In reading, one should notice and fondle details.
– Vladimir Nabokov
Love, we all know, is not always easy. It means narrowing the gap, getting closer, dropping defenses, seeing yourself in the mirror of another, risking all and parting with illusions. To write well is to do all of these things and tango with language wherever that tango might take you.
By “love” I do not mean “like a lot,” as in, “I love pizza!” or “I love magenta!” I’m not referring to the level of enthusiasm we feel for our choices in language, but rather the opposite: Let them live on the page, let them be, to do their own thing, but even as they wander and develop and do their own thing, retain the cord of love to interact with them.
We are taught not to love our words too much. We are taught as young writers that we should “Kill all your darlings,” an admonition offered by Faulkner and many others which is in fact sound advice, for every writer must have in his or her arsenal the nerve of a murderer, able to throttle in its sleep a beloved phrase or construction if, no matter how darling, it distracts or thwarts the progression we want to achieve from the language.
I remember back at Berkeley an ongoing discussion with a friend named Jonathan Barnard, copy chief at the student paper, who reacted against Jerry Garcia’s plaintive bleat in “Ain’t No Use,” crooning about his claim to love a woman “like a child loves its toy.” Jonathan recoiled against possessive, clinging love, and insisted that love should be about nurturing a connection between equals. I at the time was too juvenile to have any clue what he was talking about, but now I more than agree. It’s like that with our words, too: We don’t want to see them as our playthings, imagining we command them and love them as narcissistic extensions of ourselves, we want to give them life, and let them live outside of the perimeter of our immediate control so that we can watch them grow before our eyes.
Here’s an example of what I mean: When we read our own words aloud to others, it’s easy to feel too attached to the words and therefore want to smother them, mute them, deny them the ringing presence of words spoken with clarity and conviction. We all hear this often. It’s like writing off losses, reading your own writing in a way that feels like an apology. The impulse is honorable enough: One doesn’t want to come across as smug or overly confident. But the point is: The words are not ours, they are their own masters, and we are merely friends or tour guides who have helped them assemble on the page or screen for us. We can believe in them, love them, launch them into the world, knowing that a given patch of writing either works or doesn’t work in a sense that’s quite outside of us.
We can even, pace Nabokov, fondle the language, not in a pervy, copping-a-feel sense, but in a sense of loving, tender embrace, establishing an intimate connection that allows the words to shift under the influence of this attention, so that as we read aloud, certain phrases demand to be spoken with greater authority or volume, others call for dropping the voice almost to a whisper, and the pace at which we read will be determined by clues the language itself gives us, not our own wish to hurry through a reading and be done.
– Steve Kettmann
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