so you’re reading—something great, or meant to be, at least, so you feel it’s great, but it’s all the same to you—and you find a new word. revanchist, atavism, nostrum—maybe there were many such words, but this one is right, somehow, it has that discovery-sensation of a perfect Scrabble retort—and so you look it up and you immediately yearn to use it.
but the problem is that a really good word always stands for an equally good idea, and an eternity hits you all at once—a realisation that you could have been thinking with this idea all this time but haven’t, and it’s like all other words fade away and now this word, this idea, is the true undercurrent of your life that desperately needs to be written and at long last can be.
so you write it, and inevitably you write it badly because you write from a place of drugged temptation.
the first failure is always a placement thing; you parachute the word in somewhere it doesn’t belong, can’t belong, the scaffolding isn’t there for it and the word is flat and dead at once.
but then there is a second failure, again, always, and here you craft too much around your toy—there’s a restraint in the surrounding prose, a desaturation… you’re holding back to let your new thing shine, but you don’t know how to make it shine because you took it from a place that did more to make it shine than you ever realised or were capable of emulating, so you grey everything else instead.
it’s a control thing, deep down: you want the reader to experience that word in the exact same way you did—an impossible expectation for art—and be impressed with you the same way too. you want to force them into a parasocial relationship with a facade of your author-self (one that merely knows these words as a matter of course.. you’ve known this word for years!), armbar them into admiration through pure power of prose—and if you’re a good writer at least you will sense that you’re doing this (you hate the duress of it, despise the long for validation that you bury in your work) but that still won’t stop you.
and there’s a shallowness. *this* is the unambiguous theme of your paragraph, now—your writing has all led up to this, these few vital glyphs, and you want that climax to come through clearly and very strongly and not have the reader miss it. so you choose all your words and symbols and assonance all in single-minded support of this aim, but a singular intent is so rarely beautiful—it has to be exquisitely done—and instead you have the effect of stripping the work of all potential depth. ah, the reader understands, “nomenklatura”! *now* i understand the metaphor… and having understood the metaphor—which is certainly quite basic—and realising that you took fifty, one hundred words to express that metaphor and only that metaphor, they feel at once a tremendous boredom—your one good word now starkly lackluster, and you took far too long to get to it, and whatever suspense you’d mustered is shot to death and gone because you never had a plan for what comes next.
this is the little death of prose.
this is the scandal-murder of a literary joy that you couldn’t just let be — you wanted it for yourself, adulterously so, and in your taking smothered it.
you find another good word — next night, same book.
you don’t look it up.
[alternate title: poor faulkner]