Discursive and Rambling

I realized recently that there is a certain type of writing I really like, and I doubt I shall ever master it. This realization came to me as I was watching the movie of "A Prairie Home Companion." I described the experience this way to a few friends:

[Robert Altman and Garrison Keillor] are/were both such lovely, discursive, rambling artists with the ability (when working at the top of their respective games) to bring all that discursive rambling back to a tidy (but not too tidy - they're both naturalists in their own way) denouement.

I don't know if there is a term for that ability to send a story into about fifteen directions at once, then coax it to coalesce back into a coherent whole, but I'll call it a Big Bang. I am especially susceptible to this technique in humor - Eddie Izzard can do it in his stage shows with a seeming spontaneity that sends me into convulsive giggles. Characters and ideas that got introduced a half hour ago suddenly get tossed into the current scenario like so many comic hand grenades, and I'm off.

It's a tricky business, though, to write a Big Bang. At its best it is unforced and natural, and the tying-up of things ends up looking more like a marvelous coincidence and less like a magician's trick. At its worst, it seems - well, forced and unnatural and like the writer is trying way too hard. As I said at the outset, I am not sure I would ever be able to get there. While I may appreciate discursive and rambling, I think my natural style tends to be more brief and direct. I have two choices, I suppose: practice the style I like to read until (hopefully, maybe) one day I can graduate from practice to performance of a Big Bang, or step up the honing of my own natural style and learn to appreciate it for whatever grace it might contain. Given the constraints of time and energy, I am fairly sure I shall have to suck it up and learn to love my own way of doing things.

Posted: Thursday - March 15, 2007 at 07:34 AM | |