To what do you owe your eloquence and articulation?
It isn’t genetics, that much is clear. In terms of experiences?
- Comic books. I taught myself to read using tattered copies of House of Mystery and oversized reprints of old shit like Action Comics #1. I drove my mom insane, running from my bedroom to the kitchen every three minutes to ask, “What’s this word?”
- Becoming a disruptive student in sixth grade, and realizing that if you phrased things just so, even the teacher would laugh. You could basically take her class away from her, and make her like it.
- Harrison Ford said “George, you can type this shit, but you can’t say it!” I learned to never be satisfied with a sentence until I could smoothly read it aloud.
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy took me to a different place. I suddenly wanted to lace my words with double and triple meanings, began playing with puns and lateral thinking, and ultimately saw the power of communicative amalgam… being simultaneously insightful and stupid at the same time. (Ba-dum-bump. I’ll be here all week. Tip your waitress.)
- I accidentally bought a ticket to Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V. I became obsessed. I uncovered a linguistic power that exceeded my comprehension… it was like a monkey finding the launch codes for a nuke.
- I got lost in the wilderness for quite a while. I had no voice. I wrote like whatever I was reading at the time. I read a bunch of Alan Dean Foster, so I wrote like him. Douglas Adams. Clive Barker. Craig Shaw Gardner. W. Shakespeare. Frank Miller. Chris Claremont. Esther Freisner. I’d rip off their styles without noticing. I became a mimic.
- I found an online sex forum full of perverted lawyers, engineers, PhDs, and one honest-to-God aristocrat, who liked to fight as much as fuck. I admired some of them —these were the most extensively educated, articulate people I’d ever met— and loathed others —my admiration and loathing shifted around as people changed over the years— but mostly I wanted to be their peer. I had to learn to craft impenetrable arguments and apologize when I was wrong. I discovered oratory. I found I had a knack for crafting meaningful connections between disparate phenomena. And most of all, I developed an elevated, written version of my normal speech patterns.