Writing

Blood and Peace

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / Leave a comment

I love this line from Jessica DiGiacinto, “(I’m) just not built for peace.”  It comes from her recent blog post in which she ponders her own artistic nature, and if in fact it is one and the same with her nature overall. 

To be a writer, must one be in a constant state of struggle to some degree?

Ernest Hemingway is generally my go-to man on the nature of writers and writing.  He said so many wonderful things in this category that it’s difficult to pick just one, but a perennial favorite is this:

“There is nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

To have material, one must have met certain elements of life in a full embrace.  That is sometimes by choice, but often initially by accident.   Chasing life with reckless abandon can be fun, but frequently things seem to start with life coming after us.  That is an experience that leaves one a bit off-balance and glassy-eyed.

There is nothing to writing. Well, except that one thing…..

 The second requirement is what Papa addresses, the willingness to bleed it out in all of its hot, viscous, messy glory.

I don’t think writing requires that we be “built for peace.”  But I also don’t think it prohibits that mindset either.  The ancient practice of bloodletting rested on the literal belief that removing large quantities of blood from the body would prevent or cure disease.  This turned out to be more than a little misguided of course, but I think Hemingway’s expression is connected to this concept.  Good writing is a willingness to let out what wants to remain inside, to let it out despite the extreme difficulty and with a disregard for clean-up costs.

For many, it is about letting it out as a way of making peace, if not about being at peace.  I think we are all built for peace.  It’s the question of how we get there that makes us each unique.

Hey Irony

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 11 Comments

I just read a great essay in The New York Observer (via West Virginia’s own Ann Magnuson).  If someone asked you for a quick answer to this question, what would you say:  

“What’s so great about being original?” 

The essay’s author Lee Siegel stumbled a moment and then started thinking: 

Ann and Bowie

We are now in the middle of a crisis of originality, and partly this is due to the raging dogs of information that Google has unleashed. (EDG note to self: raging dogs of information.  That is some good stuff.  I need to use that in my next blog post.  Wait, I just did…….or does that count?)  We are so inundated by what has been written and said, and by what was written and said just seconds ago, that it is becoming impossible to sort out who said what first. Not only that, but as the idea of intellectual property—of copyright—has been thrown out the window, the notion that thoughts are duplicable commodities has become more widespread.  (EDG note to self:  I really, really want to use that picture of Ann making out with David Bowie from The Hunger.  That’s not copyrighted, right?  I mean, I couldn’t just get it if it were, right?) 

I want to tell you that Lee’s analysis of the homogeneity of literary product as it becomes increasingly electronic versus unique in your hand as an actual book is brilliant.  Except he just said that…..I mean, you can read it in the link if you click it.  Let’s see……I also really liked his examination of how referring to all forms of knowledge now as generic “information” is corrupting and degrading our appreciation of original thought.  But he did mention that, too.  And you probably just read that. 

I was going to post today about the word “unique,” and how if one more person uses a modifier with it I may go bona fide crazy.  There should be a special reform school (prison may be too harsh) for those who say, “most unique,” “more unique,” etc.  But Lee knocked me off my game with his ideas.   

Where was I? 

Oh yes.  I think what I really want to tell you is that I completely adore his concluding thought: 

But no one is quite like anyone else, and so long as you are honest about your experience, no two people will ever make intellectual or artistic sense of the world in the same way. 

I was going to say something like that.  I swear.