Forty-nine words everyone knows

Wednesday 3/18/26

Let's look at a paragraph, shall we? A paragraph of sheer power and beauty. One that uses words we all know. Words a three-year-old knows. Words we use all the time.

But there is no one who would use those words--put those words together--as I have in said paragraph.

I've been working a lot on a story called "Still Good" for There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, my book in which all of the stories are about women or girls, and would have to be. That is, you couldn't replace these main characters with male characters and just carry on. It's from the feminine side.

There are only a couple of stories in the book narrated by a man. These stories are still about female characters, but they also say things about the person telling the story and men and women in relationship to each other, but ultimately, again, coming back to what that means for a woman or girl. What we learn about men--what is posited about men--in the book is a result of how they're revealed in relation to the feminine. Everything in this book is relative to the female, the feminine, women, girls.

"Still Good" involves a man who purchases what he thinks--and has every reason to think, as he explains--is some OnlyFans type of subscription. It could be from that site. It's not specified. Doesn't have to be, and it would be limiting for the story to do so.

Don't imprison a story within a given time period, such that it would have less resonance, or be incongruous, or cause confusion, with people later on, when a given proper noun may no longer be a thing that anyone knows. Apart from their stories not being any good, too many writers bind those efforts with what will eventually--and it doesn't have to take long at all--be obsolete terms.

People aren't going to look stuff up unless that thing is their thing; like, if you were really into the Beatles, you might look up who Arthur Alexander was, but these days, that feels like a minor miracle, because that's how lazy people are. So if you're throwing in all of these proper nouns, you have to make sure that their meaning can be gleaned--and easily at that--contextually, because people wouldn't so much as take the ten steps unless that's how far it was to the bathroom and they had to piss.

You can write a story that speaks to its age, is the ultimate work of its age, has more relevance and meaning to its age and those living in that age than anything else from or of that age, is vitally needed in that age for the people living during that time period, which is also eternally relevant and doesn't date at all.

But that's a challenge, isn't it?

All of it's a challenge. The biggest challenges there can be, when you're trying to do what I am doing. Then again, I'm the only person who is. So these are my challenges.

This man pays the subscription fee, and then discovers that this isn't the personalized porn subscription he thought it was going to be, but rather features this same woman sitting in her car, at some seemingly remote, quasi-forested spot, giving life advice, self-help tips, that kind of thing.

As she talks in her videos, a different sort of story emerges, one that the man is piecing together, though he doesn't have all the information and he probably isn't going to.

And then in one video, something happens, and another person becomes part of the "action," if you will.

What follows is a paragraph from the first page. It's not one anyone else could write. In terms of the quantity and depth of its meaning, its sound, its sense--the relationship between sound and sense. But as I was saying, we all know these words, we all use these words. Here it is:

The skin you saw was her face and hands. What you think of as the everyday parts. Her hair stood out as much as anything. It was short but like it hadn’t been short for long and a friend would be surprised after not seeing her for a while.               

One paragraph, four sentences, no commas. A total of forty-nine words, forty-three of which are comprised of a single syllable.

You just would never see anything like this paragraph anywhere else. How do you classify that? How do you do that? Who puts things this way? The perspective we get--this other person's perspective--is unique.

You cannot fake this. You cannot be taught this. You won't be helped to do this by an MFA program.

I'm isolating this paragraph. To see how it works in conjunction with what's around it, the rest of the first page, the whole of the story, is a different matter. And sure, most people don't know how "every day" and "everyday" work grammatically, but they still know the meaning of both even if to them it's always "everyday" when they write because, well, you know why, if you know anything about the current state of almost everyone's language skills.

Note the point of view. It's a male point of view, but already it's starting to shade to a female-infused--or influenced--point of view. We're watching someone as they started to see someone else empathetically. We have vestiges of his now-mooted expectations--"as much as anything," which also reads as, "instead of...what I was paying to see."

The hair registers with him as a notable change, and potentially for multiple reasons. Why might someone who wears their hair long get it cut short? Okay, a simple change, but that's not what this feels like. An attempt to make over what is inside by a change on the outside. That never works, but many of us try it. Especially when we're desperate, when we're crumbling internally. There can be other reasons, too. Less to grab, less to pull. Escapability.

What we do know is she hadn't worn her hair previously this way over the adult portion of her life long enough to cover long term friendships. Those friends you don't stay in touch with are usually people with whom you go way back, or else you wouldn't think of them as your friends anymore after long periods without contact. We only do that with old friends.

Why might she be out of contact with these people? That can be a warning sign, can't it? A divide-and-conquer--conquer one person--thing.

He's still phrasing these things in his terms. The voice is authentic. "...like it hadn't been short for long..." He's not talking about a single haircut--as in one that you get periodically to keep your appearance as it was--but rather something gestural. A conscious break with how the hair had always been.

It's like this temporal elision, as a result of the voice and the point of view, but it has to be clear and temporally clear. She wasn't someone--from a friend's perspective now--who would mix something up like that. Not a short-haired person in the time they had known them. Over the period of time long enough to still think of them as a friend despite little to no contact.

Pronouns are important here. There's no "me," no "I." Rather, "you," "her," "they." His focus isn't himself, or how things pertain to him. His perspective has already expanded. The story is told in this combination of the past tense--he's already done this witnessing--but also the present tense, because these lives are going on and he's talking about videos in part, too, which are in some capacity always in the present tense.

It's a story about preservation in that regard, and also self-preservation. But the expansion is two-fold; it's in what he watched and what he thought before we came along, and it's in the telling of what he watched as he has thoughts in real-time himself. So there's a lot happening temporally and at different times at once in one time.

But again, we all know these words. We all use this words. You're unlikely to find a paragraph by anyone that isn't a single line or whatever with a higher percentage of one-syllable words.

As I've said before, you can't fake voice. When he describes "the everyday part," we know exactly what he means, even though we wouldn't put this this way ourselves. His choice of language stems in part from his previous expectations. We're with him in his head and voice has much to do with that. A non-everyday part to him, in this context, would be...well, you know what that would be. Something normally under wraps, so to speak, not visible to the other people on the subway, for instance.

"The skin you saw was her face and hands."

That's poetry in prose form. And its sweep is grand--we're going back to primitive humans. The same impulses are there. It's like when Vincent Van Gogh wrote a letter to his brother Theo bemoaning how it was inevitable to need to ejaculate, as if this was the driver of so much. But that primitive drive has morphed here. It's a form of self-restraint of observation, and insistence thereof. The sentence is both atavistic in the one regard--or has what we can call a throwback point of view in its focus on skin, face, hands; the most basic of outward physical elements--and yet innocent, almost sweet.

A tween has a crush on someone and what's their focus? What do they think of, physically? Skin, face, hands. Smile. Hair. Eyes. We get eyes here in a way, with "you saw." This sounds like an unselfish man. Or if you want to be less charitable, because men, right? But if you want to be less charitable, you could say he's a man trying not to just be some "typical" man, or what's thought of as the typical man. There's an unfolding. An opening up. That's what she's doing, perhaps without knowing the extent to which she's doing it, but it's what he's doing, too, in how he talks about the videos of hers that he's seen.

That "you" is him, but it also means us. He's speaking for us, as though we were him. It's not presumptive. There isn't attitude or superciliousness here. But it puts us behind the camera as well. And that matters a lot in this story about someone in a car who is filming themselves. Why is she doing this?

Or maybe the question is instead, "Who is this for?" She expresses her thoughts as though she were providing a service of advice to people in need of it--her fans, if you wanted to call them that--but we don't feel like that's her real target audience. Then again, we also feel like her target audience isn't getting, or accepting, her words, ironically enough in this case.

The narrator's voice is unique, and endemic to him and this situation of this story. It's his personality, yes, and his manner, his style of speaking, but those things are altered in turn because of the particular and unique story he is telling.

When we read those words, they also feel like they fit with us. They could be our words even though they're not. Indicative of something you never officially were but you feel like you were or maybe really were all along. A way back home. Or to the home that recognize now as such...in your gut...in the feeling at the back of your neck. This is new, and yet it feels familiar.

It's lived.

What do we always say?

The value of a work of art is directly proportional to the amount of life it contains.

There is a world of life in that paragraph alone. It gains in greater quantities of life with how it works within the work itself, which is something most publishing people don't want you to see because of what that contrast says and reveals. The contrast between this writing and their own writing and the writing they lie about as being so amazing, etc. And the contrast between me and them.

But isolated all the same, we experience--I don't think "read" is quite the correct word--something unique of true depth that is simultaneously accessible to all, or nearly all.

This isn't what other people are doing. That's not what's happening with Junot Diaz, Joshua Cohen, The Paris Review, Joyce Carol Oates, The Baffler, The New Yorker, Yiyun Li, George Saunders, Laura Van Den Berg, Granta, Tommy Orange garbage is it?

If you want to call any of that writing done by writers, you have to call me and what I do different things, because who I am and what I'm doing isn't remotely the same.