Words Fail Me

You’ve played Tetris, right? Tetris is strange because you can’t actually win. The blocks keep piling up, and no matter how good you are, they eventually reach the top of the screen. When you start a game of Tetris, the only question is how well you’re going to fail.

If you didn’t understand that – if you thought there was some way to Win At Tetris – you might be disappointed by that failure. But if you realize that there are only varying degrees of failure, you may feel less frustrated when you get to Game Over…and, more importantly, you may be more likely to play again.

Writing is like that. It is almost impossible to Win At Writing – to successfully translate any piece of your soul into a sequence of letters. Novelist Hari Kunzru talks about “the disappointment that this finite collection of words is all that remains of your infinitely rich idea.” I’ve heard many writers describe finishing a novel (or poem or story) as “giving up” – that is, you reach a point where you just decide to stop fiddling with it, because it’s never going to be perfect.

This built-in failure is a daily, visceral experience for me, because it happens every time I write a blog post. When I’m finished, I always read over what I’ve written and think, well, that’s okay. That’s not really it, not quite the glowing spark that was cartwheeling around in my brain, but it’ll do. I’m not bitter or frustrated about it. It’s just a thing that happens. Words fail me. More generally: words fail. But they do the best they can.

The thing is, there do seem to be occasional exceptions to this rule. You do sometimes read something and think, yeah, that’s it, he absolutely nailed that. It’s hard for me to imagine a more perfect expression of entropy than “Ozymandias,” or a better image of unraveling society than “The Second Coming.” I’ve even had that experience myself, sometimes, of writing something and actually thinking, that was exactly what I was trying to say.

I think, though, that this dead-on perfection can only occur in poems and short passages. Anything as long as a novel is bound to fail at some level. So maybe writing novels is like Tetris, whereas poems are more like Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts. Really hard to beat, but theoretically possible.

I’ve never actually played Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts. I kind of want to do that now.

All right, that’s all I’ve got. Have a good day. Fail better.