Writing on Writing and George Orwell.

For one of my classes we had to write a “manifesto” which answers/grapples with the age-old question always posed to writers who are in classrooms: Why I Write.

Yes, I know that is not a question.

You can blame George Orwell for all this, he wrote the first truly famous modern why-I-write essay, cleverly titled, “Why I Write”, and writing students at all levels, in all places, and all at all times since have been asked to write their own. This time though, there was a twist! It had to be either in the form of a manifesto or a (self) interview. I went with the manifesto form because it is more malleable (a manifesto is whatever I say it is!) and because not even I am arrogant enough to write a fake interview with myself and then ask other people to read it.

My “manifesto” is below.

A note: I did not write it to be read online and it is going to be frustrating unless you read it in two tabs in your browser and ain’t nobody got time for that.

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Manifesto.

James Bezerra’s

Writing Manifesto

Calm down,

no one cares about your masterpiece until you’ve written it. (1)

If you have a story to tell,

determine the form which is most advantageous for that story. (2)

Read everything ever written in that form;

learn to breathe that form. (3)

Now write

until it is written. (4)

If you have no story to tell,

stop wasting everyone’s time. (5)

Despite themselves,

all people enjoy the occasional use of the word ‘fuck’, (6)

learn to use it sparingly and effectively.

Also, do this with all the other words too. (7)

If ever in doubt,

sexy is always better than not. (8)

Always know more than your reader

and always tell them you know more than them. (9)

Understand that love and fear are basically the same thing, and

that fundamentally those are the only things. (10)

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(1)

Most of the writers you meet don’t write. Not really. Most of the writers you meet are low-rent philosophers, aspirational authors, deeply hopeful searchers, or lying. This explains the growing prevalence of theory-fictions, of writers writing novels about writers writing novels, of the reduction of the Humanities to relativistic pseudo-sciences. Having an idea is not the same as successfully birthing that idea into a piece of writing. The idea is not the thing. Writers, to be writers, have to make the thing.

(2)

If you are packing for a ‘round-the-world cruise and you would like to take your pet dolphin with you, it would be wise to have a vaguely dolphin-shaped suitcase in which to put him. A smaller suitcase is no good because it isn’t big enough to hold him. A too-large suitcase is no good either; how would you move it? Consider the weight of the water in addition to the weight of the dolphin. Once on the cruise ship, you can put the dolphin in the wave pool, so all you need is a tool to get the job done. This is not a decision that is ideological. It is a practical decision. As a responsible dolphin-owner, you should be familiar with many different types and kinds and shapes of dolphin-transportation-suitcases, so that you can choose the best one for any of your dolphin transport needs. This is also true of the form and structure of a piece of writing.

(3)

There are many things I like about running, chief among them is the fact it is simple. Own good shoes and possess the will to go out and run. That’s about all there is to it. One need not study Usain Bolt to improve as a runner; because none of us will ever be Usain Bolt. This philosophy does not, however, hold true of the structural engineers who build bridges. We ask those engineers to know everything there is to know about bridges. We ask that they have studied bridges: big bridges, little bridges, bridges made of steel and bridges made of stone, good bridges and failed bridges. We ask our bridge builders to know more about bridges than we do. We ask a lot of them. While there are some other similarities between writing and running, in this regard, writers are engineers.

(4)

There is no easy way to break this to you: the only way to write a book is to write it. It will involve many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many many hours of your life spent sitting still and hallucinating into a keyboard and likely no one will ever even notice or care. You may spend years of your life writing it and a quick reader will read it in a day, shrug, and go microwave a pizza. No writer, no matter how profound, will ever stop the Earth from turning. Despite these things, there is no other way to write.

(5)

Writers descent from shaman and fireside story tellers. The written word is an extension of the spoken one. Storytellers serve a social function; we have a job, a duty, an obligation. Writing - good writing - is not only self expression, it does something. It is something, if it isn’t then it's nothing.

(6)

Believe it or not, not everyone says the word “fuck”. My grandmother abhorred it. But she did like George Carlin and sometimes he said it. Be it naughty, or offensive, or even a little mean, we all sometimes like to have our boundaries pushed. Also, “fuck” is a versatile word.

(7)

If you ever get the chance to stand very close to a Jackson Pollock painting - so close that it makes the security guard in the gallery a little nervous - you will begin to notice that it is not quite as much of a mess as it initially seemed. There is control in it, there is even order to the composition, though it is a Big Bang kind of exploding order like the explosion one can get by shaping a plastic explosive before detonating it. The energy that created a Pollock painting is controlled, effective, and even - when you really look at it - sparing. Write like that.

(8)

“Sexy” is a transmutable word. There can be sexy in the grotesque, in the violent, in the well-crafted sentence, in a good line of description, in a well-rendered tragedy. Sexy is that which makes a thing attractive to us. Often that attraction lurks somewhere below what we say or do or understand. There is an animal instinct within us that determines what is sexy and the writer must try to access that.

(9)

The reader has to make an investment of time (and therefore of a quantity of their own life) in you, the writer. It is your job to be good enough not to waste their time (and therefore their life). The reader likes to know that you are not going to screw them over on their investment. The reader likes to be able to believe in you. The reader wants to believe in you. The reader should be able to read you and stand confident in you. Your writing should allow the reader to believe in you.

(10)

When boiled down to their essential elements, most emotions are only either love or fear. Though somewhat different, these both can strain the knotted muscle of our heart. Both make us sweat and dilate our pupils. Nearly all things can be reduced to either love or fear and the writer must know that and must be able to control those things and use that knowledge as a tool. Manipulative as it may be, it is only this way that the writer can cross the gulf and reach out to the reader.

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Dodging the Draft.

The piece below is a first draft an “Aesthetic Manifesto”. That was the assignment anyway. What you see below is not so much a first draft as it is a thinking-out of what I need to articulate in something called an “Aesthetic Manifesto”. The keen reader of this blog might notice how similar my academic writing has become to my blog writing.

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Getting My Manifesto On.

Aesthetic Manifesto: Draft 1

James Bezerra

One sure sign that you have ended up in the weeds while attempting to write your aesthetic manifesto is that you freely and under no threat of duress return to the manifesto of Dadaism. Asking Tristan Tzara for help is probably about as good of an idea as asking William S. Burroughs to write the tax code; it will be fascinating, it will likely not be illuminating.

Because we expect our manifestos to be jaunty and bombastic and pamphlet-able, I am breaking this one up into bite-sized chunks, like chicken in soup.

The nighttime work of a writer is writing. The day job work of a writer is the amassing of tools to be placed into a toolbox. These tools can be words or styles or strategies or thoughts or images or people or - as is frequently the case in my own life - whiskey.

I have not yet formulated a Grand Unified Theory of my own writing. Or rather, I have not yet figured out how to write it down. But I have some thoughts:

Tzara did write things like, “knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: DADA”. You gotta admire a guy who writes like that. I think I would have enjoyed being a Dadaist, though I don’t think they would have enjoyed me. I think I would have liked being a Trotskyite too, though I have never been able to decide if my affinity for Trotsky is entirely the fault of David Ives.

My aunt used to own a small box. It was made of light colored wood and half the size of a brick and it didn’t open, exactly. It was a kind of rudimentary Rubik’s Cube she’d picked up in Hong Kong. Slide one side in order to move a peg inside in order to release the top panel to slide away in order to be able to hinge open the other side, etc etc etc.

I write like that.

I try to build magical little clockwork black boxes. All writing should have within it a kind of mystery; that creates the joy of reading. The act of writing then, is the act of building that mystery (shout out here to Sarah McLachlan) and it is one of the most problematic acts of joy and most complicated acts of problem-solving I have ever even heard of. I think about writing the way that chess players think about chess: that it is an insane pleasure which will probably one day crush me and drive me completely batshit out of my mind.

I’ve been writing basically my entire life. I used to use a machine called a ‘word processor’, which was like a box where you kept all of your frustrations and paper jams. Early on as a writer I made a list of things that I did not want to write about. An excerpt:  

• Cops
• Doctors
• Medical examiners
• Criminals out for one last score
• Astronauts (I have no idea why this ended up on the list. I was 12.)
• Heroic G.I. Joe-esque soldiers
• Wise-beyond-their-years children
• Fearless and high-moral investigative journalists
• James Bond ripoffs
• Any type of character that Tom Cruise might one day want to play
• Chosen Ones (Luke Skywalker, Neo, Jesus, Harry Potter, etc.)
• Rockstars
• Serial killers

The list goes on.

Other people will invariably write that shit and god love them for doing it, but the world is far too weird and complicated and confused and mysterious of a place for me to spend my time doing it.

The most recent thing I wrote was about a guy who needed to find 50 mimes real fast.

I find myself returning to Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins about once a year. The way that some people return to Don Quixote or the Bible. For me, Still Life is about as perfect, small, and beautiful of a novel as has ever been written. From the kitchen table where I do all my writing I can see it. I also make sure that I can always see the spines of Steve Erickson’s Amnesiascope, Amiee Bender’s Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, One Hundred Years of Solitude by my man Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and at least one Vonnegut novel though I waffle often over which one that should be (Slaughterhouse-Five or Mother Night). These books are my extended, portable, literary family.

For the record: Yes, I just said Still Life is as nearly perfect of a thing as I have read.

That’s not true.

I have actually read the one perfect thing that exists and it is a short story by Carol Shields called “Various Miracles”. I will not defame it by saying any more about it.

I feel like I am still in the weeds.

Our writing must contain joy. Not happiness, but joy.

I like the act of attempting to make the ridiculous not ridiculous.

I love the words: svelte, duck, ephemeral, tart, slick, syllogism, phosphorescent, emitting.

I hate the words: cacophony, webinar, Hegelian, parataxis, jurisprudence, chalk.

Our writing should be charming bordering on snarky, sexy bordering on lurid, clever bordering on obnoxious, honest bordering on profane, and ultimately when the mystery box finally slides open and reveals itself to us, it should be tender. Our writing should always be like writing to a complicated lover, in that it should hold everything we are capable of feeling. It should be the most true thing about us.

Dada.

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