Loose and Tight

LEFT: "Spina," serigraph by Jeffery Sax

I've been seeing a physical therapist for back/hip pain.
Turns out my lower spine had stiffened up into block. Mostly from not moving.
I couldn't bend forward past waist-height.

After the therapist more or less beat me up a couple times, my spine bends again.
This morning I could fold all the way forward again.

Parts of my writing feel frozen stiff like my spine was.
I wonder what might loosen it up.

I mean loose as in flexible, not sloppy.
Loose, but also tight, like Tiger Woods's swing.


[Lordy. Who wouldn't want to go to bed with that? Makes me ponder (again) how much mob morality is jealousy in disguise.]

Some of my stiffness comes from the fear David Simon (creator/writer of The Wire) talked about in an interview with Nick Hornsby (which I blogged about):
the fear of being exposed as writing out of "lame half-assed assumptions."

That's a good fear. It keeps a writer on the lookout for flabby thinking and ignore-ance.

The years I spent writing about world geography for kids knocked a lot of assumptions out of me.
Turns out...
•New Zealand wasn't colonized by convicts.
•All folktales don't have morals.
•People in chaotic situations often welcome dictatorships.
•Entire lives are lived without thought for the United States. (This was the most humbling realization. I didn't think I'd assumed otherwise. But at a deep-muscle layer, I had, and it had to be pummeled out of me.)
•Tapirs are related to horses. [Baby tapir image from Zooborns]

So that was great. But the work also stiffened up my personal writing.
I got in the habit of explaining everything. I mention Camus in a post, say, and find myself adding a tag: "French philosopher."
For God's sake!
I'm not writing for kids here.

So, again, I connect with David Simon, who says:

"My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader.
I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life.
The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden.
Fuck him. Fuck him to hell."

Yeah. Well, I don't think "fuck him," exactly, but as long as the average reader in my head is a twelve-year-old researching a report in the library, I'm going to keep explaining stuff.

After I finish revising my ms, I need some kind of p.t. to get that kid out of my writer's brain.