Reading for Writers

On waking early and reading the newspaper online while the rest of my family still lay sleeping, I grabbed onto a single five-syllable phrase I had encountered in a review of a current production of "The Iceman Cometh":

"booze has lost its kick"

I stole this particular phrase because, on first read, I found that its pointy letters had pulled together into an iron fist and smashed me in the gut.

I immediately engaged it in combat.

I had been eager for a worthy opponent. It was four o'clock in the morning and I was fully awake and bored out of my mind. I had been up since three, silently listening to the raging wind of the winter storm exterior to my warm and cozy condo, and had only moments before finally crept downstairs and turned on my laptop. As usual, it took a great deal of effort to ignore the soft snores of my husband and children, who were still sound asleep and blissfully unaware of my ensuing struggle with words.

I surprised myself, that I was able to tackle this latest phrase-demon so calmly, given the stinging still resounding in my heart from the long, sharp knife it had inserted there in round two of our title bout. It had stabbed me while I was still gathering the weapons at my disposal for the fight ahead. I congratulated myself that I was a writer who had been regularly following a disciplined regimen during the early morning hours. This almost invariably led to a new batch of quality wordsmithery being accomplished before dawn. In the wee-est hours of the morning, before sunlight could float in and break the spell, I tried to arm myself, with only my keyboard and my memories. I prepared to do battle, with my muse as my second. I usually emerged hours later, victorious and breathless, just as the male units of my household were ready to slide out from between sheets and into fuzzy bathrobes, wanting breakfast, ready to start checking off their own to-do lists for the day.

The phrase that had attacked me this morning I would show no mercy. I would rip it to pieces. I had to find out what it looked like on the inside, to try to discover what it was about this alphabetic construction that had set my nerves on fire.

I dug in my claws, tore it apart with my gnashing teeth, and from its rent flesh, I created this haiku:

prayer to Saint Jude

(haiku)

booze has lost its kick

memories haunt and won't let go

there is no escape

On re-reading this masterpiece of mine, I immediately began wrestling with self-doubt. The poem appeared flimsy, inadequate, vague, mundane, mangy, and dull.

The phrase I had word-napped from the theater critic was trite, which I had known from the time I first spied it, from a comfortable distance, as one who was reading the phrase merely as a seeker of new information.

In my mind, I had argued with the author of the review about his choice in words. Were they really his? I was sure I had read these five words, in this particular order, someplace before.

Had he stolen these words? Where had they come from? Had he invited them in, or had they been simmering in the recesses of his mind, having taken up residence after they had forced their way in through some other author's pen? If they weren't new, and they weren't fresh and clean and his own, and they barely did the job they were supposed to be doing, then why had he settled? Why had this writer stuck his readers with this ordinary-sounding phrase? The writer of the theater review was obviously being paid handsomely for his thoughts by one of the most prestigious newspapers extant. Why had an experienced word-wrangler allowed the commonplace into his composition? Why had he not expended a truer effort, and invented a unique set of words to say the same thing, to say it better?

Had he been off his game? Or had he, in fact, anguished over the possibilities that had presented themselves, and decided that these particular five words would have to do because no others could even come close?

What was it, about booze and regret, that demanded the use of this exact five-word phrase, "booze has lost its kick," by this theater critic, working for one of the most widely-read newspapers of our time?

Unfortunately, before I could find the answer I sought, I grew tired of the tussle with the trite. I decided there was nothing to be gained in insisting upon integrity in word play with an unknown author. Realizing that if I, a reader, had had trouble in reading the odd phrase, the writer himself probably hated his own five-word construction, Maybe he just had a bad day, maybe he was just a bad writer who happened to hold a good job. My sympathy for him as a fellow writer led to a resolve for me to do something special with his words.

I revisited the phrase in question, "booze has lost its kick." I recalled an old adage, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." I decided to let this poor excuse for a descriptive phrase have its way with me. I rewrote my haiku, adding one last bit, a re-hashed word-combo, which I designed to point out the flawed nature of the trite word phrases slouching through the poem:

booze has lost its kick

memories haunt and won't let go
they beat me senseless

I gave up, and let the Idiom Monster win...for today...

"I'll be back."

Writing Exercise: The Longest Month

The stretch which is February seems as long as the time between that horrible moment when, suddenly gasping for air, you realize you've tried to drink your soda too quickly and it has gone down the wrong pipe; and the the time when you can finally stop coughing up bubbles and tears and recognize that you will probably live and breathe again and maybe even swallow normally again at some point in the future.