Writing is inventing.

Most of the time, folks get it wrong. True fact.

Children who show promise as writers get set upon by teachers who want them to think of it as self expression. Or worse, as a perfectly-executed spelling and grammar exercise. Not only does this give them the wrong impression, it can ruin them for life. I’m not exaggerating.

When I think about the writing I admire most, it’s almost always dancing back and forth across grammatical lines, common use of words, and even norms of courtesy.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is so circuitous with the magical way it treats time, you usually can’t tell what time it is…or even what year. Your seventh grade English teacher would chide you for such a thing. The narrative is supposed to go generally in the direction of time, from beginning to end, with an occasional flashback for context or exposition. Of course this is nonsense. Flashbacks are among the weakest possible exposition tools. But putting that aside…who says?

Marquez is probably the greatest fiction writer of the past 70 years. And he says the story follows the line of the story and time has to fall in line, along with all the other elements. So, two scenes, right next to each other in the narrative, one hundred years apart. And, he thinks so highly of the reader, he doesn’t even tell you. He lets you figure it out. He is inventing a way of thinking about time.

James Joyce, in Ulysses, lets the narrative flow directly, unfiltered, out of the minds of a group of drunken college-age men, out on the town in Dublin. You actually have to get into their heads to understand what the book is saying. He was inventing a way of drawing a reader into the mind of the characters. You can’t know what’s going on without feeling what Stephen, Buck, and the dudes are feeling.

Genius? Maybe.

New? Certainly.

Successful? Well, you decide. But it’s taught in every literature and writing program in the English-speaking world. So, the jury is in at least among those folks.

A few decades later, William Faulkner writes a sad story about a Southern family that’s falling apart. It’s a common theme among Southern fiction writers of the late 19th and early 20th Century. The South has had a lot of pain and some difficulty with identity since the American Civil War. It shows in our literature.

Faulkner (maybe borrowing from Joyce) decides to tell the story from four points of view. Beginning with that of the man-child, intellectually-challenged Benji. Rather than going with the usual, Benji thought ………., Faulkner tells the story as Benji would tell it…actually, as Benji would think it. Lots of smelling of leaves and conflating adult Candice with child Caddy. The kinds of things a 6'2", 225-pound, 30-year-old toddler might think.

Faulkner invented a new way of extracting the confusion, frustration, and fear from a character who could not have been grasped by traditional, Jane Austin means. Or even by the techniques of Mark Twain, just a generation (or so) earlier.) A new kind of story. A new kind of hero. It needed a new way of speaking. And Faulkner invented it.

But it’s not just fiction. Nonfiction guys like Hunter S. Thompson (whose prose sometimes feel like you’re sharing a hallucination) and Tom Wolfe (whose sprawling books feel more like novels in their telling) invent lexicon and grammar for each project on which they embark.

I was blessed to begin writing at least 2-3 years before my first encounter with a grammar teacher. I had already learned to think of words as toys. I would later think of them as tools. I had already begun to think of sentences and paragraphs as strategies to go from one place to another. I was pragmatic, like a kid is pragmatic about LEGO. I learned to write like a jazz player learns to play.

What sound do you have? What sound do you want? How do you want someone to feel?

Only later did I learn grammar. And I learned it more to describe what I was doing and to keep myself consistent than to prescribe how it must be written.

Personally, I’d rather be like Joyce, Faulkner, Thompson, Wolfe, or Marquez than like the people who mastered Dick, Jane, Sally, Spot, Puff, and their ball. And that’s kind of the point.

Writing is supposed to be invention. There was writing before there was standardized spelling or prescriptive grammar. Writing that expressed eternal truths that needed to be told, that could not be contained. Writing that documented and crafted entire civilizations. And civilizations to come.

It’s a fire hose spraying multicolored paint. You can point it. You can control the rate. But at some level, if there’s no chance of it’s blasting out of control with blueish, greenish, black…against a cinderblock wall, it’s not going to move anyone. It won’t even inform anyone other than the people with nothing better to do than peruse it.

Writing is invention. I’m not sure how you would teach that. But it really needs to be taught. Because it really needs to be learned. Otherwise, we’ll be a language group full of proofreaders, bereft of writers.