This is what I get

[channonyarrow]

I read a fic and an email today that both made me want to go destroy something beautiful.

I rarely have the sense that I get the right word in the right place. And to read the lines that the authors wrote was soul-crushing.

They were perfect lines, you see. They were the perfect line in the perfect place, so evocative that you knew exactly what the writer was talking about and you could feel it slotting into place in your own life.

Once I took a class on novels - Text and Culture in America, 1945-1985 - which meant that we read a lot of books like Raintree County, The Invisible Man, and Sometimes A Great Notion. And the teacher was insane. All my really good teachers have been insane.

These two lines today made me realise what he meant in one of his stories. He was driving on I-5 somewhere, when a Judy Collins song came on. The song had a line about waiting to meet you where the seagull stitch the sea to the sky.

He had to pull over and rage about that line. She had figured out what it is that seagulls do when they dart into the water, into the sky, into the water - and he hadn't.

This is what I mean by soul-destroying. The lines nailed it. Absolutely fucking nailed it.

"Tonight I'm a mutilated angel, using the cold concrete stairs to reach the sky, hunched over from the wounds where my wings used to be."*

Someday, I want to put the right word in the right place - and I want to watch someone else's soul be destroyed and rebuilt with the words I managed to command and the truth I managed to tell. You build a civilisation in that moment, that second of prose. The old civilisation falls; the new one rises and the new one is very different.

I am a mutilated angel. I can see the stars, but I'll never reach them.


*-- Warren Ellis

Comments

[graeae.livejournal.com]

What were the lines?

[graeae.livejournal.com]

That is, you said fic and email so I imagine it's not just Ellis. Though the quote is lovely.

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

I'll email you them. One was a filtered post that I don't want to repost.

[filthyassistant.livejournal.com]

I felt that way when I read Sailing to Sarantium or Artesia. Both twisted me up, wrung me out, and twisted me up again. And then they both wrote sequels. Whenever I sit down to write, I have to keep my one reasonable goal in mind. I would love to have my work resemble both in some way, but if it comes out even half as good as either I will be completely satisfied.

[koemiko.livejournal.com]

Poked nose in here after seeing the Chair Leg of Justice.

Won't you be ... my neighbor friend?

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

I'd be happy to be your neighbour friend!

[nullstr.livejournal.com]

Stop whinging, bitch. The fact that you feel this way about such lines is proof enough that you do not need the cold concrete staircase to reach prose heaven.

Create something beautiful instead, like the next chapter of the Elf story, dammit.

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

Dude, one of them was YOUR LINE. About choosing life. You fucker!

And yeah, I'm editing that this weekend, and the when story too. I'm going to submit when next week.

[nullstr.livejournal.com]

Glad to be of service. *bows obsequiously*

I am so gonna buy you a chainsaw and some Blood-Off (tm) from Wal-Mart

;)

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I think that if you were to walk into a Wal-Mart you'd probably spontaneously combust. Don't try that one on with me, mate!

[lzz.livejournal.com]

You know, despite all those years of literary training, I still find that when it comes down to the wire, what defines good writing for me is exactly that: the right word in the right place. By that, I mean the word that you would never, ever have thought of, but which suddenly makes you see how things really are and shows the world in a whole new light.

That last clause is, sadly, a splendid example of how I rarely if ever find those words, and instead come out with tired old cliches. However, I am now fighting back against my deeply rooted yet fundamentally unhelpful belief that second-rate writing isn't even worth attempting to get down on paper, because at this rate I will never LEARN.

[channonyarrow.livejournal.com]

That's exactly it. Unfortunately, no one is born with that much natural talent - it is work, and I will spit in the eye of anyone who denies that writing is. And we only get better by working. But sometimes the accidental beauty is better than anything ever contrived, and that's sort of depressing.

On the other hand, since writing this, even though I think that the lines were both so superb and subtle and they still are, I did like the one I came up with about "hiding like tigers in the hot Muggle jungle."

Keep writin'.