katnyss's blog: "The Way Back"

What makes a great writer, is it a great reader? Really it's often left open to the interpretations of the later. According to Anais Nin, " the role of the writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say" or was that Hallmark. When you're truly  a bona fide, topping the charts of the NY Times best sellers list, and extra kudos to when you hang onto that spot for weeeks and even more Brownie points when you can spew out works faster than the masses can whip out their Mastercards. Getting your works made into a blockbuster movie, priceless.

Would you consider  the Twilight series to be good writing? It is afterall good storytelling and isn't that what it's all about...excuse the belch. A vapid young girl, insert emo here, whose only desire in life is to become a bloodsucker and die forever in the cold arms of Edward the shimmery one. Written on a primary school level and written by a grade schooler who each night begins her entries with "dear diary, today..." Now I love a good lip biting, heart palpitating romance but receive more flush faced desires from reading the mating habits of the whooping cranes. Take Lady Chatt, who finally ends up with her Mellors and lives forever in orgasmic bliss. What Lawrence did for my libido is beyond mere words. Oh, so sorry I should have said, "spoiler alert" first.

Let's take Joyce, or not. That's James Joyce, the great delivery of the "stream of consciousness" a mind numbing trek down the rabbit hole while mumbling "Beware the Jabberwocky!" Truly an enlightened trek into the Odyssey of the mind, take the blue pill! He is is unquestionable the master of the English language. I spent on summer, pre boyfriend era, plowing through Finnegans Wake, while pulling out my hair, chewing my mother's lithium and seeking answers from Cliff, who had no clearer understanding of Joyce than I did. I unfriend you Cliff.

I have a soft spot in my heart for the poets. With their words of passion and longing, written in fractured meters by fractured minds that distrub my thoughts and make me rethink my own certitude. My first love WB Yeats, the true poet laureate and often a writer of the mystical. "Come away, Oh human child! To the waters and the wild with a faery hand in hand, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand".  Then pehaps it's ee cummings, who said to hell with conventions even grammatical ones. Or Bob Kaufman, "a terror is more certain than all the desirable popular songs". Well said Bob. For me they do speak the words that I am unable to say and long to.