What makes good writing good?
I ask because I'm reading this novel right now called Mailman, by J.Robert Lennon, and it's about -- you guessed it -- a mailman, one who inhabits modern-day American suburbia, and it's very well-written, clever, filled with these long and looping sentences that are designed to draw you into the story but also designed, in part, to show off the linguistic dexterity of the writer, drawing attention to the quality and elasticity of the writing, kind of like what I'm trying to do now, writing a long sentence that still somehow has some semblance of control, so you can flip the pages and say: "Damn, this guy's good."
See what I mean?
The novelist Elmore Leonard on his rewriting process: "If it sounds like writing, I cut it."
Meaning, if the language in the story draws attention to itself as language, the author is, basically, showing off. Letting the reader know that he or she is a talented wordsmith, a gifted craftsman; if you're spending all of your time admiring the pretty way that the piece is put together and not concentrating (or caring) about the story, something's out of whack.
I tend to agree.
Take Michael Ondaatje, the Canadian poet/novelist who wrote The English Patient. Fabulous poet, but I can't really get off on his novels, because they're, I don't know, too poetic. Every sentence is this crisp and sharpened jewel. You're meant to pause and ooh and ahh after every phrase.
Poetry, in my humble opinion, is the place for showing off your verbal skills, your ways with words, your capacity to turn English on its head. Poetry is the dazzling little sparkles of sunshine that drift through the summer afternoon; prose is the beam of light itself, pointed and purposeful.
This is not to say that language isn't important when reading a story, or writing a story. It's everything. But the style of the writer should serve the path of the story. You should be sucked in by the writer's prose, yes, but not astonished. Some of my favorite writers, muscular
wordsmiths like John Irving and Norman Mailer, are always insightful, graceful writers, working wonders with our puny language, but it always has a point, their prose; it always has a direction. It's subordinate to the characters and the plot and the theme. It's functional, this use of language, which makes its occasional leap into profundity that much more, well, profound.
I say all of this because writing a blog, even as casual as one as this, is still an exercise in language, in tone, in voice. I'm not writing this the same way that I would write a term paper, or short story, or a letter to the editor. I'm trying to emulate the kind of breezy, conversational tone that most blogs and e-mails have tended to adapt over the last five years or so, because it's easy to read and fun to write. (Who wants to go through life writing term papers every day? Or reading them, God forbid...)
It's my little theory that a whole new form of writing has developed since the dawn of the Internet, and blogs are just an example of it, this kind of casual, lackadaisical prose, trying to simulate the way we speak. It used to be that you did your rigid, serious, writing type writing for your teacher or your boss or your editor (if you were a writer); any casual tone was saved for the recipient of your letters, but realistically, not too many people are writing letters anymore.
So writing in more or less the same way that we speak was not really what people did, until the
Internet exploded and blogs were invented and suddenly everyone around the world was able to read pretty much whatever they wanted. And then you throw in cell phones and text
messaging and who knows what else, and suddenly language is shifting, mutating, morphing into something almost unrecognizable.
As long as it's rooted in communication, it's fine with me. Language started out as merely that, right? Purely functional. And then people got good at it, developed a flair for it, and, bingo bammo, art was formed. Prose was formed. Poetry was formed. And sometimes the artistic flaunting of one's own gifts got in the way of the entire purpose of art which was, well, communication.
The Internet brings us full circle, back to communication, back to me having something to say and you waiting to hear it. (Okay, maybe you're not waiting to here what I have to say...) It's the newest addition to what Gutenberg started awhile back. (No, not Steve; I'm talking about the printing press dude, although he might be distantly related to the Short Circuit star).
So here's to blogs and prose and poetry and every other way that we try to link ourselves with another's thoughts, minds and hearts. Here's hoping that, despite all our recent technological advancements, we never lose sight of language's original intent, nor the wonderfully artistic and malleable ways we can put it to use.
