Capturing Chaos

I was in the middle of editing another chunk of the free writing that I wrote about yesterday when I thought it might be interesting to post the original today and the edited version tomorrow. So here, warts and all, is another selection from the top of my head.

“Why do so many people want to be writers when they lack every qualification? They have illusions of adequacy because words are all around us, they’re what we use every day, so it’s assumed that there’s nothing special about them. There’s nothing we need to know about words or language because it’s part of our everyday experience. We think that the grunts of those around us and the grunts we offer then in return are equivalent to what a writer produces and ultimately shows up on the pages of books and magazines.

“It’s a very different thing, though, almost a different world. It is a different world, one you enter either prepared or unprepared. If you’re start out unprepared, and refuse to change your status, you will eventually be cast out, whether rudely or politely, it doesn’t really matter, except in how it affects your understanding. Too polite a rejection teaches nothing. It allows the incompetent to believe that if they just keep trying, the doors will open and they’ll be admitted to the inner sanctum and to what they mistakenly believe is an endless flow of money and adulation.

“If one of these aspiring writers were to take a look at what I’ve produced in the last 15 minutes or so, they would be impressed, possibly awed. How can someone just sit down and produce so many words in such a short time? And where do the ideas come from? They have no conception of what goes into becoming a writer, even one as mediocre in many ways as myself. Years of reading and absorbing the language and its uses. They think that taking courses, being told how to write, how to go about it, are what they need, but it never occurs to them that most writers have never taken a course. The great writers of the past would laugh at such a notion, knowing that their teachers were the writers of previous generations and those of their own generation worthy of their admiration. They might emulate those writers as part of the learning process, but they never took courses or had a teacher in the sense in which we understand teachers.

“So reading is the base, the core of everything that a writer is. Without that base, it’s impossible to become a writer. There is nothing to draw on, nothing learned. The writer who doesn’t read, who hasn’t been reading since early childhood is nothing but an empty shell, and all he can produce is wind the meaningless natter that passes for communication.”

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