Word Frenzy

A friend of mine recently described my writing style as 'word frenzy', for this I am eternally in her debt. I don't think any two greater words have ever been applied to my work and, man, do I ever deserve them. I would love to be able to call this whole blog 'Word Frenzy' but I've already locked in the 'Dances for Architecture' thing so, oh well.  You see, I definitely belong to the 'more adjectives, by thunder!' school of writing.  My literary technique is less of a lean, analytical thing and more like a wild torrent of words with occasional explosions of imagery. If you've read any of my other posts, you might have noticed this already.

I am not a subtle man.

But that's not the whole story.  I've just been going over a manuscript (novel-length, fictional, inspired by an old and rather obscure English folktale) that I first wrote about seven or eight years ago and my writing style of the time was even less..umm, reticent than it is now.  It is not so much a novel as a blitzkrieg of words; a propulsive burst of unrestrained (and oft unhinged) imagery and every rhetorical literary device known to humankind. It is a glorious, gory, Gothic nightmare trip of a thing and frankly, I'm actually pretty happy with it.  But, man...was I a messed up kid back then, albeit one with a flair for dramatic imagery and some rather surprising wordplay.

And yes, I am going to see that the demented tale gets printed.

The deal is, I've always written - as long as I can remember. I used to tell folks that I wanted to be a writer and hell, I may have actually had something written at the time. No, I did not just use it to impress girls. Although I may have tried to.  Okay, yes for a while there (in a very uncomfortable burst of teenaged sartorial misjudgement) I tried to cultivate the hyper-dramatic and terribly Romantic (allegedly) air of a suffering poet type. I wore Byron-esque shirts and grew my hair long. At least I did it with a bit of irony, all of which only serves to make me sound like a hipster. No, not just any hipster - I was a hipster before it was a thing, dammit: the Original Hipster. Anyway, my obsession with writing has always stemmed first and foremost from my obsession with words. This seems like a pointless statement, but I can't stress it enough: I absolutely love words.

I mean, how could anyone not feel the same way? Words are such remarkable and slippery things. They are changeable and unpredictable; they can be used to express loathing or for declarations of love, they can brutalise and they can soothe, they can tear a world apart and rebuild it. With words you can totally screw everything up but you might also be able to save it all if only you can find the right words. In fiction you can do all these things, you can also tell deep and personal truths while cloaking them all in a veneer of 'well, it's all just a story, isn't it'.  Okay, a confession, when I say 'words' here, I sadly mean English words. I don't speak any other language and on a rough morning before a nice, hot shower, I can barely even speak this one. English is a fascinating language, though; because it is such a shambolic, stitched-together Frankenstein's monster of a thing. It rampages around other languages and mutilates their verbs, steals off with their adjectives and violates their nouns.

If anyone ever wonders why the English language has so many seemingly arbitrary and self-contradictory rules it's because, well, we probably nicked over half of our words from the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Germans and the Greeks, a little from the Celts, one or two from the Norse and the rest is mostly just butchered Latin.  But some words are just so frickin' clever.  Especially the words for other words or sounds. Seriously, what genius came up with the word 'stutter', a word that even sounds like its staggering out in bitten-off syllables?

Sinuous, slither, whisper, stagger, punch, grasp, hiss and so many more are all utterly lovely because they sound exactly like what they describe. Literary and linguistic terms go even further: fricative, sibilant, onomatopoeia, glottal stop, plosive  - these words are their own definitions. Seriously, I think the most mellifluous word in the English language is the word 'mellifluous', it just ripples off the tongue.
So, yeah: lot of fun to be had there.

I've been commended for my imagery - it happened a lot going through school and a little bit after. I've always really dug imagery. Not so much the images themselves, though, as the words used to convey said images. If I was really into raw, pure images I would be more serious about photography or film-making. But there's more to it than that - often I just throw the words around because I like the way they sound, even deliberately taking them out of their usual contexts simply because I think they work in another one. I do tend to be over-reliant on adjectives, though. Must really tone that down.

Obviously, I read a lot. You can't really love words and not read. I'm not going to pretend that my bookcase is all Dostoevsky and James Joyce though. It really frigging isn't. I loathe James Joyce, honestly I think literature would be better served were his works entirely excised from existence.

Yes, I read 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' three times for University, why do you ask? Frankly the third time was neither essential nor even helpful, at that point it was just academic self-flagellation.
And I can't even be in the same room as 'Finnegans Wake'.

Actually, in order to set up an awkward segue; I've always been a fan of Stephen King. He's a great writer and to read his work you know...just absolutely know...that he damn well digs words too.
Which brings me to the macabre...

There are a few things that I feel have always defined me: a passionate love of words is very definitely one of them. An equally passionate and, some would and have said, love of many things dark and ominous is another. But that is something for a later post.

But enough writing about writing for now. I'll inevitably come back to it at a later date, but now it just seems all a bit weird.