The most basic writing and it still goes wrong again and again

Monday 2/19/24

I'm going to illustrate something here before I run stairs. Looking at these AGNI stories--and they're all bad--I see the most obvious errors, one after another. Things that should be flagged by the writer or the editor--in the latter case, our friend Sven Birkerts, but he doesn't know what he's doing.

For instance, let's consider the first sentence of a short story called "Laurel and Patina" by Christopher Notarnicola. Here it is:

For seventeen convoys, in the helpless passenger seat behind layered glass and the streaming world, he said nothing when things went antic.

Anyone who can write well has this kind of internal ordering device. It's more than a device, I should say. It's a totality, a way you are, what you are with this thing you have. It's something that you can't teach and that can't be learned. You possess this or you don't. What it does is put things in order for you so that they have this maximum combined power of sound and sense, with the two abetting each other. It's just not words and phrases and clauses that are ordered; it goes deeper than that. It's the ordering of parts of sounds, and parts of the parts of sounds, and the subsequent selections that are made in writing--and speaking--to get the most from this idea that is itself more than idea. I don't want to term this an inner ear, because, again, it's so much more.

What I'm talking about is different than making basic corrections that should have been obvious to writer and editor in what's really very basic writing.

As I've said before, there's nothing easier to do than to stop reading something. Think of reading like moving your hand across a surface. Your hand is going along, and then it hits this thumbtack that someone put there.

No. We don't want that. Usually, these people are so bad at what they're doing that the title itself is a thumbtack. It's blah, it's annoying, it's a cliche, it does nothing, portends nothing, doesn't impel us, is flat, etc. You get to the first few words of the story itself--though I'd argue that a title also is a story--and generally you get another thumbtack.

Well, how many do you think you can get away with before someone bails? And that's when there's nothing else either. The story isn't offering anything. It's one thing for something to not offer anything--that's bad enough--but to have all of these thumbtacks sticking up, too?

You see how awkward that is when we hit the first comma of this story? The syntax snaps. This isn't natural flow, and it's not some impeccable and wise choice on an author's part to call some form of attention to that for impact or thematic reason.

We start out with three words, our ear and our readerly eye is going in a given direction, and then that sentence grinds to this awkward halt with that comma, and we have to reset and begin again. You've messed us up. Put us off our stroke as readers.

But then the problem is compounded. We are told of a "helpless passenger seat." We get--if we decide to be charitable--what the author means. They're talking about how when someone is in the passenger seat they don't have agency with how the vehicle runs. But that's not what this says, is it? I, the reader, shouldn't have to cover for you, the writer, and make these allowances on your behalf. The sentence says that the seat itself is helpless. A helpless seat? As opposed to a capable seat?

It's a mixed metaphor. So now you've hit me with some other cock-up. And I'm done. I know all I need to know about you as a writer. You don't get any more from me. That's how readers are. This isn't me being some monster. I've said this again and again: You have to think about the person on the other side of the table. They're who matters most. Otherwise, just keep some private diary for yourself. That doesn't mean you can't write this open-ended work with parts open for interpretation. What it means is you shouldn't be fucking up.

Then we get "the streaming world." Again, it's not effective. What the author probably means--but you see how we have to treat him like this charity case we're trying to make excuses for?--is that the world outside the window is streaming by. But "streaming" is a word with which we need to be careful here in this age. "The streaming world" has an internet connotation. This writer isn't clear, and not because they're deliberately fostering mystery and we're going along with that mystery and its open-endedness on account that the writing--and, more importantly, what we've experienced with the story--has made that not just viable but also how it should be with this story and this place we're in and the journey we're now on and with the life experience we're presently having.

Instead, we're annoyed and distrustful. We've had to stop and reset multiple times already. It's like you're trying to do something and your kid keeps interrupting you. Eventually, you say, "I'll just come back to this later." But that's something you want to come back to, that you've deemed worth it beforehand. That's why you were taking that thing up when you took it up before you had to field a dozen questions from your daughter about her math homework.

This is different. You're not going to come back to this. (Not that you would be here in the first place, given that the people of this system have killed off reading and none of this is actually meant to be read, but you know what I mean.)

And how is it possible to be "behind" the streaming world?

It's error after error after error.

Temporally we're also confused. At first we don't know if "things went antic" every one of these seventeen times, or if they're just going antic now, on what we might presume is convoy seventeen or eighteen.

You can't make a writer a writer that that writer is not. But you can fix certain things somewhat. Here's how an editor should have suggested this sentence go instead:

In the passenger seat behind layered glass, he said nothing for seventeen convoys when things went antic.

It's still not any good, because this isn't someone working with anything, but you avoid those errors.