I must have been half-asleep last night, though I was reading an article that I could have sworn I’d remember. Newspapers! It was about the death of the American newspaper. Yes, I’m still reading the same issue of the New Yorker but I promise, I’m reading other things too. Also, I have a job, kids. It takes time to do my job and I spend many hours a day in front of a computer or writing and at the end of the day, sometimes I need a break from writing and reading to… watch The Hills. Doesn’t every girl?
Anyway, I must have been half-sleep though thoroughly enjoying the article I was reading on the awake side of asleep, while my sleeping self was thinking about Novelique. Thought I, “Shouldn’t I be writing more than just fiction? Shouldn’t this experiment be an exercise in writing general prose?” I continued on this line of thinking - as I read about all those bloggers out there blogging for the Huffington Post - “Shouldn’t I try to write about things I know? Questions I have? Why am I not trying to write articles and essays? I used to love writing essays in college.”
So now on to the hard stuff. What is an essay? And what about writing them did I like? I did love the research. I also loved the lack of guile. Occasionally, I just wanted to show and tell instead of hiding behind characters and plots. I wanted to say “These are my findings! Voila! This is the truth.” But the question for me has always been connected to subject matter. I am a good enough writer. I have a definite still and a chameleon-like ability to mimic other people’s writing and speech - taking on enough of their idiosyncrasies to make it sound like them while still retaining some of my own patterns. But I’ve never had anything to write about.
In college, my research dove further and further into the way people speak. My final thesis paper was about the interviews a writer gave on her novel. I looked at what she said in interviews versus the much more complicated things she was actually doing in her writing. I then found one interview that she did with another writer that she and the other writer called a conversation and found the piece to be completely different than anything else she’d said about her writing. At the time, I was titillated by all of this. It’s not surprising to me now because the writer clearly just knew her audience. Another fiction writer is looking to have the genre explode outward. She’s interested in finding out how they can change and expand what novels already do. Both writers were African American women of a similar age - which means that they probably share some common influences as well as common experiences (I don’t think is a particularly controversial statement - as a playwright and a musical theater writer, I find that the other women in the field have a lot to say about being a woman in the field when in the company of women and much less to say about it when in mixed company. I think this is largely because you’re trying not to look self-pitying, but there are definitely a few glass ceilings here and there). When you’re being interviewed, you know that the interviewer is looking for a sound bite. The more the interviewer searches for it, the more likely you are to give a stock response to a question - to diminish what you are trying to do in whatever you’re writing to something easy to swallow. What seemed profound to me in college feels entirely natural to me now.
But again, the things I have to say are all about how people say what they say. I’m fascinated by that and it influences everything I do. It’s become my career path. It rules my political world. It impacts what books I read (I just can’t read poorly written books. I can’t do it.). How will it impact what I write in prose because to some degree - prose is more about the about than the how.
