Technique and Inspiration

Writing is an amazing thing.

We talk about it in emotional terms and threaten to swoon at any second about some aspect of it.

We talk about how hard it is (God, let me stop talking about how hard it is), how important it is and how the world will just spin off its axis if it is not well received, but the truth is, with enough careful, analytical reading and writing, it is possible to understand any work of fiction and see how it was written and if you *really* understand how something was written and you have enough technique, you can write the same thing yourself.

This is not a trivial process. Nor is it one that would work in the real world.

Editors, audiences and, perhaps most importantly, lawyers would notice if you tried to submit a re-worded version of "The Hunger Games," or "Interview with the vampire" and it is more than likely that what you produced would be anything but good because understanding someone's technique in writing is like trying to use someone's technique in painting. The best that you can hope for is forgery: you cannot imitate the *feeling* of the thing by writing the same thing only using different words.

There is a paradox in this aspect of writing: technique is not enough and inspiration is too much.

Writing that is pure technique is chilly. No matter what the writer is writing about, it always boils down to dry facts and ends up looking like an essay--something artificial like sex-advice written by a eunuch.

Writing that is all technique often ends up being unreadable unless the technique is the sort of technique you find in the stories of Somerset Maugham or John Gardner. Maugham's work displays an amazing ability to combine situation, voice and detail to create worlds in which matters of purely social importance become experiences as large and immediate as looking down the barrel of a gun.

To read Maugham is to come to the end of a long, almost painfully dense story and thinking, "that worked... that actually worked!"

Much the same is true of Gardner. Gardner's "Grendel" is the ultimate work of academic fiction. It is erudite and flawless, an application of everything that Gardner the creative writing teacher could ever hope to impart to any of his students. His technique is so perfect, that Grendel is like a challenge, like someone saying, "playing by the same rules, see if you can come up with something better than this."

The other end of the spectrum is inspiration. Inspiration gets you there, It makes people read. It makes them read with their eyes wide open. But the costs can be gigantic. Inspiration can last for minutes and make you wait for years. Also, there is nothing sadder in a text than the moment you see inspiration fade: you buy Chicago: City on the Make after reading the incredible poetry of the first ten pages and you're ready to find and slap Algren by the time you get to the last ten.

Obviously, both inspiration and technique are necessary. It's just that inspiration is so much more fun: inspiration reminds you of the feeling that made you start writing in the first place. Inspiration reminds you of the first moments of those first days after you realized that you could find a thread in all that cloth of information and that seeing it would make you write, make you write so hard and so fast that what you write comes together before you can think about it or stop it.

And you are in the land then and the blue sky is as sweet a candy-apple and every girl is Helen of Troy and every breath is the breath you share with a trillion other living things and you will live forever because this live moment is so full and sweet that it is unnatural: it fails to acknowledge the possibility of its ever ending.

It is the only perfect place: the only place where everything is extraordinary and all things are ordained.

Therein lies the paradox: the closer you get to either extreme, the further you stray from readability and readability to someone somewhere is the only point of writing: every other corridor in writing ends with a door with a sign on it that says, "why bother."

Blah.

Time to sit down and remind myself that matter what it is, or how it comes together, it's nouns and verbs. It is always nouns and always verbs--and the more precisely-chosen they are the better.