Again my thanks to Dan Green at The Reading Experience for calling this essay by William Gass called "The Sentence Seeks Its Form" (Bookforum, Dec/Jan) to our attention, and I am excerpting here from his own to focus on a point:
What can we do to find out how writing is written? Why, we listen to writers who have written well–wondrously well–because that self through which the sentence passes–those eyes, those ears, that nose–is made not of flesh and bone and their dinky experiences, but of pages absorbed from the masters, because that is what writing comes from: It comes from reading. It is not acquired by taking the lift to a slippery peak, by breaking up with yet another boyfriend, by being miserable from thirteen until now.
I believe what he is saying is that while we all have stories–good and interesting ones–in writing, the style and method of putting that story down is what needs to be studied by the aspiring writer. It is not just a case of having something to say, although I thought this alone was my own problem, but to select the way of telling it, to learn the way of telling it that makes it compelling. I know this only too well; perhaps my writing style is looked upon by some as better than average, when I verbally tell story–even if it is something truly exciting that I have firsthand knowledge of–I fail miserably to even get the point across much less make it even as interesting as it actually was.
So how can I, and so many others, do so much better in writing it down than in verbalization? I, of course, totally agree with Gass that you learn a good part of this through reading the best writers. (And, as a bonus, learn to recognize good writing.) But I think that experience as well contributes. As a child I know I watched cartoons, some Howdy Doody and Pinkie Lee, but I also know that I didn’t watch a lot of the children’s shows that I found my schoolmates had been brought up watching, such as Mr. Rogers, and similar early prototypes of Sesame Street. I did watch the cowboy shows, and we did watch all the old movies as were daily presented on the 5:00 p.m. The Early Show. So I would think that what we were absorbing was more drama, language, reality of the adult world that most of my friends didn’t see.
I realize that this excerpt is taken out of context of Gass’ full essay (I do not have access to the article), but it is an interesting concept and one that I would agree with. We may have the most traumatic experience that would provide excellent story, but if asked to write it down and could come up with no better than "my day sucked," then it’s obvious that we just haven’t learned to describe what happened to be able to share the experience (or elaborate on it, using it as a base) and no decent story will be formed from it.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Writers my age typically disagree with the sentiment that “[Writing] is not acquired by taking the lift to a slippery peak, by breaking up with yet another boyfriend, by being miserable from thirteen until now.” To me, the aquisition of content for writing, and skills for arranging the words themselves, are as inseperable as writing is from reading. Writing an adventure story, for example, is aided by having had an adventure, but it is written by sitting at a desk.
Yes, I see your point. There is nothing short of “having been there” to come up with the emotion, the feel of the event. But I would think that the learning of how to describe it is helped enormously by the reading of those so skilled, or talented, that our own use of language is expanded as well as our way of viewing the world. I’m not sure age rather than openmindedness and a creative nature have much to do with it. And too, each writer not only absorbs but reacts and writes the world differently.