The Speed of Sight

Why write less?

Strunk & White always said to make sure you eliminate every unnecessary word. And I agree; the purpose of communicating should be clarity first and foremost. It's not an easy standard to maintain; first, you've got to gather all the grain (your thoughts) and then you need to separate the chaff from the wheat. Not that chaff lacks value because it looks great when you get to burn it at the end of the season. S&W say a lot more stuff about how to make your writing clear and punchy. So does Cormac McCarthy, Stephen King, and the entire staff at the Wall Street Journal (meanwhile, those of us who reside in the real world wouldn't dare to spell coöperate in such a brusquely Germanic fashion).

But maybe that's not you.

Two or three days ago, I finished reading the entirety of the Lord of the Rings trilogy to my daughter. She's about eighteen months old, so I'm not sure how soon we'll be able to start debating the relative merits of Tom Bombadil, Orc breeding, or Elven cloaking technology. But anybody who's read anything from The Monsters and the Critics to The Silmarillion knows that old JRR had a thing for trees. And rocks. And streams. And, to quote Zizek, and so on and so forth. Snort. It seems like once you obtain tenure at Oxford and write the cornerstone of Western Fantasy literature, you can basically disregard all rules and write whatever the hell you want.

I guess what that tells us is that after a certain point, you can stop asking for and heeding any advice the so-called experts give you. At the end of the day, most art is a message. It may be a convoluted message, covered in psychosexual bondage, robotic murderers, melting clocks, naked boys and psychedelic starships (if you're Jodorowsky) or it may be whatever you prefer to create with your spare time. Aesop Rock tells us that we should probably spend that time creating things we love because they sound dope. And I agree with that too.

So here I am at 7 AM local time sitting in a kitchen in Germany, tragically not caffeinated, letting you, the reader, know what I think about it. Frank Herbert called himself the first Dune fan, and I like to think that the writer is also a part of You, the Reader (proper noun). We're all in this together and as soon as I pop the lid on the Box of Hope and Horror (that one's from Ovid, I think) it becomes part of the canon. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle no matter how much you suppress the dissent.

I used to think that was what made editing so important. Like, you don't want to go write something that becomes offensive seven or ten years down the road. As I get older and slower and grayer, I stopped thinking that mattered. You the reader and you the writer should stick to your guns, if only to look back on the product when you're even slower and grayer than you are now to think 'my god, that sounded stupid.'

If anything, it should make you want to go back and write something even better. Or weirder. That's the joy of maturity: you start to learn what you really are.