How To Read A Book

I’ve decided to renovate, re-energize and realign my writing. Style, structural coherence, usage, the whole shebang. To that end I followed the suggestion made by Jerry Pournelle of Chaos Manor to aspiring writers: purchase Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and Adler and Van Doren’s How to Read a Book and read them over and over again. Well, that wasn’t his suggestion exactly, but it’s the gist of it: Pournelle reads The Elements once a year.

My renovations won’t keep me from spouting off; my hope is that they will refine my prose enough so that I can abandon the stylistic tics of a precocious and outclassed teenager and find my own, clear voice--so that I can spout off with improved accuracy and vigor, as it were.

Isn’t finding one’s own, clear voice the eternal quest though? I sure hope it is; looking at it that way takes the edge off of the intense inadequacy and futility I feel each time I write.

Anyhoo—here’s a passage from How to Read a Book that just got me to “thinkin’ sumpin’ fierce”:

“The plot of Tom Jones for instance, can be reduced to the familiar formula: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. That, indeed, is the plot of every romance. To recognize this is to learn what it means to say that there are only a small number of plots in the world.”

Now, if you’re reading this, you understand that what comes next from me is an amateurish gloss on how what I read fits into what Allan Bloom wrote. So here it is:

The modern romantic psychology of teenagers and twenty-somethings has replaced the romantic plot arc with the tragic one: the last third, boy gets girl, has been amputated by the 20th century ego growth-spurt. Modern youth live in tragedy and depression not because they think losing the girl inevitable but because they think getting the girl never was, or that doing so somehow betrays their martyr’s purity. They prefer lounging in lovelorn purgatory to fighting the mundane battles necessary to winning, and keeping, the girl. They enjoy this luxury because in modern life there is so much else to sustain them besides the love and fidelity of a life partner; they can live life sustained by remorse and regret for however long it takes them to realize their sustenance temporary and vaporous. How long it takes them to mature, to discover the gains of society fragile, to see that love and fidelity as rare and precious safeguards against social disintegration, and thus the preserves of their own tenuous sanity, is a measure of the degree to which they have been coddled and spoiled and kept from touching the thorns of life.

Okay…got that out of my system.

I couldn’t resist this, from Pournelle:

“The biggest mistake new writers make is carrying around copies of unfinished work to inflict on their friends.”

How accurately that describes me, and what I do here!