I provided my classmates this explanation of my story and my style. It's kind of haughty, but at the same time it touches on some points that really do piss me right off when they aren't treated with the considerable concern they deserve. It's actually an addendum (as you'll soon see) because I really quick wrote down a letter of intent right before class, because it was required along with the story. This one's better than that one. You don't need to see that one.
Letter of Intention: Addendum
I’ve had a chance to reread my own story a handful of times now, and first let me just apologize for the typos. Second, let me apologize for adding an addendum to my initial letter. The first one came too soon after the completion of the story, and I hadn’t had time to really think about what it was my story was trying to wring out of me. Now here goes.
When I approach any sort of task involving creativity, I find I accomplish it best when I am able to forget the medium I am using and just focus on [insert Unknowable All-Encompassing Truth here]. Let me give you a few examples: when I play Guitar Hero, I do great, but start to mess up if I think too hard about what my fingers are doing or whether or not I should strum down and/or up; when create visual art, I truly stand out when I use a pencil and paper, whereas my creations suffer greatly under less familiar media like watercolor, pastel, torn-paper, or other sadistic things art teachers demand; finally—and this is the relevant part—when I write, I feel my ideas come out most cleanly when I can just forget about the pages themselves. Liken a keyboard to buttons on a Guitar Hero controller. Liken writing styles to artistic media.
I’ve taken a stab at lots of styles—I mean I’ve gone neck-deep into full on poeticism fairly recently, and I spent half my nerdy upbringing trying to write in High Style English—and now, for the first time in a long time, I seem to have come to a plateau of sorts. I don’t mean that in a quantitative way, but more just that I feel really comfortable with where I’m at, stylistically. If I had tried to write this story in my self-conscious Joycian style, (e.g. “… ‘I’ll be king and you’ll be queen,’ she sang, her blonde hair a mess with backyard sharkleaf weeds; we are alone in the world and eight years old,”) then I think I would have lost both the subtlety and, in video game terms, the replay value that are more in place with “How He Got Home” as it is. I’ll say it again because it never stops hurting: I seem to be stuck in Raymond Carver dialect.
I think it’s popular in much the same way drawing with pencils is popular. BUT there are artists who dominate the realm of the imagination via pencil, and there are artists who simply prefer to get their art homework done faster by using pencil. Carver didn’t just introduce his minimalism, he justified it. I keep working with pencil because my heart is in it, not because pencils are easy to come by. Of course, I am not anything but a hopeful student at this point, and I adamantly apologize for constantly relating myself to Carver. See, look at how ugly that sentence is.
Shakespeare had to write about every inner pondering he could think of. He wouldn’t just say that an important character tugged his old shirt down from under a pile of sweaters and pillowcases, no, he would ruminate on the symbolism of that gesture. He would go into iambic pentameter on behalf of each sweater, on the drool stains of each pillowcase as they related to the themes of death and despondence prevalent in the tale. Proust probably would have, too, and might have even taken the opportunity to make a novel about closets. Borges… not as likely. My theory is that, ever since Shakespeare made literature more than just storytelling, the literary world has gradually gained popularity with a readership that, back in his day, was in the vast minority: the imaginative. You can feel Shakespeare trying to reach out to the common man with his writing, his all-too-familiar desperation to inspire. But these days, imagination and creativity are taught in Kindergarten, (with mixed degrees of success, but then you don’t often hear the Engineering-type students discussing philosophy, anyway). These days, movies literally ‘cue dramatic music’ to let you (and Engineering-types) know when you are being inspired. Carvery—that is, Carver’s writing style—would have been another fork in the road for literary progress back in Shakespeare’s day. Now, it’s an important retaliation, a compensation of sorts for modern man’s lowered responsibility, a deliberate removal of dramatic music cues. The result is something ponderous. The result is, ideally, that the reader will take the time to ponder—whether while reading or, later, when a passage idly returns to mind—why and how and where the author chose to mention the sweaters and the pillowcases amidst a tale of death and despondence. Shakespeare would have done all the thinking for you across fifty lines so that you wouldn’t have to do it yourself, later. Today’s readers are practiced imaginers, because Spielberg and Howard and Kubrick have given us hours and hours of rehearsal time. Once upon a time, dramatic music was actually dramatic.
Language is metaphors. It is a constant attempt to shorten and further shorten the short-cuts between one meaning and another. The phrase “justice is universal” would have required immense amounts of explanation once upon a time. Today, we understand it and even find it a little boring, by itself, if not somewhat controversial. Cliches aren’t the death of a symbol, just like dying is not the total erasure of a person from existence. The longer language has been around, the higher and higher the ideas it implies have escalated, the more great ideas become clichés or, that is, understood. Shakespeare’s work was like the introduction of electricity to language, the beginning of an industrial revolution in the field of literature. He gave life to things we never would have thought possible. But that’s old hat now. Electricity is old hat. Now we have touch-screen iPhones—now you can find out your wife’s water has broken and download bestial child porn all with one device that fits in your pocket. Amazing! It’s easy to say we’ve lost our way, but it’s only that beauty is ever changing and ever climbing. Elegance, like language, never looks the same from one generation to the next. Carver is no less brilliant than any of his predecessors. Read “A Small Good Thing” and tell me you didn’t cry harder than when you read Romeo and Juliet. It’s just that our tastes of changed. And yes, thanks for not asking, that IS a cliché.
The reason I’m creating this addendum, as I said, is because I wrote my first letter too soon after finishing “How He Got Home.” While I’m the first to admit I’m stuck in a rut, stylistically, I also have an overwhelming urge to explain that I created this rut, myself, and its Carvery is not just the result of idol worship, but of the many many many times I’ve caught myself humming ‘dramatic music’ during my own personal moments of eureka and stopped myself. I am Anti-Hollywood at a spiritual level.
I wrote this story because one time I went out on a job and had to clean up an apartment where an old man, a recently retired trucker, had died a couple of days before. Everything was just how he’d left it. There were quarters laid out and counted on a piece of paper in his kitchen. There was a pile of dirty whitey-tighties in the bathroom, some pairs with massive amounts of stainage. There was the chair that he had died in that had to be wrapped up and taken out, and it smelled like HELL. But none of this got to me. None of it. The one thing I remember most is his calendar, how I went up to it and looked at the next month and read the dates he’d written down for the upcoming weeks. He hadn’t planned on dying when he did. He died of old age, sure, but he had meant to be there, come July. The money we count and the underwear we stain and the chairs we fall asleep in, all of these things play a part in our death, but it is the death itself, the verb, that haunts us from our future graves. All of those other things are just adverbs. Fuck adverbs. The only way the job could have been any worse that day was if it had been my mess that we were cleaning up. So I wrote that story down and gave it to you guys.
Tremendously yours,
<3 Dana <3