For a few years I tried to write prettier – to add flourishes that would astound. I guess I didn’t think I would run into that purple prose problem, because I had tended at first to write so sparsely.
Surely, I thought, I could only strengthen my prose by gazing often into gilded, trickled springs or at the azure sky with sadness.
Well, nope.
My problem was trying to flow my sentences like brilliance, and brilliant I am not. Not forced in that way. I love ideas and situations and the intricacies of people, relationships.
I love finding ways to express what I love, but I dig hard in the finding. I’m not a concert pianist, high-strung athlete, or dazzling, tortured artist. In this I can despair at times. But I am also learning to rejoice. I’m a little critter – a part of me has always known it’s so.
I’m seeing I can strengthen what I do have. In the idea-excavating of every day, I scrape a happy portion all my own.
I don’t much care for gilded writing (or design), usually.
I prefer writing that is what Ezra Pound called “sparing with the mortar.”
To write this way well, you have to know what you’re saying.
This is the hardest thing of all.
Yes, Fresca, absolutely. Perhaps that’s the reason there are writers who are able to start well only with age, assuming wisdom has joined them. I know I feel more like I have something to say than when I was 30. But I also need the time to figure out how to say what I’m saying (structure), and that comes usually only after time and much work. I’m finally accepting it!
Well, that was incredible.
Something to come upon in book on writing.
I’m glad to hear you liked coming upon it, Deb.