Not even a fully day has passed since my last missive, and I have already come dangerously close to letting my newly-turned leaf of productivity wilt and catch fire like a greasy burger forgotten on the grill, wherein said greasy burger was wrapped in some previously moist and supple leaf such as that of a cabbage, or whatever they make spanakopita out of.
As you might have guessed, today’s communiqué draws inspiration from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad writing.
What I find so fascinating about the contest is that creating a winning entry requires not only a great sense of humor and a command of grammar clichés, but the ability to conjure up the most ridiculous scenes. Forget about making it funny. How do they come up with this stuff? It feels like it must be incredibly hard, but I haven’t written a word of fiction since I was in high school. So for the next few minutes, I am going to try an exercise: With as little revising as possible, and in as short a time as possible, I am going to write three sentences, each describing a bizarre scene bearing little resemblance to anything in my life. It’s going to be horrible. Here goes:
Bernardo hopped off his windsurfer into the shallows and felt the sting of saltwater on his newly shaven chest as his feet landed softly on the white Brazilian sand.
[Oh my god what was horrible!]
“I just know that Mr. Svenson must have taken it,” she fretted, as she pushed her bifocals up her nose and hurriedly flipped through the hanging files in her study looking for the deed to her granddaughter’s farmstead.
[Farmstead? What?]
“I know why you’re here, Harry, and I know why you brought two of your dogs but not the third, and I know why you’re holding that printer cartridge, but before you say a word, you must understand that I never intended to finish the pork lo mein—it just happened.”
[Ok now that makes no sense at all.]
So what have I learned? Nothing, probably. But I am reminded that the process of writing fiction scares me in a way that does not seem to apply to, say, academic or technical writing. With fiction is like standing at the edge of a cliff overlooking a vast ocean of possibility—the land being what you have written, the ocean being what you might write next, and the cliff being the thin line between the two: Of all the ideas in the world, and all the ways to express them, what should I choose? Should the windsurfer have black hair? Does it matter? Is he in South Africa and not Brazil? Why?
How is it even possible to create a cohesive string of words that tells a story over hundreds of pages, leaving out what is unnecessary, including what is essential, constructing a narrative arc, building characters, evoking emotions, using metaphors, following themes, and all that jazz? It’s a mystery to me.
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