Today, for instance, I spent a good hour playing my banjo, because I have an upcoming gig, and I want to be A Musician, and to be A Musician one needs gigs. But I outpace myself; before writing about my experiences today (an important writerly discipline) I must explain myself 1. I am returning to a discipline of writing 500 words every day. I practiced this discipline once for a sustained period during college. I believe it was six months. I believe that during these six months I was a better writer, though I cannot recall if it ever got me any writing gigs, and it certainly did not advance my writerly career to the point where I am writing anything at all these days really.
So I return to the exercise, first begun because 1) E.B. White was a great essayist and I wanted to write like him, and 2) Ray Bradbury said that he wrote 1,000 words every day of his life, and while I didn't (and don't) want to write like him, I admired (and admire) his resolve and his output 2.
But why do exercises at all? After all, if we extend the word "exercise" to another context, most people successfully walk from place to place without ever engaging in anything that they might call exercise 3. Baby Havah, for instance, can practically walk, yet she cannot conceive of a semantic difference between exercise activity and transportational activity. She has never exercised, yet she has (almost) achieved the practical end towards which the exercise is directed. This sort of extension is, of course, linguistically and metaphorically ungrounded, so I will move on to the original point of the exercise: Writing About my Experiences Today. Baby Havah was part of my experience a few days ago, so do not expect to see her as the page rolls on. Now, the ostensible focus of this piece:
THINGS THAT HAPPENED TODAY:
- My doorknob fell off, stranding me outside during my dinner break, forcing me to, using my pocketknife, unscrew my front window and break into my own apartment. I was then unable to properly reattach the front window, so my apartment is currently very vulnerable to intruders.
- I discussed the paradox of choice with a man with an English accent who was delighted to be discussing the paradox of choice as he was being overwhelmed by the paralyzing selection of teas.
- I cooked my friend a vegetarian lunch.
- I tasted homemade Amish rootbeer.
- I decided, while sitting on the toilet, to starting writing 500 words a day. I made this resolution twice, both times while on the toilet.
- I played the banjo.
These are the things, among others, that I did today.
The exercise is grounded in that important writerly assumption that writing is borne out of experience. This may or may not be true; I was recently reading a book by Northrop Frye, which suggested that writing is borne out of societal convention, not experience. My reading of that was, of course, something I experienced 4; I finished that book days ago, which is why its reading is not included on the list above.
The exercise is also grounded in the idea that an essay has a reason to be; that is, that it is not merely an unconnected string of 500 words (probably more, at this point), but that is has some sort of Central Idea; that it has, in the words of the high school English class, A Thesis (Statement) 5. Not that every day's 500 words have some sort of Deep Meaning (and not that every day's will be posted here), but that perhaps, maybe once a week, maybe once a month, the aspiring Writer can turn his daily experiences into something that somebody might, for some reason, be willing to read.
The real reason that I hope to continue in this exercise is not technical. It is not about developing my Voice As A Writer or because I hope to publish one whole year's worth of recollections these in a little book (182,500 Words, I call it in my imagination) 6. I re-begin this discipline because it entails a valorization of the mundane things of daily life. It says to the fallen doorknob, to the homemade root beer and the vegetarian soup, "I care about you, enough to write about you." 7
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1 Sorry for all the run-ons and my skeptically disengaged tone. I've been reading a particular, well-known author and essayist recently a, and undertaken this exercise as a sort of stylistic pastiche.
a Guess which one
2 Part of why I stopped trying to write was that I felt that I could not write without worrying what people would think of my writing once I was a Great Writer, and while I have since concluded that such thinking is unhelpful and vain, if anyone in any bio ever written of me lists my influences as E.B. White and Ray Bradbury, I will personally club her or him to death with hardcover printings of those authors' works, purchased online, from a bargain bookseller, for that express purpose.
3 Except for that very place-to-place walking, which, especially if they are hip, fitness conscious people too lazy to get to the gym or to walk for purposes other than transportation are very willing to point out as exercise.
4 Though Frye would perhaps argue that regardless of the individual reader's experience of reading the text, the text acts, as evidenced by the fact that it can act on multiple readers who may be having multifarious experiences while reading it.
5 That same thesis statement to be accompanied by, according to Mrs. Zehner, my 10th grade English teacher, five and only five paragraphs of supporting and concluding material. This arbitrariness always bothered me, yet here I am engaging in a exercise with a similarly arbitrary (and numerically consonant) constraint.
6 "Greg Albright's work was influenced by popular writers such as Ray Bradbury and E.B. --- AAAGGGH!!!" the author bio will read.
7 Of course, tonight's writing was not really about those things at all. It was about style, about reassuring myself that this return to the writing game is possible, that I've still got it, a fact of which I cannot assure myself. It's a pastiche of David Foster Wallace, by the way.
2 comments:
The endnotes gave it away for me. I'm reading Infinite Jest right now, and boy can I see that here! Two things though: I don't recall DFW using first-person all that often, so the whole tone is a little unfamiliar; secondly, he would never apologize for anything he writes, so your endnote #1 is a welcome drop of Greg Albright into this 'pastiche'. :)
I was just reading the title piece in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," which is very first-person, but yes, DFW is the antithesis of apologetic. I actually received my copy of "A Supposedly Fun Thing..." from a friend who was getting rid of it. He said "It's good writing, but he's way to arrogant, and I don't want to read that."
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