This post is based off of an assignment I completed for the graduate copyediting class I took in spring 2015. The idea was to distill the essence of a chosen writing or editing book into a clear, concise, creative essay. The footnote covers it also, but due to the nature of the assignment, typical methods of quote attribution were discouraged. I only used about three direct quote tidbits of any kind, and the rest is paraphrasing or—gasp!—my own views.
“Prufrock’s Crab” and “Colo-rectal Theology”:[1]
The Delicate Balance Between Writing and Death[2]
Every childhood is comprised of a thousand and one stories, and writing starts from those memories. At its messiest and most vivid, it begins as an ungainly sprawl and greases its way through your own puberty, until each piece is rewritten into its adult draft. No story springs fully formed from the writer, even the best ones—if it does, that writer probably lacks a rich inner life—and the process may be like extracting your own ingrown toenail with a dull knife. Rereading may be even more painful, as painful as the first wincing meal you tried to eat after getting braces, drawing choked breaths in the school cafeteria and knowing that you’re the only seven-year-old with teeth so crooked they couldn’t wait for the awkwardness of puberty before attaching medieval torture devices to your teeth. Awareness of your differences is the fucking key, even if you realize you do scuttle around like Prufrock’s crab.
This is where a writer starts, in the small details and the short assignments. Cringing is for later, and publication maybe later still or never. New writing students always want to know the route to publication; they want the writing instructor to hold the lantern for them while they scrabble in the dirt. And she does, but she sees and she shows them the gold among the muck, the reason for writing that isn’t always so others can see it. The suffering and flailing and puking of the successful or not-successful writers who have gone before. And yes, the lack of perfection—perfection is the tool of the oppressor, the damning weight of doubt and neuroses. The urge to be seen, acknowledged, deserving and earned of affection feeds the neuroses and the narcissistic urges that lead to colo-rectal theology, a back-and-forth loop that can only return the same quality it originally put out.
By necessity and lack of other employable skills, writers should listen, observe, watch, absorb—they can be sponges, mirrors, unknown spycams, but they are not the dancer on the stage, performing art in the moment where an audience is necessary. In their lonesome, writers can process and create, cobble together the shitty first draft by sieving their observances through their own experiences. Yet writing is not always the solitary task you might wish it to be, and that is Okay. The writer needs the friend who can read the shitty first draft, they need the personal conversation to vicariously utilize an experience of which they have no actual knowledge, and sometimes they need other writers to tell them they’re full of shit. And whether or not they admit it, they need their editor, the one holding the last lamp, finding not just gold but platinum and providing the stone tablet to immortalize a story—if that is the writer’s wish.
But if the editor or the teacher holds the lamp, the writers are the lamplighters. They must cultivate their own illumination and feed their consciousness of themselves to become an awareness of others. We’re all on a sinking ship, and the writers are singing (while lighting lamps, maybe), telling the truth about what we are if not what we see, buoying the readers with an exactness of words to a place of clarity, even if it is painful, even if it is joyful.
[1] This imagery courtesy of Lamott, but because the prompt involved “distilling the essence” of a book, direct quoting was discouraged (these are, as far as I remember, the only direct lifts from the book, along with “that is Okay”). Also, I did have a Prufrock’s-crab-scuttling state of existence as a child, similar to what Lamott describes of herself. (And maybe I’m a li’l bit like that still.)
[2] Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.
Molly K.B. Hunt 