Writerly Reflections

by Dennis Green

I’ve always thought of myself as a writer, even as a very young boy, but I’ve never thought much about my writing. Until now. How I write, what I write, how I go about it.

From this side of the eyeballs, I’m just a story teller. I simply sit down to tell a story. “Once upon a time…” In a sense, I’m re-telling a story, maybe something I heard in my sleep, a story I like well enough that I think you will too.

But I listen to Scott Turow talk about his writing, as Charlie Rose asks him some questions, such as, “Why do you write so much dialogue?” And that gets me thinking about it. Scott answers, “Oh, I just write down what I hear. I hear these people talking, and I just write it down.”

And that’s about how dialogue comes to me. But there’s more. “I write,” he then says, “for the same reason that all writers do, because it’s a matter of survival, it’s the only way I have of making peace with myself.” A supremely confident man, I find his manner almost off-putting, until I recognize where I have encountered it before. In myself.

A chum, Els, also a writer, tells me that she enjoys writing description, dialogue, “scenes,” far more than she does writing narrative. And she is rather amazed, or amused, that I use narrative so much, not even as a device, but just as my natural voice. Els says she likes the experience in the writing of “being in the here and now” which writing description and dialogue does for her, and that sense of immediacy doesn’t hold any special pleasure for me.

It may also be that I prefer the god-like perspective of the ÜberVoice.

And I usually start a story with an idea, one which can be summed up, or pointed at, with a simple phrase, a title. I proceed the way the ripples on the surface of water from a stone dropped thereon might proceed, in the most natural process I can imagine. If it’s an op-ed piece, I try to make a convincing argument, which is also a kind of story. “Once upon a time there was an idea…”

The Charlie Rose show comes to an end, and with the closing refrains of music, as usual, my dog Lucca sets up a howling, and a singing, and a guttural longing that is curious and amazing indeed. She then finishes up her marrow bone, comes across the room, stands in front of me and licks her lips, once, twice. Meaning: I want to go outside now.

I let the dog out the back door, and leave it closed but unlatched. She will lie on the back porch for fifteen minutes, then come back inside and flop down on the floor, where she will doze. (How’s that for immediacy?)

I have invested a good deal of my time and attention in the subject of aging, of growing old. In fact, I’ve been at it now since my mid-fifties, getting a jump on old age itself and putting an early end to those fiddling middle age years. (How’s that for narrative?)

Sometimes I take great delight in executing some sort of rhetorical flourish. It might be bringing an essay back around to its own title, even using the same phrase in a final or penultimate sentence. But when I do that, I can feel my self-conscious mind rising to the surface, making itself felt, and then known clearly by the tracks it leaves behind. And I like to let it sink back down out of sight.

These writerly reflections don’t come all that naturally to me, as I say, and so this particular bit of writing on these two pages is all of it more self-conscious than my usual writerly state. So much for humility!

©2010 Dennis Green