Writing that "drags"

I hope this one doesn't...

Untitled, no. 17 of 24, from the illustrated book, Hours of the Day by Louise Bourgeois (MoMA, 2006)

No. 133: Writing that “drags”

Somewhere along the way I encountered the term “drag” in the context of writing, a word thrown about in literary spheres referring to reads that feel like a drawn-out slog.

I like that — “drag.” It fits. Some reads do drag. And I wonder if I’m only noticing it more lately because of my new vocabulary or because I’m a more advanced reader. 

I’ll pat myself on the back in this respect: I’m reading better than ever before. 

At least, I think I am.

This why the concept of “drag” is interesting.

What I’m calling more advanced reading could also be a sign that the digital age, that alleged murderer of attention spans, has finally taken its toll on my poor, pink brain. Sections that come off as dragging to me might be fantastic expressions of imagery to others, even the essence of an author’s writing style. 

I guess we can only be sure of one thing.

Writing that drags comes down to preference. 

But, ahem, who I am if not a man of impeccable taste?

Noticing drag, I think, is good. It means you have strong opinions about reading and writing, which can only be a plus for the writer-reader. When I think back to matt the younger, a spiky-haired kiddo enthralled by pretty much any writing printed and glued between a glossy cover (and, even better, authored by a dead writer), I see a person who faithfully read every word of every chapter for fear of feeling snubbed out of the reading experience.

Today, that feels a bit simple.

I find myself at 28-years-old flying past entire paragraphs, skipping the second half of sentences, or feeling fatigued when I decide to plow my way through a dragging section. The process follows a common pattern. I realize what the writer is doing — “oh boy here we go with a two-paragraph romantic description of the lakeshore for the third time since the start of this book” — and the needle of my Satisfaction Gauge (SG) slowly creeps into the red zone. The writing begins to feel inefficient, stylistically masturbatory, slow and irritating as opposed to quick and painless.

I think my tendency to notice drag has to do with developing a maturer view of who authors are: real, actual humans — artistic people doing their damn bestest, and very admirably falling short from time to time, as we all do. 

This, I love.

Everyone misses, especially those who take big swings. There’s no such thing as a perfect writer — only those we perceive as perfect, sometimes understandably so, because there’s something admittedly god-like about one who communicates without speaking, dead or alive, through the pages of a book. 

By realizing an author is human, we realize that we — also humans — might be authors, too, and ones that will likewise produce dragging sections. We should be so lucky. 

The question of attention span still stands.

What if my attention span has been stunted?

What if, and, so what?

If true, I view this as a further refinement of taste. If I’m less patient, other readers probably are, too.

The question: How does writing react? 

If we live in a word in which we’re busier than ever, with many pleasurable and/or mandatory activities vying for our time…

The question, again: How does writing react?

There’s never been a time when a writer shouldn’t respect her reader, and perhaps that respect is more important than ever now, when people have more alternatives to reading than ever before. Perhaps nothing suggests this more effectively than realizing that, even in the realm of those easier-to-consume alternatives, the same rules apply.

Take video, which I’ve mentioned a lot recently.

In my recent adventures in the realm of short-form media, I’ve unsurprisingly become a student of visual stories that perform well, not only by external metrics, but by the always-true metric of how a work of art affects me.

Always, it’s the works that tell stories most efficiently that hit the hardest. 

That which is efficient, in my opinion, is also beautiful. 

This is something that’s been underlined in my experience editing videos. Often, the shape of the story I’m trying to tell is decided after I’ve filmed everything, when I’m editing the footage. The mechanism of this shaping process is not addition, but subtraction, something I like to call trimming the fat (and writing has it’s own, similar analogies: trimming the rose bush, killing your darlings). 

So again, noticing dragging is a good thing overall, I think — good inasmuch as you desire to create. The phenomenon of dragging for the strict reader is, most definitely, a bad thing. (Perhaps one day we can get into the topic of finishing, or abandoning, a book that isn’t hitting the spot.)

Luckily, all this talk of dragging is something only relevant within the first and last sentence of this newsletter. All that really needs to be said about encountering works that seem to drag is that, clearly, you have instincts, you have taste, both of which are constantly developing, which is kind of a beautiful thing. 

I guess if it was that easy to say, this whole piece might be a drag.

Forgive me. I tried. ♦

If you enjoyed this piece (and only if you really liked it), please consider subscribing and/or recommending my work to help my find new readers Thanks for stopping by. MZ.

P.S. Keep in mind, paid subscribers get my photo essay series, where I take a camera somewhere, snap a bunch of pictures, and share the pictures along with some writing about what I encountered in the wilds of the real world. More of that coming soon.