Tag: readers

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Behind the Words

Every once in a while, someone who’s new to this column will ask me what it’s about. My usual response is “It’s about 600 words, give or take.”

Ba-dum-bum.

OK, it’s a wiseguy answer. But not a wrong one. Over the years, this column has dealt with puns and politics, sports and sorrow, news of the weird and news from home. Many of the most popular have been about family – my wife Heather, our disabled ward Missy, our cousins and nieces and nephews and pets.

If there’s been one consistent theme, though – aside from my beating my forehead against the monitor until the words come pouring out – it’s that this column is about all of you.

Allow me to explain.

Long ago, I dwelt in a fabled land known as southwest Kansas, where the distances are vast and the people few. Within this land, there dwelt a sage known as Ava Betz, copy editor for The Garden City Telegram. And after I wrote my first weekly column ever as a newspaper reporter – a light piece on the beauty of words – it was Ava who came up to me to compliment me and pass on a bit of advice.

“You can write anything you want,” she told me, “but no navel gazing. Got it?”

“Got it.” And I did.

Writers spend a lot of time in their own head. It can be very tempting to not come out again – to cut out the rest of the world and make it all about ME, spending paragraph after paragraph on the beauty of your own belly button lint (figuratively speaking) without a thought to why anyone else in the world should care about your deathless prose.

But other people matter.

And “why should anyone care?” is the most vital question any writer can ask.

Let me revise that. It’s the most vital question any human being can ask.

Writers need readers. And writers who never give a moment’s thought to the readers’ world haven’t created a story. At best, they’ve created a still life, objects without motion, references without resonance. At worst, they’re posing in a mirror.

People need people. And people who never give a moment’s though to the other lives around them pass through an empty world – or worse, create one. Neighbors without empathy are just folks who happen to live nearby. Leadership without reflection is just preening, or maybe even bullying. Failing to recognize someone else’s pain is to not truly understand your own.

That’s one of the secrets that shouldn’t be so secret. We learn ourselves better when we see others more clearly. When we reach out, something also reaches in.

And together, we create a story worth telling.

It sounds easy. It isn’t. It means taking time to consider other perspectives and other hearts, and maybe having your own broken a few times. C.S. Lewis once wrote that “To love at all is to be vulnerable,” and when you try to find the things that tie your soul to another’s, you are committing an act of love. Leaving yourself vulnerable.

But you’re also making the world just a little closer. And yourself a little more alive.

In acting, a performer is sometimes derided as “only playing himself.” Actors know the truth – that every actor plays themselves, but the most limited ones don’t have enough self to play. You stretch yourself by breaking out of familiar patterns and experiencing those around you. By caring.

This is a space where we come to care. This column. This community. This world.

That’s what it’s about.

And if it’s also about 600 words – well, that’s a bonus.

You bet your belly button.

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A Word Out of Place

Who can forget the climax of “Gone With the Wind” when Rhett turned to Scarlett and shockingly, unforgettably told her “My dear, I don’t give a darn?”

Or the pages of Shelby Foote’s “The Civil War” where William T. Sherman warns that “War is heck?”

And of course, there’s that shocking background refrain in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” where one of the “Chronics” in the asylum can’t say anything but “Fff ….” Come to think of it, I guess he never gets to say much of anything.

At least, that may be the case with a new app called Clean Reader that’s advertised to remove all the profanity from an e-book. The app can be set to Clean, Cleaner, Squeaky Clean or Off, depending on how many swear words a reader feels like tolerating; censored words receive a blue dot and a suggested substitute for those that tap the deletion.

It’s not the first time that something like this has been tried, of course. Go back to the 19th century and you find Thomas Bowdler’s cleaned-up edition of Shakespeare, where Opehlia drowns accidentally and Lady Macbeth screams “Out, crimson spot!” (And yes, this is where the word bowdlerization comes from.) Film buffs can point instead at CleanFlicks, a company which re-edited movies to remove offensive content until a judge told them to stop.

The difference here, of course, is that there’s a certain amount of reader control. Instead of buying an adulterated copy, the customer buys the same book as everyone else and then chooses whether to filter it. That’s led some to defend the app: “It’s my book and my business, right?”

There’s some truth to that. But there’s also a catch. Two catches, really.

Yes, you can do with your book whatever you want. If you choose to right now, you can take any book you own and go through it with a black marker to remove anything. That’s not new, either. Thomas Jefferson once took that approach to his copy of the Gospels, literally trimming out any reference to miracles or the supernatural.

But that’s where you run into Catch No. 1: markers don’t work so well on the mind. Even when you let something line out the profanity for you, the word isn’t gone. Every time a reader hits the deleted or substituted word, the act simply calls attention to what used to be there, unless the reader is either innocent or quite young.

And then there’s Catch No. 2, brought up by a friend: if you don’t trust an author to use the right words, why are you reading him or her in the first place?

One of the glories – and yes, sometimes, one of the dangers – of the written word is that it’s a telepathic act. By staring at words on a page, you can know what a writer was thinking, no matter how much time has passed since the thought. At any time, a reader can dive into the ideas of Mark Twain, J.D. Salinger or Maya Angelou, touching them mind-to-mind until the book is closed.

But the words matter. Twain once said that the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug. They’re tools, chosen to evoke a desired effect.

Change the word, and you change the effect. You no longer have a clear window into the author’s mind, but only an approximation.

It’s true, not every author uses profanity, just like not every painter uses teal or violet. The ones that do have a reason. If the excuse seems weak, that’s a perfectly valid reason to read a different book or even a different author. Nobody reads everything, nobody has to read anything.

But what you do choose to read – don’t hold back. Read it. Without screens. Without modification. Find your way into that mind, even the uncomfortable parts, and see what you discover.

You may love it. You may hate it. But you’ll know because you’ve read the book, instead of almost the book.

And missing that opportunity would be a darned shame.