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

From: [identity profile] 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.

From: [identity profile] 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'.
.

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