I was thinking the other day about what one is doing when one sits
down and writes a lengthy reply, like Christopher's here, to an email,
where the reply is a sort of mini-essay, through-composed rather than
meticulously planned and marshalled: an impromptu writing performance,
a little improvisatory "turn".

It's a form of writing I enjoy; I find out what I think about things
while doing it, or sometimes find out what I might think about things
if I started thinking about them - and one can disappear down
blind-alleys, or build a structure that crumbles under its own weight,
and learn from the experience: "I may or may not have succeeded", but
there is something there to assess, a form of argument that has at
least been tried.

One of the many reasons why it's often a shame when things get
"personal" is that one loses the confidence to do this: the writing
has to be tight, unambiguous, display nothing untoward that might be
seized upon; you're looking over your shoulder the whole time. Or one
might compensate through aggression: get the *other* guy on the back
foot, and you can keep on slugging...

But I'm not so interested in the pathologies of the form, which
everyone here's presumably *quite* familiar with. What interests me is
the training you have to have, in writing and thinking on the hoof, to
do this in the first place. Not everybody can. I remember being very
impressed by university tutors who spoke in paragraphs, who could
follow one paragraph with another, quite off-the-cuff; I remember
wanting to be able to do that, already being able to do it to some
degree, and honing that ability at some length whilst at university.
It shocked me a great deal later on to find myself in a seminar room
full of alleged degree students who couldn't do that at all, whom one
had to coax a great deal into delivering even a few sentences on the
topic at hand. And then marking their essays...

Partly it's a question of having something to say, something to talk
*about* and some reserves of example and anecdote that you can lavish
on the subject. I've been trying to get better at jazz improvisation
on the guitar, and insofar as I have got better it's because I have an
expanding vocabulary of musical ideas, things to play with that come
readily to hand. Eventually there may come a point where one has to go
the other way, to divest and "actively forget", in order to say
something new. The formula "X has forgotten more about Y than Z will
ever know" comes to mind; the forgetting may be purposeful. God knows,
if I never play certain generic blues-rock licks again it will be too
soon.

The one thing that does bother me about this kind of writing, although
it probably shouldn't, is the ephemerality of it. I'm sure I've
written several books-worth of prose in poetryetc alone; probably very
bad and unreadable books, but nevertheless it does sometimes feel like
an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Somehow the ability to
natter fluently in an electronic forum seems like a poor substitute
for, say, the completion of that PhD thesis I was going to write
(*cough*). Maybe we should have a poetryetc project where everyone
just disconnects for a month and tries to write a few short stories,
critical articles, sonnet sequences or whatever instead - then we all
reconnect a month later, and see what we've got...

Then again, the truly prolific natterers seem to manage to do both at once.

Dominic