My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol.3, #51, June 29, 1998

SCRIBBLES ON PAGES

And thoughts that I don't know I have
They're hidden by useless facts
That I've compiled at the office where I work
Where there is no time for feeling anything.
You see, I work there to finance my real life
That begins with scribbles on pages.

the Innocence Mission

You know, people are always asking writers "How do you do it?" "Where do you get your ideas?" "Do you just sit down and start typing and it all comes out in polished form?" It's three full years, now, that I've been writing these little essays, week after week, and my answers are: "I have no idea," "everywhere," and "no way in hell."

I don't really understand how writers' workshops go about teaching people how to write, because the chances are so minimal that we ourselves understand how we do it. For me it all goes on in my head without my conscious awareness. The odd bits of ideas and information in my head are like so many toys jumbled together in the attic--every once in a while, I take them out and dust them and rearrange them. I wrote three columns on Saturday, all from ideas that had been rattling around in my brain for some time. But I can no more explain how I knew those ideas were ready to become columns than I can explain how I know a canteloupe is ripe when I thump it.

When I was at a music store recently, right after Sinatra died, a woman was standing next to me in line with half a dozen of his CDs, and I said, "Some people never really die, do they, they just stop doing live performances." And I stashed that line away, because there may be a column in it. I don't know yet where I would take the idea, how I would flesh it out. As phrases start forming, even entire paragraphs, I let them stew for a while. I wait for a hook to come along, a joke or story, a punned title, a killer opening line to suck you in. It's kind of the same way I write my Christmas cards--I start with a punch line and work backwards, trying to figure out how to set it up.

Getting ideas is the easy part. Often the idea comes from something that made me mad. I like what Bella Abzug once said about herself: "I have a decent sense of outrage." I too have a decent sense of outrage, at injustice, at smugness, at people who profit from other people's pain, or turn people against each other. All I have to do is watch and read the news to be amply filled with outrage. Oh, yes, I have things to talk about.

But being Chicken Little is a bore, and hardly anybody listened to him anyway. The sky may indeed be falling, and sometimes I need to tell people that. But the fact is that even if it IS the end of the world as we know it, I DO feel fine. If there are things to despair about, I see just as many things to celebrate, often enough ordinary things that other people somehow don't seem to notice.

My columns often stem from things that amuse me. I just found out that when Al Gore gave a commencement speech at MIT in 1996, some enterprising students made up templates for "Al Gore Buzzword Bingo," with some of his favorite words and phrases in little boxes. They handed them out to the graduating seniors and urged them to wave their cards in the air when Gore had said enough of his pet phrases that they had filled in five boxes across or down. This of course reminds me of Neil Steinberg's wonderful book When in Doubt, Involve a Cow, which tells about college pranks through the ages. All of this may someday lead to a column, maybe about pranksters, or adolescent snarkiness, or different ways of striking back at authority, or something else altogether. While I'm waiting, I just enjoy the stories and stash them away in the attic.

The columns I most enjoy writing are the ones about people I admire; I want to give you a chance to admire them too. You may have heard that Bob Hope was recently pronounced dead by a congressman. It was an accident--a newspaper writer was updating the file of readymade obituaries, pushed the wrong button, and accidentally made the file public on the newspaper's web site, where a congressman's aide saw it and passed the word to his boss. Now disconcerting as Hope must have found this, he nonetheless got to see his eulogies in advance. Most of us never have any idea our friends and relations think we're as wonderful as they will make us out to be after we're dead. That's because we're all so much better at telling people what we don't like than what we DO. I enjoy the opportunity to restore that balance a little.

So many ideas are floating around that I hardly even have to reach out to snatch one. I am surrounded by jokes, friends, children, cats, absurdities--all the things that make life such a ball. Like David Byrne says, "There's a party in my head and it never stops."

Turning them into columns, though, is a process of dredging similar ideas and evidence out of my memory to go along with the original idea. When an idea is ripe, I sit down at the computer and start writing and rewriting paragraphs until I am moderately pleased with them. Then I go away for a while. When I come back and look at those paragraphs, I groan and tear them up, keeping a sentence here and there, and thanking God for cut and paste, one of the great technological miracles of our time.

As I shape the paragraphs one by one, I usually start seeing where the column is going. The column I wrote about kittens sat around for ages half-finished, because I didn't know what the point of it was. When I eventually realized it was nothing but pure description of kittens' silliness, and didn't NEED a point, I was at last able to finish writing the column.

When I do know what the point of a column is, though, I go back and re-structure everything so that it leads logically to that point. This is the painful part, because it means I have to be ruthless with sentences and paragraphs that are irrelevant, or interfere with the flow, or don't make sense in that context. I have to stare unflinchingly at phrases and jokes I really liked, say "Sorry, you didn't make the cut," and murder them. (Knowing that I can use a good line in some other column makes this a little easier to bear.)

That's all I actually understand about what I do when I write a column. It's not much in the way of guidelines for aspiring writers, is it? Or even enough to answer those questions, how do you do it, and where do your ideas come from. The best I can say is that I pay attention to the world. Writing about it helps me see the thoughts I didn't know I have, and lends a purpose to all the useless facts stored in my bizarrely retentive memory.

My scribbles on cyberpages have to please me first. But when they strike a chord with readers besides, that's even better. Your responding to them is like lots of rich creamy hot fudge sauce, poured on top of ice cream that was scrumptious all by itself.