Couple of Things

First off, I'm struggling at a point in my NaNoWriMNo novel where my protagonist has to transition from one setting to another. I wasn't sure how to pull that off. I've got him in limbo at the moment and haven't written much in the past two days. So I took B.B. for a walk tonight, put on some loud Prodigy (which is the soundtrack for this particular work), and mulled over different scenarios. Something about the fresh air, the exercise, the blood rushing to my brain in ways that it just doesn't while I'm sitting on my butt in front of the computer, I don't know, something about that just gets my creative juices whirling. I figured out not only how to get to the next phase (chapter three, in fact) but how to make this limbo stuff meaningful and memorable and useful later on, and I have some pretty good ideas how to kick off the next chapter. Thank God. I was beginning to worry that I'd be stuck here for the next 16 days.

Second, K and I picked up a copy of Dave Egger's edited Best American Nonrequired Reading (2009) today and found, inside, this ode to David Foster Wallace, a man I have expressed my sadness and adoration for already, written by (none other than) National Book Award winner Jonathan Franzen, who was apparently a close friend of DFW. It's a short paean, barely five pages, and if you're browsing through a bookstore someday soon, you might pick this book up, navigate back to page 167 and give it a read. But one thing I would like to share, as Franzen puts it better than I ever could, is a brief thought on how amazingly well DFW crafted a sentence, and if you link back to my pithy farewell, you'll know what I mean when I say his writing urged me to be a better writer.

He had the most commanding and exciting and inventive rhetorical virtuosity of any writer alive. Way out at word number 70 or 100 or 140 in a sentence deep into a three-page paragraph of macabre humor of fabulously reticulated self-consciousness, you could smell the ozone from the crackling precision of his sentence structure, his effortless and pitch-perfect shifting among ten different levels of high, low, middle, technical, hipster, nerdy, philosophical, vernacular, vaudevillian, hortatory, tough-guy, broken-hearted, lyrical diction.

So very true. Well put Jon.