Um… let me start a leveret here: there’s language and there’s speech. Um, there’s chess and there’s a game of chess. Mark the difference for me. Mark it please. Imagine a piano keyboard, eh, 88 keys, only 88 and yet, and yet, hundreds of new melodies, new tunes, new harmonies are being composed upon hundreds of different keyboards every day in Dorset alone. Our language, tiger, our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas, so that I can say the following sentence and be utterly sure that nobody has ever said it before in the history of human communication: “Hold the newsreader’s nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.” Perfectly ordinary words, but never before put in that precise order. A unique child delivered of a unique mother. And yet, oh, and yet, we, all of us, spend all our days saying to each other the same things time after weary time: “I love you,” “Don’t go in there,” “Get out,” “You have no right to say that,” “Stop it,” “Why should I,” “That hurt,” “Help,” “Marjorie is dead.” Hmm? Surely, it’s a thought to take out for cream tea on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
– Fry, A Bit of Fry and Laurie
It all started when my husband started asking me to self-publish my writings, specifically the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo last year. I explained why I didn’t intend to publish and ended up tangled in a thought-loop that seemed to say– even to me–that the only reason I don’t want to publish is because I can’t decide on my name.
Which is silly, of course.
It’s quite a tiny reason when you write it out.
Very little is that simple, though. To explain it in terms of the A Bit of Fry & Laurie sketch quoted above, writing is almost always a game of chess, and so very rarely just chess.
My issue about pen names is just a pawn– but as they say, at the end of the day, kings, queens, and pawns go back in the same box. The pawn is the vanguard of more moves to come.
There is a quite a bit of elasticity to language and, unlike my husband, who wields language fearlessly, I am more like a collector. I’m cautious by nature, and slow to embrace new things. Even words.
The other day, when picking me up from work, Dave told me that he didn’t get much done that day because he took a siesta.
Me: A siesta? What, you’re too good for naps now?
Dave: Umm, a siesta is a nap– just one that more specifically indicates the type and time of day in which the nap was taken.
Me: But since we lived the same day, and since I know what time you must have napped, you could’ve just said nap.
Dave: (Moment of silence.) Hard day at work, honey?
Me: No, I’m just uncomfortable with all these new words. It’s like I’m in Middle Earth all of a sudden!
Dave: Is that a sly way of calling me a hobbit?
Me: That’s the only way we can move past this issue. Only hobbits take siestas.
As you can see, if a new word haphazardly-used can cause such uproar, a never-truly-considered hobby caused an explosion of Die Hard proportions.
ka-boom.
I would have just quickly brushed the idea away entirely, except Dave brought up two critically important points.
- I don’t like to waste things.
- What’s the point of a book that no one can read?
But I’m hard on books in general, and my writing specifically. I can see publication being a bigger issue than the spontaneous use of the word siesta. These little phobias, like worries about pen names and worries about worries might always keep me from being ready to publish, but maybe I can compromise.
Maybe I’ll post my chapters here.
Where I can change them when I want to change them.
Where I can delete them from the face of the earth, should I chose to.
Where I can post them randomly, with comfortable siestas between the postings, like the tiny hobbits of language that they are.
From : http://mywaffle.wordpress.com/2011/08/04/a-trip-to-the-seaside-anyone/
I’m not sure what the point of this post was, or why I have hobbits on the mind, I just needed to take my thought out for cream tea on this early Saturday morning.
“Language is my mother, my father, my husband, my brother, my sister, my whore, my mistress, my check-out girl… language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God. Language is the dew on a fresh apple, it’s the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning light as you pluck from a old bookshelf a half-forgotten book of erotic memoirs. Language is the creak on a stair, it’s a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, it’s a half-remembered childhood birthday party, it’s the warm, wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl. It’s cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.”
- Fry, A Bit of Fry and Laurie
What do you do when you need to think something out? Or better yet, what do you do when you know that you aren’t thinking about something clearly because your own paranoias and fears– do you try not to upset yourself, or do you make yourself stretch? Why did you decide to publish or not publish? Do you like cream tea? Have you seen A Bit of Fry & Laurie, or at least this skit that I quoted here?
Can you make up a sentence that has never before been written, perhaps?
