Grammar

I finished reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka by the Shore and Alice Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease last night, snapped off the light by the easy chair, and sat in the dark thinking about writing until I dozed off. Flaherty’s book about the neurological and psychological basis for hypergraphia and writing in general fit nicely with my preoccupation with writing the past two months. Murakami’s novel, his usual blend of the metaphysical, magical, and modern, fit well with my belief that a fiction writer can interest anyone in anything if she has mastered the right or correct fictional technique and grammar. But what is the right fictional grammar? Does such a thing exist?

Early yesterday morning, while I was drinking my coffee and reading some blogs, I tried to formulate a new very short story. An idea came to me. I won’t say what it was, for to say it before I have written it is to lose it. All day long as I traversed part of the city, I worked on the story. When I returned home, I found that working on a short story while trying to accomplish other things had exhausted me. The correct fictional grammar eluded me. I picked up my books for a good night’s reading.

The questions about fictional grammar remain with me this morning.

Fictional grammar first came to me while I was drinking Budweiser at my local bar two Friday’s ago, trying to discover an idea for a short story. I sat catatonically in the noisy and crowded bar among acquaintances busy talking away. One person happened to remark that I was not saying much. By the time he said it, I had drunk a lot of beer and my silence was my gift to the world. In my inebriated state I arrived at the conclusion that there must be a correct fictional grammar for each story. Not only that, there must be a method for producing it, a sort of computer program one could run in the mind to produce the correct result. The program could replace waiting around for the Muse to arrive.

Anyway, I still have this idea for a very short story I thought about yesterday, but have not discovered its grammar.

I read a posting on a blog last night that discussed politics and religion and their relationship via some historical events. I found its argument fuzzy and confused and the evidence for its major claim contrary to the point the blogger was trying to make. The article was written well enough though. I would never have spent the time arriving at conclusions about it if it had not been. Blogs, even the most popular and best of them, have an element of hypergraphia associated with them. If they are to remain popular, there is also an element of “publish or perish” to them. The arguments that arise between bloggers and mainstream media editors and columnists about the importance of blogging seem odd given the same elements are associated with newspaper Oped columns as with blogs.

Articles produced and published under pressure, no matter where published, have a different sort of grammar than the well wrought essay or fiction, or a relaxation of the correct grammar. We forgive them for that, for we often want to talk, hear the buzz, and let someone else critic our thoughts and writing without going to the trouble of doing it ourselves. The trick is not deluding ourselves about what mode we are in when we write these things.