The problem with words

My gym visits are usually uneventful, but yesterday was a whole other story. Yesterday I met A, a journalism major, who seemed to share my thoughts on most important issues concerning writing.

Like me, A has written a book about the human condition -- it is sixty-five-thousand words long, and like mine, it too doesn't have a title that its author likes. Like me, she is terrified by the prospect of publisher rejection -- she can't bring herself to be judged by a bunch of "faceless people more interested in marketing an idea instead of publishing literature" . And her book, like mine, has been read by about four people.

That I felt an intense, life-affirming gratification at meeting an insecure writer like myself is fairly obvious. I've spent the last year, on & off, agonizing about things like mediocrity and rejection; I've thought about whether I should let more people read my book, or whether it was a mistake to give it even to one person; and I've read it so many times that I can reel off entire passages from memory. In short, I've lost all perspective on my sole work of art (there, I said it), and so you can imagine how cheered I was when I met another person like me.

The high point of the conversation, though, was our discussion on the nature of sentences -- we were both of the opinion that sentences can be about either themselves or about their subject. An example of a sentence that is about itself can be read in the "About" page of this blog (actually, this blog is littered with sentences like this) --"An exercise in style, this blog abandons most conventional approaches to populism, preferring instead to dissemble its intentions beneath a veil of heavy-handed pseudo-intellectual verbosity and imperfectly thought out semi-ideas; in so doing, it kicks much ass."

That sentence is three things -- long, verbose, and self-indulgent. The untrained reader might impatiently exclaim that it uses "big words" and is "empty"; a more appropriate adjective would be "cloying".

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have sentences that are about something (other than themselves). For eg (from my post on Austin live music):"I’d been with my friend to this little pub/restaurant on sixth street, one of those places that has the TV muted to ESPN baseball and the muzak playing Sinatra."This sentence puts a picture in your head without using too many adjectives. In itself, it may be of little use, but many such sentences line up to make up the bulk of modern literature. Typically, such sentences contain similes and metaphors, and use adjectives as tools instead of crutches; they are, in some sense, better than their self-indulgent counterparts.

But they aren't all bad. For me, it is always a pleasure to be able to use 'risible' in place of 'laughable', and 'gravid' in place of 'full of', not because they're 'big words' but because they're more appropriate. Writing is always about using the right words, and adjectives usually need to be more right than most other kinds of words. Writers need to know their adjectives well so as to use them appropriately.

We decided, though, that no serious writer can afford to keep his love for the abstruse sentence and still flourish. A worst case scenario might be a page-long paragraph populated with three sentences full of adjectives describing other adjectives that describe still other adjectives; a paragraph that loses sight of its subject, preferring to deal with its own pseudo-pulchritude instead; a paragraph that causes the reader to throw down the book in a fit of annoyance. Such writing, we agreed, is mostly self-defeating.

Inside, however, I still feel a deep affection for convoluted adjectival prose. It might be self-defeating and narcissistic, a garish display of verbal might; it might stand for nothing more than itself; and less, it might serve to deter all those who approach it with an open mind; but for me, it will always remain fun, both to read and write.