Five minutes after signing the contract, I dropped to the floor, gasping for air. Next to being waterboarded as a Vietnam POW, I could tell that editing this manuscript was going to be the most horrendous experience of my life:
Inquiring my well-wishers, which is the deadliest mistake as inherently scheduled to jealousy or hawk eyesight on your wardrobe waiting for the garment to vomit out as not fitting towards them or due to impaired vision, will tell you a lie.
After I stopped hyperventilating, I thought, well the next chapter can’t be that bad. It wasn’t. It was worse:
Emotional detachment between us during manifested harmony in relationships was causing a cognitive dissonance within me; my mind was wandering in Kafkian labyrinths of doubt, guilt, and sorrow, while my mouth subconsciously produced sparkling words that people usually associate with love.
###
Evidently, I’m ignorant of the new wave of poets, authors and reading audience that’s flooded the market. An audience that doesn’t give a hoot about the work of Hemingway, Steinbeck or Wolfe. Nor the mechanics of writing well. Things like:
· Have something to say
· Be specific
· Get to the point
· Don’t ramble
· Write the way you naturally speak
· Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs
Rather, this posse of contemporary writers feels it’s more important to regurgitate their sub-consciousness drivel into a never-ending stream of pointless, run-on dreck: single paragraphs that occupy an entire printed page.
The clogged arteries of my heart slammed against the walls of my thoracic lesions as fear clamped its tight fist around my aorta.
But then I thought, why not? Haven’t we all grown from passages like “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” (A Tale of Two Cities) and “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” (The Great Gatsby)? So, instead of complaining, I thought I’d share the gospel of the nouveau, future literary giants by highlighting the crucial elements of contemporary writing.
There are five essential elements to writing contemporary prose. Include ALL of them in your writing, regardless of the length of your manuscript:
1) Use legions of unrelated human body parts in everything you write
Each time the blood-soaked mongrel barked through the mucosal lining of his aging larynx, it froze me to the bone as I listened for my mohter’s car in the descending throughway to the garage and debated hiding the evidence of a horrible lie that I’d just scrambled upon. The clogged arteries of my heart slammed against the walls of my thoracic lesions as fear clamped its tight fist around my aorta.
2) Combine as many sentences as you can into one endless paragraph
The professor looked down at his new young lover who rested fitfully lashed as she was with duct tape to the side of his stolen hovercraft her head lolling gently in the breeze and as they soared over the buildings of downtown St. Paul to his secret lair he mused that she was much like a sweet ripe juicy peach except for her not being a fuzzy three-inch sphere produced by a tree with pink blossoms and that she had internal organs and could walk, talk and falk.
3) Use as many adjectives and adverbs as you can in one run-on sentence
As she slowly drove up the long, winding driveway, Lady Alicia furtively peeked out the impeccably opaque window of her shiny sky-blue Mercedes 550SL and immediately spied Rodrigo her new gardener quietly standing on the rolling grassy mound that was covered with wild Dracunculus Vulgaris, his long perfectly coiffed jet-black hair flowing freely in the wind, his sable-brown eyes piercing into her very soul like a long, gleaming dagger, his snow-white shirt open several inches below his taught nipples, revealing his olive skin with beautiful hairless rippling and muscular chest, as she introspectively thought to herself, “I must tell that lazy idiot to trim the hedges by the gate.”
4) Feel free to make up your own words that didn’t previously exist
Sterben counted Chijuaca bars in the storage chamber, wondering why women back on Arrakis paid him little attention, but up here they seem to adore him, in fact, six fraichemaidens had already shown him their Wikipedic blinka just before a night of fripping.
In the old days, writers often struggled to find just the right word to capture the essence of their thoughts. Did the mad doctor screw, twist or tighten the thumbscrews into Frankenstein’s head?” Today, you can throw all those out. Instead, make up your own words! Try using RandomReady’s Fake Word Generator to come up with clever alternatives like: cracetchammiss, spittlestoat, asteriously, downhipprocks, syricouch, prologisang or catenaliggette.
5) Make love and sex the main focus of all your writing
Despite the vast differences it their ages, ethnicity, and religious upbringing, the sexual chemistry between Roberto and Heather was the most amazing he had ever experienced and for the entirety of the Barzzle Snurfing Day weekend they had sex like monkeys, amped on espresso, but not those monkeys in the zoo that fling their feces at you, rather more like the monkeys in the wild that have those giant red butts, and unlimited access to coallipery.
6) Forget about proper punctuation
She looked as if she was struck by lightning: her eyes going to fall out of their orbits (her mouth wide open) as if she was trying to swallow a train — her skin deadly pale — that to me observing her in such a condition was heartbreaking, like eggs being cracked upon a stone: because before they met, his heart was a frozen block of ice, scarred by the skate blades of broken relationships, then she came along and like a beautiful Zamboni flooded his heart with warmth, scraped away the ugly slushy bits, and dumped them in the empty parking lot of his soul.
You can also forget about using outdated tools like spell checkers and the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease Scale. Most spell checkers, like those in Microsoft Word will succumb to cardiac arrest when subjected to passages like,
Haul away on those slug guskets, you bilge-scum!” roared the decapitated captain, leaning wearily against the starboard clog-hutch as the mizzen spittlestoat rose majestically upward until it cuzzled atop the upper spit flukes.
The Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease Scale is another useful tool authors have depended on since 1975 to ensure their writing is easy to comprehend by the average reading public. The highest (easiest) readability score possible is 120. The lowest (most difficult) is 0. For instance, the average 6th grade student’s written assignment scores a readability test of 60–70. Now, take the passage,
Electric compulsion of misery flowed through the night megalopolis, filling the veins of pragmatic reality with juices. Magnetic Adam of the new epoch, the innocent function of digital satori, who were you in this entropy?
It scored 13.6 and A lecherous sunrise flaunted itself over a flatulent sea, ripping the obsidian bodice of night asunder with its rapacious fingers of gold, thus exposing her dusky bosom to the dawn’s ogling stare scored a 31.6. Great news if you’re one of those readers who enjoys curling up at the end of the day next to a cozy fire, with a glass of Merlot and an LSAT Reading Comprehension Examination.
It had been fifty-seven days since Madi left him, and still her stinging parting words slithered through Brett’s mind and echoed jarringly in the emptiness of his life like a half-frozen iguana
You can also forget about the strict rules of grammar. In a world where you can’t argue the difference between woowoosoft and bargictics, it’s pointless to quibble over there, their, they’re, its, and it’s. Just write whatever you want.
Finally, don’t worry about whether your writing falls into the four hard and fast styles: persuasive, narrative, expository, or descriptive. None of that makes any difference anymore. When an author writes, It had been fifty-seven days since Madi left him, and still her stinging parting words slithered through Brett’s mind and echoed jarringly in the emptiness of his life like a half-frozen iguana falling out of a tree in an unseasonable Cozumel cold snap, the reader will make up their own mind about what they read.
Eventually, I passed the writing assignment on to one of my colleagues. Someone younger, more flexible and brazen in their approach to the craft of writing. As Rakefet Wiezman, one of my favorite contemporary authors once wrote,
The mind turns like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping our sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fall onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.
I couldn’t have said it better.
Many thanks to the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest.
