehead). As a writer, words are all I have to work with, and I’m always in search of more, and more ways to use them.
Which is why I’m telling myself it’s gonna be fun to go to the passport office this week. Really! Who knows what they’ll *say*?
And now you’ve turned the other cheek
RR
December 12th, 2008
Language, Open and Shut
Writing is the only art form that mainly strives to be not itself. Any serious writer dwells in the beauty of language, the elegance of phrasing, sound and rhythm, but over the long-term, the longer-than-a-sentence term, good writing strives to make you stop seeing it, stop seeing the words on the page and start seeing the images and characters those words create. As a writer, I want readers to feel my stories as people and events, not in ink on paper.
To achieve this, of course, the writer is reliant on language, the very thing she wants to make you not see. To achieve an image that transcends ink and paper, you need language like a stone polished so brilliant that we see only the reflection of the world, and not the stone’s surface at all. The rightest word must be the most precise and specific, penetrating and resilient, in order to engage the reader in creating the image in his or her mind. If you just say “tree” the reader might see a budding maple from outside the window of her third-grade classroom, or she might see dying yellowed pinetree on the shoulder of an Alaska highway, but more than likely, the reader will just see the Times New Roman letters t-r-e-e, and nothing more.
A writer seeks to corner an image, an emotion, a sensation–to make it stay put for a minute so a reader can get a sort of fleeting, slantwise glimpse of what the writer sees in *her* head when she thinks about trunks and branches and leaves. You can never do it completely, and some writers are ok with more gaps in the fence than others. The task allottment might differ from writer to writer, or text to text, but the project of creating meaning in a story, novel or poem is always a joint one between writer and reader.
In conversation–well, in good conversation–statements are like story-writing. When I describe my day, date or dinner to you, I’m trying to give you enough information that you can recreate it in your own head. Same as a story. But dialogue is a much more delicate dynamic than text, and we not ever *just* offering information–in conversation we ask for information in return. And there is a very different linguistic necessity in asking questions, or even opening topics, than there is in making statements/telling stories.
I’ve had considerable sensitivity training, in the formal sense (there are many life experiences that qualify as sensitivity training, I know) and one of the things I’ve been taught is to open language as wide as possible, to leave space in a question for *every possible answer*.
You’d think that’d be easy–by the very fact of asking a question, we admit we don’t know the answer. But quite often, the words we use to ask can imply that we believe we know the range of the answer. When I point at a woman’s wedding band, and say, “How long have you and your husband been married?” that’s (say it together, grad school kids) heteronormative. When I suggest that an acquaintance buy a certain item, I suggest I know she can afford it. When I make an idle joke about a colleague being “off her meds,” I imply that I know she’s never taken mood-stabilizers.
And, as we’ve so often established her at Rose-coloured, what do I know?
Most people are tough enough to weather such slights, and generous enough to forgive them. But it’s alienating, absolutely, to misapprised (literally, mis-seen) again and again. And if one is going through a particularly vulnerable time, maybe you aren’t that tough. Around this time of year, there’s a lot of seemingly inoccuous queries about family that could be truly upsetting if your family is dead/abusive/too distant to afford plane fare. Never even mind that we aren’t all celebrating the same holidays–even as a Jew who enjoys Christmas, I don’t find it so unreasonable that *everybody* stick to saying “Season’s Greeting” to those whose denomination is unknown.
That my version of “open” language comes from sensitivity training leaves me open to a little bit of mockery, sometimes, and other times is just confusing. I am so well programmed (I actually eventually taught the class) that I really fear hurting someone by asking loaded questions like, “How was your Mother’s Day?” “Why don’t you buy a new one?” “Are you going to talk that over with a friend?”
So I’m a little over-delicate–I don’t ask a lot of questions if I can’t make them very neutral. Because I am actually passionately curious (read: nosy); I want to know everything about your life you feel like telling me. But there’s the thing, I want to know *anything*–and if I slant the question so that it sounds like I already know, or expect to know, why would you speak at all?
When I tell a story, on the page or in conversation, I want to give you the gift of what I know, more or less elaborately done up with paper and bow. When I ask a question, I want to give you clean a clean and empty box, with the flaps folded back, to make it easier for you to give me anything at all.
Can I put this lightly?
RR
March 14th, 2008
Think about It
Thinking aloud last night with KC, I made the logical hop from feeling
ambivalence–the state of having simultaneous but conflicting feelings or attitudes, such as love and hate, toward some person or thing. ambivalent (ambi- in two ways + valere to be worth)
to
valence–the quality of an atom…that determines the number of other atoms…with which it can combine… -valent combining form having (a given number of) valent forms: monovalent, trivalent
So when you are ambivalent about an idea or an atom or a person, you don’t know whether you can bond with it or not…genius!!
Oh, English language, how much do I love you? Sometimes I feel like I should write a little tribute to my love, but since I would have to use words to write that tribute, it seems a little tacky, like borrowing someone’s credit card to buy them a present. I have so many really serious problems.
When violins aren’t so out of tune
RR
November 30th, 2007
Tapping out
What’s really been bothering me lately is the expression “tapped out.” Where does it come from? I always assumed that it came from wrestling: when a man is pinned and gives up unpinning himself, he taps the other wrestler to indicate his surrender. But then, when you come to the end of a long grey day and realize that you haven’t the strength for even one more useful task, shouldn’t you say, “I’ve tapped out,” or “I’m tapping out,” as opposed to what one does say, which is “I’m tapped out.”
That grammar would indicate that the etymology (can you have etymology of a phrase?) is rooted in a beer keg. When you pour beer from a keg you tap it, and when it’s empty it’s tapped out, right? (obviously, I’m way out of my depth here) Then the conjugation makes sense, because when you say “I’m tapped out” you are just substituting yourself for the beer keg, you being empty of energy, not beer.
But three dictionaries neither confirm nor deny this hypothesis (including Canadian Oxford!) and the definition of an expression is distressingly hard to Google. Now I’m worried I’ve made the whole thing up, and in fact no one says “tap out” in any context, ever, except me!
You know, I think I am. Tapped out, I mean. It’s been a really long week. Perhaps I’ll leave this question for better minds than mine, and go do something fun.
Can you bring me back a cardinal from Kentucky?
RR
PS–My orthodonist unexpectedly announced this morning that I don’t have to wear my retainer during the day anymore. Unexpectedly because he’d said before that it would be maybe as much as six months before I’d have this luxury. I think he gave me the worst case scenario because he knows I don’t take disappointment too well, but I take unexpected good news very well. Despite my exhaustion, I am ebullient. I went right to the dep and bought gum, Raspberry Extra, which is repulsive, but which I am chewing right now for the lack of anything else. On my way to the fun, I’ll buy something better.
November 8th, 2007
Think about It (iv)
metafiction: writing about writing
metadata: data about data
metacognition: thinking about thinking
metalanguage: words about words (even more elegant: metalingual)
October 12th, 2007
Specificity and Purpose
I remember in grade eleven being asked to write a little treatise on my favourite word, and I wrote mine on idiosyncratic because that is the sort of thing that appeals at 16–multisyllabic, subjective adjectives that would set me up as an alienated intellectual. Yum.
I still think that’s a nice word, as multisyllabic, subjective adjectives go: it’s got that dipthong thing going and it’s all Greek-y, but I’ve moved on. A writing teacher of mine was devoutly enthused with getting people to use material from their real lives, not necessarily love affairs and fights with parents, because everyone has those, but the quirks of employment and obsessions that are unique, nay, idiosyncratic, that come with a rarefied vocabulary that people from outside do not possess. These words are new to most readers and using them conveys a wealth of detail about the character who would choose these words, in a way that subjective adjectives cannot. Who is analytical? Who is grumpy or fey or trivia? Hard to say.
A person who uses words like folio, pass, bleed, crop, query, tighten, ligature, and cold read is very likely a person who works in publishing production. Coming back to the industry after some time away, I’m appreciating the technical vocabulary perhaps for the first time. The words aren’t gorgeous, but they useful and specific and mine to make use of. I like them. I thought I’d share here my two very favourite publishing words with you, in case you like them too. They aren’t really my favourite words in the language–there’s too many to choose, and world enough and time to use them all–but they are quite good.
kerning (n.) — in a typeset text, the spacing between letters on a line
ledding (n.) — in a typeset text, the spacing between lines on a page
I always knew about those spaces, and that they could be tightened or loosened, and I sensed (maybe?) that a page with optimal spacing was a greater pleasure to read, but I didn’t know those words. Then one day I was able to put concept into letters, exactly the right way, and in a small way, was better for it.
If I crash on the couch / Can I sleep in my clothes?
RR
September 12th, 2007
What would you do?
If you had been involved in a conversation that didn’t go that well, and later you looked up the word “meretricious” (attractive in a showy way; plausible but not genuine) and you realized you had misinterpreted it as “meritorious” (deserving reward or praise)? Would you go back to the person and explain your error? Or just let that person think it’s your values and not your vocabulary that’s wanting?
I ain’t that lonely yet
RR
June 7th, 2007
Think About It (III)
Cathode
Cathartic
Catheter
All words relating to sending or getting out: electrons, emotions, pee.
For all of the men / who have served with no fear
RR
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