02.09.08
On Writing
I was lucky enough to attend an event featuring notable author and playwright David Mamet. If you don’t know who he is, just go away now; if you have an inkling of who he is, keep reading. This is the man who wrote some of the most incredible plays of the past 20 years, including screenplays for Wag the Dog and Glengarry Glen Ross. He’s written a few bombshell books about writing and performing, notably 3 Uses of the Knife and Truth and Lies: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor.
If you read or watch Mamet’s plays, they’re incredible things. Concise, brilliant, true-life reproductions of how humans speak. It’s unnerving. Speak the text out loud and you find yourself thinking the man just dropped a tape recorder in the bushes and transcribed it all later, down to the minor vocal interjections.
But his books…well…honestly, I thought they sucked.
No, really…on your first (who am i kidding…tenth) read, they’re ponderous, twelve-syllable intellectual pieces of poo that barely qualify as human. One can imagine that Mamet descends among the rabble to write his coarse plays, then back on his intellectual cloud back to heaven. They’re really really hard to read. I put him right next to Umberto Eco on the shelf and then try not to think about them too much.
But then I heard Mamet speak at this event I mentioned earlier, and changed my perceptions of him immediately. Because even though he writes like a semiotician’s wet dream, he talks like a Chicago beat cop from the 1930’s. Suddenly I realize that he’s far more fascinating than I could have imagined. His books are fugues of intensity, written by someone with a great mind and a very simple voice. He described writing as a schizophrenic act; you’re forced to split yourself into many voices to tell a story. He’s capable of spanning both worlds because he’s painfully aware that academic writing is nothing remotely related to writing for the masses. The difference between Mamet and most writers is that he makes money doing both.
You do not have David Mamet’s problems. Nor do I…thank God. We only need so many geniuses.
But you do have a problem, Gentle Reader. You can’t write for shit. And you know it. You pore over things you’ve written, desperately hoping they’re “okay.” You ask yourself “is that a real sentence?” or inane things like “Gee, am I using the right punctuation?” Or worse, you think a colon is on a keyboard because it’s used in web addresses.
In an era where literacy is at an all time high, writing sucks more than ever. And the proliferation of web-publishing doesn’t help. I swear to High Holy God that the first time I crack open a newspaper and find the acronyms OMG or ROFL, I’m gonna murder some copywriters.
I’m not here to teach you anything. This is my website for me, and my sanity, and I’m writing purely to keep my brain solid. I’m also doing a favor to a couple of dear friends. But I will write about writing, and try to explain what I think about when I write. And maybe that’ll help you. I cannot give advice; I am not an advisor. I can speak only from the benefit of 27 years of writing, since I first picked up my big Red #1 and started scrawling.
Along the way I’ll add things like literary criticism and how to tell the difference between effective writing on multiple platforms, including business writing for literary anarchists like me.
Next time I’m gonna bash on Anne Rice. Stay tuned. Should be fun.