Anything but typical prose
Caution: herein lie explosions.
No. 127: Anything but typical prose
The writer usually assumes her reader is in a calm and collected state because usually, that’s what the act of reading is.
Thoughtful, slow, quiet.
But what about all the times when it isn’t, or shouldn’t be, because the writer or reader is excitable, excited, or feeling like something inside of them is about to explode?
What then?
Will a book do the trick? Or an article? Will reading careful sentences written by a careful writer with a careful brain do it?
Something new is needed then.
But what?
Something fast. Something fun. Something joyful. Something that likewise explodes.
That, or it’s going to have to be something else entirely, like a song.
But I believe writing can do it, with one caveat.
It’s got to be unsteady, I think.
Anything but steadiness, please.
Anything but typical prose.
Poetry made prosaic? Sure.
So long as it explodes and is exploding.
That said, the writer meets her reader in that excitable place. It’s a little known fact that, sometimes, writers aren’t all that calm and collected themselves, so it isn’t much of a stretch. Not all writing is done in a musty room, or under a tree, or by the ocean. Sometimes, it’s done on a coffee-stained table littered with wires and headphones and tripods and water bottles and iPhones and weed and money. And to write this way is liberating because sometimes the writer is exploding with something too, and that’s a tough spot, because typical prose tends to be unaccommodating to such a mood, because typical prose is boring.
Boredom.
That’s the enemy.
It’s the opposite of exploding, a tepid pond vs. a firework that’s been accidentally ignited at ground level.
And when typical prose seems a limiter, it’s tempting to just throw the whole damn writing machine from the third-story window and watch it crash on the sidewalk, narrowly missing — or hitting — a pedestrian.
But then, that won’t help anyone, especially not the guy taking a laptop to the head.
So the writer decides to explode the old prose instead of exploding her computer. A new prose, yeah. It’s needed. A prose that meets the moment, that expands upwards and outwards like a mushroom cloud but without the nuclear implications, a prose that dances like natives around a fire instead of that stupid ass waltz.
And as it turns out, that’s all it took.
Both writer and reader connect. It’s perfect. It’s beautiful. It’s more colorful than a rainbow, which for all their hype aren’t even that bright or saturated, at least not when compared to the spectrums produced by writer and reader meeting eye to eye at last.
It’s like, yes.
We can be joyful. We can be fun. We can be happy. We can be new.
It like, yes.
We can go faster. We can go further. We can nix the astuteness and tell the more astute among us to fuck off.
It’s like, yes.
This works. It’s not casual to continually pluck ideas from an endless ocean of them. That’s mindblowingly exciting.
But at the same time, it’s like, no.
There can’t only be one mood — the literary mood. When literature dominates the mood, we’ve lost the plot. It’s the mood that must dominate the literature, and to forget that is to sink into something akin to Davy Jones Locker, a grim hell for all those who have settled to bla bla bla.
The goal should be to augment a mood, not adjust it.
Which can be hard.
This piece, for example, will confuse the downtrodden.
I’m sorry, downtrodden folk.
I love you still.
And no doubt, I will be downtrodden, too, soon enough.
But today?
We explode.
With our hands shaking and our eyes dilating and our stomachs turning upside down, we explode in the way only humans can. That is, over and over and over again.
I think both of us can agree.
That’s exciting. ♦
Weekly Three
HEAR: This song is my soul, or what I hope my soul can be. “Ibs” - Duval Timothy (YouTube)
Excellent work here!!
"It is the job of the creator to explode. It is the task of the academic to walk around the bomb site gathering up the shrapnel to figure out what kind of explosion it was, who was killed, how much damage it was meant to do, and how close it came to actually achieving that. As a writer I'm much more comfortable exploding than talking about explosions."
- Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap Seats
Okay coach thank you I’m amped. I don’t know what’s coming to the page this weekend but I’m excited now lol