Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Using words in fucked up ways is so fun.

Mood: Fine
Music: Opeth-Black Rose Immortal

Messing with words is so fun; it's one of the main things I do with writing. I take a simple word, or a longer word, or any word, and usually mess with suffixes on it, or I add an -un or -ab or whatever to the front, forming interestingly cool words.

I also very much so enjoy metaphors and similes. I'm sure if you've actually taken some time to see the way I write in style piece by piece, you've noticed I heavily rely on them. And it does work...and it never gets old, too, because I use such abstract things as metaphors and similies often. That I'd say is one of the things I most enjoy about writing: making it as abstract, as simple, or anything as I want. I love how flexible language is in this way. How you can take such unrelated things, and make them, you know, just work. It's just beautiful really.

The main reason I rely on metaphors and similies is because if you get them right, you can paint such an amazing and eloquent picture in the reader's mind. Plus, it also forces the reader to actually take in words if they're just la-laing through whatever block of text they might be reading, not even caring or absorbing the words. Plus some of them just stick to your mind...and paint in your mind...and just make it feel like you should actually read more into what you are reading, instead of being some idiotic imbicilophilitic little twerp. It actually makes the reader feel like they can relate to you in some odd ways.

I also use them because--more than any other form of writing--they are original. With words, if you manage to place some special word that that person doesn't know, it only surprises them the first time. Plus there's the added little scenario of if they have already seen the word before. Then it doesn't do anything to keep the reader reading.

When it all comes down to as much as I could blabber about writing, the main thing is is originality. I like to use the best possible word choice for something--something that is specific, and that is clear. Because if you aren't clear to a reader. then you lose them, and a lost person is not a happy person, nor is a lost person an incitful person. Once this happens, and your thoughts of sentences just weave into nothing, you lose the reader entirely, and they drone you out until they can't even hear you.

In this way, too, you have to weigh the importance of something and how much it needs to be clarified. What I try to do as I write is constantly go over what I've written, whether it just be a few sentences or an entire paragraph, and see how mechanically (punctuation-wise) it works, and see if the word choices work, and if they are expanded on enough. Basically, I just read into my own thinking and see, if I were a reader, if I would understand this. Of course you still can't be completely a reader when you're writing, since you can't be exactly certain if what you've written is just too complex and cruxifying for the reader, or if it's just something that isn't needed. You never know.

I find that most people see the things which I see as beauties as something that is weak. My english teacher, after reading my 2,000 word column, had crossed out the sentence, "I was a cajoling yodeling Barney the Dinosaur."

This sentence alone catches me--the reader part of me--like nothing else. It's abstract, it's original, and if you look into it enough, you'll see what it means. The double use of the gerunds (ing's) themselves give it some rhythm, while the Barney the Dinosaur part gives it--I hope--some humor as well as an image to it.

Just think of Barney. He's innocent. Some--most highschoolers I'd say--consider him to be something little kids idolize, and see him as something that is annoying, horrible at what he does, and all-in-all inferior and stupid.

That's what I meant by this.

Now, from just looking at this thing alone, it works wellm right? Yes. Now give it some place in a sentence, such as:

""Somewhat," I said. I could've said that I did. I could've told her that I actually mostly did. But what was I? I was a little colonel, I was a yodeling cajoling little Barney the Dinosaur. I didn't know jack. And it was pointless to tell her the truth, I could see it in her pig eyes that I wasn't going to get out of this. So I kept shut."

That's directly quoted from my column. Isn't it beautiful? Some will say yes, others will say no. At least, I'm sure, all you can say, that it caught your intention, right? That's the intention.

I'd also like to focus on this part of this paragraph. And it's such a small thing, some might even overlook it.

"I could see it in her pig eyes that I wasn't going to get out of this."

Pig eyes. Isn't that nice, too? Doesn't it just give you instantly the picture of a pig, which I'm sure all of you have some sort of picture. As it's used here, it's used to show that she was fat. Imagining a pig's eyes is a harder thing to do, though. I don't think I was aiming for that though, really, when you get down to it. But you can see the image of a pig, and place some eyes, as vague as it is, right? It's little things like this, in the long run, if you want to be a writer, that should soon come to you and show you that it really does matter. Try reading this sentence without the pig part:

"I could see it in hereyes that I wasn't going to get out of this."

Isn't it a lot more plain? You really don't get any image from it, and it has such over-used, boring words. This is what I mean: small little things have such a great affect on writing, and do such amazing things.

This is what I do as a writer. I take all of my vocabulary I've learned, and I try to dig out the things that I don't quite remember and tie them into some kind of metaphor or simile.

Sometimes words even just come to me, as strange as it's to say. It's like I have some intuition with them--they just come instantaneously, just pow, come. Instinct. That's what it is, some kind of random instict. When you examine language enough, you will find that a lot of pieces of words form other words, right? My mind just splays them all over and sometimes adds things together, randomly, somehow. I do this with suffixes too. To me, as a writer, it's all about being there for the reader, guiding them along and letting them feel what I feel by the use of as beating words as I can use.

I've really rambled. Basically this post is about how in english today we went over word choices. We filled out this sheet using the infinitives of such lame words as to give, to obtain, to walk slowly, and such, and choose better words for these.

One of these was to fly. It's a really hard one. I, trying to be as atypical as I usually try to be, put down aeorplane. When the teacher got to me, she mentioned that since we are mostly doing formal essays--and that is what we will do in college--I can't use this. This totally makes writing not fun from me.

In general I hate writing formal essays. It's like bullshitting about some topic that no one could give a damn about, and purposely not putting the reader first. It's just no fun to read some blank, totally unstylistic jargon about something in the end, when it comes down to it, doesn't mean anything else than probably what you said in your thesis statement and the second paragraph. Doing this is overdoing what you need to say--being superfluous. It's not needed. It's something that will bore the reader to a happy death. Why write like this when I can write how I want?

Do you want an example of an extremely dull, shitty, formal piece of shit sentence, and a good, stylistic one? Okay then.

"He was the coolest man ever when he was flying in the air and just being bad. "

Flying, coolest, ever, bad, just. All these words I hate, and immediately just read over like a car droning along on its way. I don't care about them, I've seen them before, I don't see a reason to tie them into my mind and find out what they mean, so I read on from this sentence in hopes of finding something better.

Here's a re-worked one.

"He aeroplaned around, the most envied piece of junk ever to be scrapped into a streamlined form and placed into the painted sky."

It's not the best--but doesn't it work well? I'm basically saying, with envied and junk, that he was bad as well as good. That he was "cool" as well as "bad." Doesn't this work better? I think so.

My teacher would argue that I'm using a noun, aeroplane, as a verb, and using the slang of it, aeroplaned, which I made up myself. So what? My goal as writer isnt' to be Mr. I follow the rules and bore the fucking shit out of you, my mission is to keep the reader loving every word, and seeing images, and just enjoying the ride.

I've also done the use of a noun as verb before in a poem.

"see those spiders in your hair
as they ulcer a period there,"

is something how it went. Isn't that just beautiful and genius? The use of ulcer as a verb is beautiful, so abstract. I love it. And when you think of ulcer, if you're aquainted with the word, you'll instantly see it as something that is horrid, and killing. Since an ulcer is basically necrotizing, or dead tissue. And what is a period? It is something that ends a sentence. But look past the sentence. It's just something the ends.

That was the basis of this poem...how we are like commas in the big monster that is life, and we crawl around, until our commas or changed, or killed, ulcered, into death. Into an end. Into periods. Do you see my abstract thinking here, my use of metaphors? Doesn't it at least make you understand it so completely, or just wish you did? That's the point.

As for mechanics, that's another thing I'd like to argue about. My teacher says that a semi-colon should only be used to link two complete sentences together. I saw fuck the rules. Just look at this sentence:

"They were like marionettes on strings; some puppets that danced and moved like suave grass swaying in a somber breeze."

It's good, isn't it? And it is a complete sentence and another complete sentence, yes? This causes the reader to be hit with a lot of things at once, and that's what I use it for: to kind of make two sentences, or ideas, one. Look at this use of it, though:

"They were but dancing phantoms on the stage of the gym; nothings."

This serves to be cryptic, sort of beautiful in its simpleness. It gives the reader--the person that's always in the forefront of my mind--time to think deeper into something they can relate to this.

Also, look at these uses of punctuation. As I see it, I should be able to fuck around with this as much as I want too. I should be able to make a sentence flow like I want; which, that's what punctuation's main purpose is. A device to further give fluctiation and beauty to writing.

Look at this:

"I was a fucked man, and I couldn't be fucked, but I was fucked, and so I couldn't do a fucking thing, and I was left to be alone, a mind fucking, numbing little animal in its cage."

This sentence is really fragmented because of the commas. It gives it a nice style, makes you feel how frantically this person must've felt. Now look at this:

"I was a fucked man and I couldn't be fucked but I was fucked and so I couldn't do a fucking thing and I was left to be alone a mind fucking numbing little animal in its cage."

See how different you read this? This is what I mean by using punctuation the way I want. It's again putting the reader in the forefront of my mind.

Punctuation, when you really think about it, too, is its own art in its own way. Good writers use all these things I've mentioned all together in a neat little way of their own. I hope I do some of this lol.
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