AND IN THIS CORNER, REPRESENTING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE....

As its title suggests, Tom Stoppard's 1982 play The Real Thing concerns that which is authentic or true, that which is mere semblance or illusion, and the gray area in between. (If you've seen the film Shakespeare in Love, which Stoppard wrote with Marc Norman, you'll already have witnessed his obsession with the tension between art/artifice and reality; it merges playfully throughout the movie, from the gender-switching heroine all the way to the question of whether Christopher Marlowe really conceived Shakespeare's plays.)

As writers long before Stoppard have recognized (I'm thinking of George Orwell here, but there are myriads of examples), language can be force for both truth and falsehood, so it's not surprising that The Real Thing speaks directly on that theme, as well as expressing it indirectly through a series of literary tricks, deceptions, and double entendres. At one point Henry, the playwright protagonist, says the following about Brodie, a anti-nuclear protester:

He's a lout with language....Words don't deserve that kind of malarkey. They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good anymore, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

So much of that passage resonates for me (and all of it, of course, is beautifully written). I particularly love the image of words getting their "corners knocked off," and the insistence that their precise use is not mere pedantry but rather a way of building "bridges across incomprehension and chaos." It's a worthwhile reminder that as writers, the power of our work necessarily rests on the precision and power with which we use words, and language generally. It's tempting to be careless with our word choice or unconscious about our diction. But great writers don't work that way. They use words as precisely as, say, Mozart uses musical notes: so that each and every one rings true.

Click here for an nice interview from the British Guardian in which Stoppard discusses this and other issues.

I'M GOING TO KILL YOU IF YOU MISUSE THE WORD LITERALLY AGAIN. Literally.

I try not to get too grouchy about the increasing numbers of language usage errors that appear today in conversation, on television, even in august print publications. Grouchiness is a slippery slope in midlife: one day you're bitching over a single word, then before you know it you don't like the weather, the government, the traffic, the cost of living, the color yellow, your house, your spouse, your nose, your teeth, your dog, or pizza.

Despite these good intentions, I have to say that the moribund state of word "literally" really irritates me. Once a sturdy little worker bee, the poor thing's been blurred out and beaten down until it's a useless shadow of its former self.

As in: That purse cost like, literally, a million dollars.

As in: He's literally skin and bones.

As in: I literally died.

Part of what irritates me is that there's no really graceful substitute for the word. If you can think of one, do please post a comment below.

I'll be so grateful, I'll literally kiss you.

MAKING YOUR BOOK IDEAS WORK: The Play-Doh Theory

Play-Doh delights the senses and takes a very, very long to harden. It's designed to for radical experimentation. If you don't like what you've made of it, there's lots of opportunity for even drastic change.

Plaster of Paris is gritty, clammy and dull. It sets quite quickly. Once it hardens, you can't change its shape without breaking it.

Too many of us develop our book ideas in plaster of paris. We forget how endlessly and inventively malleable ideas are. Our book concepts get set in stone, so to speak, long before we've pushed them around to see where they need to go. We can' make the alterations needed to reflect our research on competitors, expert critique, or even our own instinct when it tells us something must change.

Thanks to this premature finalization, we end up with books that aren't as good as they could be.

Keep your book ideas in the "play" state long enough to develop them fully, imaginatively, openly.

I keep a small container of Play-Doh on my office credenza to remind me of this. (And occasionally, to open as a micro-vacation. That smell: to me, it's pure childhood.)

A FINE MESS: a metaphor brought to you courtesy of the department of roads and bridges

For the last six months, the state road that leads to my house has been undergoing a vast widening project. The stretch closest to me is now in the grading stage, I discovered when I left to go to the Post Office this morning. As far as the eye could see, the landscape was littered with orange cones, detour signs, mounds of gravel, parked trucks. All so that a single guy could ride back and forth in a small truck pushing a big roller, doing something that seems to have no visible effect at all.

And then I thought: isn't that the pot calling the kettle black (as my grandmother used to say).

A big mess. A long time. A solitary person. The seemingly endless task of leveling. And smoothing. And packing. And balancing. And smoothing again, all to make changes so subtle than no ordinary human can see the difference.

Welcome to the Working Writer's world.

If our work as writers was visible, I suspect it would look just like this kind of road project. No "normal" person, no non-writer, would understand the minute revisions we so often find ourselves engaged in, or the seemingly endless time that they seem to take. But we know that this work is not just necessary but foundational. If we don't get it right, the visible parts of our book or poem, story or essay, just won't work. And if we don't get it right now, it will be much messier--or even impossible--to fix it later, when everything is set in stone. Or in asphalt, as the case may be.

FUNCTIONING AUTHOR MARVELS: the perils and pleasures of word choice

It's not every day registering a domain name makes you laugh so forcefully you nearly snort Perrier out your nose, but I had that pleasure recently when I went to buy the domains associated with this blog.

I had figured that "workingwriterwonders" was weird enough that it wouldn't be taken, and I was right. Nevertheless, the computer at the site wanted me to have every possible option, so it made some suggestions of its own.

EffortWriterAmazes. BestWriterOnline. (If only.) JudyWriterOnline. DriverWritingOnline. My own personal favorite, FunctioningAuthorAmazes. (I couldn't use that one even if I wanted to; I'm often working, but to claim that I'm actually functioning is a stretch.) WorkingAtHome Forever: a premium name, the site said, that would cost me a cool $477 for a year.

Then there were the shorter suggestions: FunctioningWriter, WondersAuthor, WorkingAnimals, WorkingAway, EffortAuthor, WorkingHen (another $477 choice, though I discovered I could get WorkingChicken for only twelve bucks), and FunctioningAmazes. Well, indeed it does.

Samuel Clemens famously noted that "the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." I like to think he'd be amused at this illustration of his precept, even if it's just a computer with a bug providing it.

As for me, I'm going to save up my pennies until I have twelve bucks...not easy for those of us who are WorkingAtHomeForever. Because I can totally see myself writing a Working Chicken blog.