FYI: George Carlin and Writing

If you don't know who George Carlin is, you have missed out on one of the more hilarious comics of the past forty years. He passed away this week at the age of 71. His work is thought provoking, often vulgar, sometimes irreligious, and usually plays with language. He never apologized for his work at comic and author, so I won't either. His passion for others doing better in the world had a very sharp edge.

In any event, the following excerpts on how Carlin regarded himself as a writer just crossed my inbox. I like reading other authors, especially when they talk about how they use writing and improve their craft. It is one means I use to keep my own craft growing and improving. In any event, as growing authors yourselves, I wanted to pass this along to you:

Psychology Today [Notice: The names of magazines and books appear in italics. In the text of an email, they are surrounded by underscrores, like this: _Psychology Today_.] had planned a short, back page, 350-word interview with George Carlin, but given his death, Jay Dixit, the interviewer, posted longer excerpts on his blog. Carlin talks about a lot of things: the craft of comedy, the anatomy of a joke, the nature of language, and very often about the nature of writing--for him--and how he came to see writing in his work and how he came to think of himself as a writer.

Below are some excerpts followed by a URL to the full piece. Note: Read the full piece before sending students to it; there's profanity and some crude humor, as you can imagine, which might not play well in all quarters. But if your students are mature enough to work through that, there's a lot to be gleaned about learning, writing, and language.

So if I write something down, some observation-I see something on television that reminds me of something I wanted to say already-the first time I write it, the first time I hear it, it makes an impression.

The first time I write it down, it makes a second impression, a deeper path. Every time I look at that piece of paper, until I file it in my file, each time, the path gets a little richer and deeper so that these things are all in there.

Now at this age, I have a network of knowledge and data and observations and feelings and values and evaluations I have in me that do things automatically. And then when I sit down to consciously write, that's when I bring the craftsmanship. That's when I pull everything together and say, how I can best express that?

And then as you write, you find more, 'cause the mind is looking for further connections. And these things just flow into your head and you write them. And the writing is the really wonderful part. A lot of this is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that's our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.

This was a really important distinction for me to notice-it happened way after the fact. I'm a writer. I think of myself as a writer. First of all, I'm an entertainer; I'm in the vulgar arts. I travel around talking and saying things and entertaining, but it's in service of my art and it's informed by that. So I get to write for two destinations. The
writing is what gives me the joy, especially editing myself for the page, and getting something ready to show to the editors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love reworking, I love editing, love love love revision, revision, revision, revision.

And computers changed my life, the fact that you can move text as easily as you can move text, and say, "Wait a minute, these two things belong together, these two things go together, page 2 and page 5: similar ideas, put 'em together!" But the person who is most a part of me is the performer, is the standup, the guy who says, "Hey look at me, listen to this!" I do that because that's what I do, I love doing it.

http://tinyurl.com/5o6g8y


Enjoy or not. Your choice, but there's a lot to learn from every author. --Steve