waning curiosity

Lately, reading drafts of my writing has become one of those activities that I look forward to with trepidation. This is especially true with drafts that I haven’t seen in awhile. They read like the ravings of a very calm madman. Something must be important to the hell-bent speaker of my determined prose, but it is not exactly clear what that obsessed-over object might be. Descriptions zoom in so close to mind-staggeringly minute points that its like this person is writing from within a can of tuna (and can’t seem to write himself out it). This sense of claustrophobia is what bothers me the most. I wait impatiently, with bated breadth, for a sentence, a word even that gestures outward to some bigger picture. And slowly it dawns on me that there’s going to be quite a wait before this guy says anything to give the remote impression of any relative importance. How can something that once seemed so urgent suddenly lose all semblance of being a matter of importance after a period of a mere seven days?

My writing isn’t always like this. It’s Freud, I tell you.

So I pulled a book off my shelf to see how the pros did it. The book I grabbed probably wasn’t the best choice, considering that the author specializes in comparative literature, a field requiring a pretty wide breadth of knowledge (just everything ever written). It was helpful regardless. The subject matter was no less obscure and esoteric than my own, and possibly more so since people have at least heard of Freud. But this guy had taken measures to combat this complete lack of interest. In every single paragraph about his palpably boring subject (J.C. Powys’s, A Glastonbury Romance) he took the reader in hand and led him carefully to a place where there stood, staring you plainly in the face, the answer to that timeless question: “who gives a shit?” Seriously, he did this like two to three times a page. All it took to hold my interest was the frequent return to profound, bold, and quotable statements that rolled an idea up into a little gift of portable wisdom. Yeah! You’re right! It is really interesting that this pretty forgettable author (Powys, in case you forgot already) just used a modern aesthetics to express an anti-modern sentiment. Then again, what do I know? My ideas for what counts as exciting are clearly warped by years of education.