Saving String

Today I saw an acquaintance with a bandage around his ankle.

“Are you limping Peter?” I asked him.

“Yes,” Peter said.

“You have passed into the realm of the aged.”

“Yeah, people have been telling me that I am getting old.”

And then it dawned on me, in a slow onslaught of horror. What has happened to me? Am I not able to speak common English anymore? You have passed into the realm of the aged. YOU HAVE PASSED INTO THE REALM OF THE AGED. 

WHAT THE FUCK?!

Is this because of college, or because of a burgeoning vocabulary, or is it, and I shudder at the thought, because I have passed into the realm of the elitist?

Am I now condemned to a life of solitude: forgetting the sound of monosyllabic words, reading the dictionary to myself and my six cats in the wee hours of the night, forced to hire a translator to explain my verbose word vomit to every human I encounter?

From now on, I will have only one response to anyone who speaks to me. It is also the New Yorker’s universal caption: “Christ, what an asshole!”

I can hardly go wrong with that.

Two years ago, I remember reporting on the premiere of the Half Blood Prince for the Stanford newspaper. Here is my favorite passage from the article:

Nearby, a group of drama students dressed in a variety of guises runs periodically to the ticket window to ask if they can watch the movie in theater 9-3/4. They talk in character and stage an epic duel between Snape, Neville Longbottom, Remus Lupin and Bellatrix Lestrange.

Amid shouts and exclamations of incredulity, they position themselves in the middle of the courtyard.

“These guys are having, like, legit duels and stuff!” is one girl’s insightful comment.

Snape points his wand at Longbottom, who shouts something incomprehensible in return.

“That’s not a spell; you just made that up!” Snape yells at Longbottom.

Shouts of “Crucio!” and “Stupefy!” arise as the wizards swish and flick their wands.

“Avada Kedavra!” screams Lestrange in a frenzy, almost plunging her wand into Lupin, and ending the duel with two dead wizards and a triumphant, if not psychotic, grin.

Just when the scene seems to have hit the peak of ridiculousness, Darth Vader shows up. A muggle pulls down his pants and runs around in circles screaming, “Harry Potter love!” as a police car casually drives by.

I love this passage because I think it clearly displays what it means to be a proud member of the Harry Potter generation. And this is a generation that exists solely because of J.K. Rowling’s excellent writing.

Take for example this famous sentence from the books: I solemnly swear that I am up to no good. Now, imagine, for a second, that we took out the word solemnly. The sentence would then be: I swear that I am up to no good.  This version hardly has the same kind of charm.

To be solemn and to be up to no good is a contradiction of sorts, it displays an ironic humor—solemn people usually don’t think about being up to no good. The alliteration of the s in solemnly and the s in swear adds rhythm to the sentence, making you want to read it aloud, as is the case in general with Harry Potter books.

This is about creating magic with words, it is about adding flourishes and embellishments that change the way you tell your story. The devil is in the details. It is also the mark of a great writer, to recognize that each word not only counts, but that it can make all the difference.

Harold Bloom, a professor at Yale, wrote this in a critique of Harry Potter:

I would think in another generation or so, Harry Potter will be in the dustbins everywhere. It will be period-piece rubbish because it is so atrociously written.

Not only was he wrong about the dustbin part, but he was also wrong in his even more atrocious observation that Harry Potter was atrociously written.  He is the obvious epitome of a thick-headed muggle, a Vernon Dursley type. It is his loss that he was never able to see the magic.

For four hours a day, for almost half a year, Francis Johnson, rolled twine in Minnesota. It is unknown what demon compelled him to perform this task, but his bits of twine, that he rolled and rolled into the shape of a ball, eventually formed the largest twine ball in the world rolled by one man, spanning 12 feet in diameter and weighing over 17,000 pounds. Enclosed in a gazebo made of plexiglass and wood, the twine ball sits in graceful grandeur, a monument to a man whose greatest achievement is almost completely useless. Almost.

From this story comes the term saving string.  Saving string is the collection and filing away in a safe place of odds and ends, of anecdotes, of thoughts, of ideas, of anything really, that peaks a writer’s interest.  The idea is to use your bits of string, collected over eons, to build such a work of written art, such a flabbergasting ball of twine, that even Francis Johnson would hop out of his grave to see it. 

I first encountered this term in 10th grade when Roy Peter Clark and his toolbox came to fix my leaking literary pipes. Roy Peter Clark is a writer and journalist whose book, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, contains this idea of saving string. Here is what he says about it:

Item by item, anecdote by anecdote, statistic by statistic, your boxes of curiosity fill up without effort, creating a literary life cycle: planting, cultivation, and harvesting.

My hope is that this blog will become a woven ball of wordy twine: a place to save string, share tidbits of writing that I admire, and to hone my written craft to the best of my ability. I also hope, dear reader, that it will kindle a similar flame within you, that you will begin to collect bits of string that spark your interest, and that you will borrow some of mine, for I am quite willing to share. So without waiting another superfluous second, let the rolling begin.