Posts Tagged: On Writing

“ON READING ON WRITING: SERIOUSLY FUNNY”

On January 6, 2017 by Dteb With 0 Comments - down to earth believer

I am trying to learn to be a writer—or, at least, a better one.  So, I am doing two things: writing more and reading/listening to good writers more.

I am rereading Stephen King’s book On Writing.  I am enjoying it even more this time.

I am trying to read the what of King’s writing, but also the how of his writing.  How is he doing what he is doing with a particular word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, or story?

King uses wonderful metaphors in his stories.  In fact, he uses a metaphor for his stories of his early childhood.  He calls them “snapshots.”

Some of the snapshots are funny.  Some are scary.  Some are puzzling.  Some are all of those and more at the same time.

But he also annotates his snapshots.  His teenage babysitter when he was four used to fart in his face.  King drolly comments that this prepared him for literary critics.  Yes!

Everything is grist for the literary mill.  But you have to know how to mill it.  And that means grinding it out.

This involves, for me at least, a light touch with serious matters.  I want to write seriously helpful stuff, but I don’t want to be morbidly obese about it.

I have noticed that the authors I like to read and reread are the ones who invite me to laugh, but also to do some serious thinking about important realities: life, death, what is important, relationships, politics, work.

The Old and New Testaments also make serious observations with irony and humor.

Yes, I do realize that irony and humor are different things.  But, like sibling twins, they share at least some of the same dna.

Take Cain, for example.  The story about him is found in Genesis 4.  He kills his brother Abel.  When God asks Cain where his brother is, Cain responds with a statement and a question, “I don’t know.  Am I my brother’s keeper?”  I often hear people quote this saying, sometimes with approval.  I wonder if they realize that they are quoting the first murderer, according to the Bible.

As part of the LORD God’s punishment, Cain is told that he will be a vagabond, a wanderer (näd, in Genesis 4:12).  Yet the narrator who is telling the story says that Cain settled down in the Land of Wandering (nôd, Genesis 4:16).  How on earth do you “settle down” in “the Land of Wandering?”

Precisely!  The narrator wants us to see that, if we abuse or kill our brother, we will be exiled—even when we think we are settling down.  As I heard one preacher say many years ago concerning the Lord’s Prayer, “We cannot say ‘Our Father,’ unless we are also willing to say, ‘Our brother.’”

So, the writers I like—whether ancient or modern—have some serious things to say, but they say those things with humor.  That is the kind of writer I would like to be.

As has often been said, “Many a truth is uttered in jest.”

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