From Word To Word

Mike Hoye wrote yesterday about four essays that have caused him to reconsider his writing practise.  These essays themselves are quite interesting, but I am more intrigued by the reaction that they caused in Mike.  He quotes each essay at length to show how they model a more purposeful approach to writing and being, and then he concludes by saying,

“The world needs changing and my work and my writing frankly suck, because good enough sucks. Adequate sucks. Merely competent sucks, and don’t think I’m willing to set the bar at contentedness with anything that isn’t the best I’ve got on offer anymore.”

I agree with Mike entirely, not that his work sucks, because I have been enjoying his writing very much, but that any work sucks, and any writing sucks, as soon as it has become good enough.  Writing that has become satisfied with itself, that sees itself as adequate, that no longer strives to be more than it is, can only ever be poor writing.  Good writing is always trying to be better writing, and it should therefore provoke better writing in its readers.

This returns me to the opening phrase of Mike’s post, where he compares the four essays he is discussing to a “swarm of intellectual candiru” that have “lodged themselves in his apparatus.”  This is a wonderful and appalling image.  It likens the reader to someone standing thigh high in the river of writing, in the place where the Amazon and the Rio Negro meet, pissing into the passing water, when these four essays, these four small, bloodsucking, parasitic catfish, jump from the river and into the reader’s urethra to gorge themselves on his blood.

The violence and the repugnance of this image describe, at least for me, what good writing needs to do.  It needs to violate the reader somehow, to pain and discomfit, to provoke.  It needs to get under the reader’s most sensitive skin and incite a different and better reading, a different and better writing, a dissatisfaction with what has so far been read and written.  This dissatisfaction, this refusal to be merely adequate, is what produces writing worth reading.