Le mot juste

"You could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define a net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string" reads an inspection of the conundrum of interpretation in Flaubert's Parrot (1984). A similar thing can be done with a biography of Julian Barnes: let the trawling net fill, then haul it in, sort, throw back, store, fillet and sell. Yet consider what isn't caught: there is always far more of Barnes that slips through.

For those who have read any of Barnes's books, be it the distressing tripartite England, England or the intensively fictionalized account of the Great Wyrley Outrage, Arthur and George, those stark metaphors stand out that were strung taut around unforgiving sentences, assuaging those waylaid in their attempt to move on from tragedies that innocence cannot be reinvented. In fact, since it would be an injustice to concede that very little is known of the man, it would be just as right to come to the conclusion that almost everything about him is reflected in his writing.

Born in Leicester, England, in 1946, Barnes studied modern languages at Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating with honours in 1968. After graduation, he was employed with the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement as a lexicographer, before joining the New Statesman and the New Review as a reviewer and literary editor in 1977. It was in this position that he wrote his first novel, Metroland, in 1981, winning the Somerset Maugham Prize for it. It was in this position that he wrote his third novel in 1984, his claim to international fame, Flaubert's Parrot. An ardent Francophile, he was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988, Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995 and Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004 in recognition of his work.

A rather English man in many ways, Barnes is discursive and understated, freely suspended on a forest of associations that stretch between his love for the Gaelic all the way to a humaneness and generosity that some of his friends recollect passionately. Hardly ever blunt in his appraisal of matters - literary or no - his association with the art seems to suggest less of experimentation and more of groping. Given his candidness, those who have known him in any measure are only inclined to believe he knows just as much as the reader does. In other words, his books enjoy such acclaim because Barnes seems to have written each word the moment the reader has read those words. They come to life reflected starkly in the memories of our own past, of what we have always held to be true but at the moment of completion of Barnes' exposition seem to be trapped in a simulacrum.

The inherent variety of his styles points at the inability of readers to consolidate his work under one ideological umbrella; given that the days of British literature are waning, it becomes all the more pertinent to understand this most inscrutable of authors. Readers knew what to expect from Rushdie, from Amis, but they stand clueless when it comes to Barnes, a man Auberon Waugh, founder of The Literary Review, said wouldn't be read in 20 years' time in 1991. There have been no attempts at self-portraits, no attempts to emulate Pynchon's or Conan Doyle's portrayal of fiction as the higher autobiography. Does the man know how to invent, then?

One thing is for sure, however. Where, in search of the right word, Flaubert and Nabokov toe the fine line between indulgent romanticism and an ironic realism, Julian Barnes deftly negotiates the pursuit of le mot juste, as it were, to construct the lives and times of his fiercely individual characters, each still possessing sufficient strength to entice the reader into examining the tenuous links between one's past and future. The works of Barnes, more than anything else, are a study of history and our places in them. It has been said that other people's tastes in art can seem as mysterious and trivial as their tastes in love, and in reading a man who writes with such verbal inventiveness, our lifetimes seem to split asunder, each shard a mirror of our disbelief, a mysterious souvenir to remember our vain pursuit of the days gone by.

The legacy of Tamil thatha

The classicism of Tamil literature and the masterpieces that make it so bring to mind great palaces, poets endowed with immense talent, and an immeasurable appreciation of what the quills sang. To think all these are preserved in one 68-year old library, with inadequate funds, in Thiruvanmiyur can be a bit of a letdown.

However, the U. V. Swaminatha Aiyer Research Library is one of its kinds in South Asia, both in terms of its history, its contents and its potential.

Dr. Swaminatha Aiyar lived in a time that possessed an incomplete awareness, let alone knowledge, of Tamil literature. Once, after a chance encounter with an associate, he received a frail document to decipher, a document he quickly realized with a shock was the Jeevaka Chintamani, one of the five great epics, the Aymperum Kaappiangal.

His discovery prompted him to search for other lost epics of Tamil literature. Soon, he was going from door to door in hundreds of towns and villages in and around Tamil Nadu, begging for the Tamil people to give up any old manuscripts they might have had to be preserved. The alternative then, unamusingly, was for their use in cooking fires.

Kalyansundaram Aiyar, his son, offered the entire treasure trove after the passing of his father Rukmini Devi in 1942.

On the advice of her husband, Dr. George Arundale, she accepted the gift and initially stored the collection in the Theosophical Society's library. With grants from the central and state governments, a building was constructed in Thiruvanmiyur to house the collection in 1967.

Formally established in 1943, one year after the death of Dr. Aiyer, the research library bears fitting tribute to a man of great intellect and even greater perseverance. This was demonstrated when he collected all five of the epics, the others being Silappathikaram, Thirukkural, Kundalakesi and Valayapathi, apart from over 21,000 books and 3,100 palm leaf manuscripts.

In accordance with the facilities at the library’s disposal, the books are categorized into three: transcribed and published, transcribed and unpublished, and non-transcribed. The latter already number on the greater side of 400. With dwindling interest in the services of this remarkable facility, their preservation is beginning to pose a tremendous problem – both to the administration as well as to the language itself.

V. Jagannathan, an independent Tamil scholar, has used the library and admires it fervently – both for what it is and what it could be. Many a time making use of the transcribed works to aid in his translations of the Silappathikaram and the Thirukkural, he says, “These are works that cannot be found anywhere in the world. They are preserved in their original forms here. It is really depressing to see them so uncared for.”

He explains that the transcription and lamination processes were begun later than they should have, in 2006. Even now, Dr. Jagannathan observes, the influx of funds remains a concern. Enough has been provided by the government and the Kalakshetra foundation for micro-filming and fumigation of the texts. “However, with the internet, the library has the fantastic opportunity to make these texts quickly available for free and in a form accessible to many youngsters.”

[caption id="attachment_20413" align="aligncenter" width="376" caption="A statue of Dr. Aiyar outside the Madras Presidency College, Chennai"][/caption]

What does the future look like, then? The title of Mahopadhyaya was conferred on Dr. Aiyar in 1906, meaning “the greatest of the great teachers”, and how have we honoured his lessons?

M. V. Pasupathy, honorary curator of the library, has emphasized the need for virtual libraries abetted by awareness programs on history and heritage that draw in more people to sustain its preservation. The hope, evidently, lies with the hundreds of scholars and their use of the library every year. It is from the appreciation of their efforts that we can embark once more upon a journey that will revive the splendour of Tamil classical literature as well as our beloved Tamil thatha.

Visions of a beach

*

Look at it! Two eyes, two eyes. I sit pinned down, stunned silent. Some dualism of vision. One eye sees while the other observes. While this observes, that sees. This and that. The palm knows everything, I suppose!

*

*

Fishes inside my head. My lover in the water and I can't swim. She swims away while only the blood flows this way. It is a beautiful cosmology where imitations galore. What one eye sees is what all eyes must see!

*

*

Stories abound in this Universe. Opinions are injected into each page, into every page, all going in, in and in. Limitless volume... or really? There are no ears and no eyes, no flavours and no odours. The fabula must live and the sujet must die. It must, expended, die!

*

*

Why must I listen? There are stories everywhere, characters, plots, words, ideas, people, their avarice... their avarice! Idiots! Demons! The inheritance of loss is scarring, the reward for neonatality! Steps and ladders, snakes and bosoms, where are my fortunes?

*

*

Skin and bones, wherewith there struts a holy cleavage, the thin line between illusion and the eternity of godliness! Am I there? I must be there. It is as what I imagined it to be. Be blessed, my child! You are no longer polluted. You are the polluting all-dirt.

Visions of a beach

*

Look at it! Two eyes, two eyes. I sit pinned down, stunned silent. Some dualism of vision. One eye sees while the other observes. While this observes, that sees. This and that. The palm knows everything, I suppose!

*

*

Fishes inside my head. My lover in the water and I can't swim. She swims away while only the blood flows this way. It is a beautiful cosmology where imitations galore. What one eye sees is what all eyes must see!

*

*

Stories abound in this Universe. Opinions are injected into each page, into every page, all going in, in and in. Limitless volume... or really? There are no ears and no eyes, no flavours and no odours. The fabula must live and the sujet must die. It must, expended, die!

*

*

Why must I listen? There are stories everywhere, characters, plots, words, ideas, people, their avarice... their avarice! Idiots! Demons! The inheritance of loss is scarring, the reward for neonatality! Steps and ladders, snakes and bosoms, where are my fortunes?

*

*

Skin and bones, wherewith there struts a holy cleavage, the thin line between illusion and the eternity of godliness! Am I there? I must be there. It is as what I imagined it to be. Be blessed, my child! You are no longer polluted. You are the polluting all-dirt.

A Shade Of Solecism

In the process of understanding this wide world, a strange inner transformation comes to fruition. Just like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the expenditure of energy in observing something changes the observation. The world we learn about is only the world that includes us, and the world there is is made up of people who change it continuously. What we can learn is what it is, but the mistake would be in trying to teach ourselves what it could have been instead of understanding it for what it was.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Rites of passage"][/caption]

I learnt of the world outside my window by writing. When I write things and hit "Save", an exuberance sweeps over me that signifies that something has been said and set in stone, that something cannot be changed and for every moment that comes after it, it is embellished deeper and deeper in the murk of history. For that reason, I can't let anything be wrong. I want my footprints on history's pages to be picture-perfect. It's not something I'm pretending to be - it's only something I know I can be and am trying my best to be so. In order to make correctness a habit, I read, I discover, I interpret. Reading and discovering can happen over and over again, without interpretation they will remain useless as time passes. Our mark does not lie in understanding that darkness is darkness and the light is the light; it lies in being able to light a candle without regard to whatever winds may be blowing then.

However, as the writer writes more and more, there is more and more about the world that is new, that is there in the now but wasn't in the then. If this moment has been prepared for, then disillusionment can be spared in favour of understanding, as has been noted that to attempt to learn is futile if understanding is absent. The prevalence of a loss of context forces a delineation on the matter of "understanding": to say that one understands is to not have integrated the ability to recognize, disintegrate and recreate, but to have only remembered the meaning encapsulated therein.

As much as contributions are expedited, so much is the world changed, and the world of the minute before understands its retirement just so. I, who have learnt much in this process of writing and self-discovery, am now a different man than of the minute before and have cast over my understanding of the world then a shade of solecism. The greatest lesson, therefore, does not concern the contents of our learning but the methodology itself: not what we learn, but how we learn. By integrating the idea that the spinning top spins so because tops spin so, we do not graduate from being fools. We must learn why it spins so. A top spinning the moment past will grind to a clumsy halt, but in setting another in motion is our learning vindicated.

Blackbird's Egg

Ephemeral and lasting these sons of constant attention remain, swimming seas of white and seeking like brave fools the short-lived happiness that words bring. A bloodied chest of rubies with a curse screaming above their head, and I am pushed away, slowly, steadily, and I deliberately forget to fight as noiseless wonders fracture to an unforgiving life. My hollowness has been stolen and in its place is a black bird.

[caption id="attachment_819" align="alignright" width="420" caption="Broken sky, wholesome rain"][/caption]

A dreaded wall climbs high and lifts magnanimously on its bank a small green frog. The calendar is moving away, tearing slowly across the lines, the numbers are released up and down both at once. Ripples settle down in silence and the moon comes to watch a storm gently falling asleep in the morning. Jan-jan-jan, one by one, push the sun out. Was-now flaps its wings in a blur but white lingers, a black sun rises in the north, and the morning blooms now-was.

Dissension and debate rage on the outside while a sharp illness pricks within. Give me your promise, broken at birth, and exploit my choices as a preference. Blood on the world's hands and scratches on the queen's back, the marauder runs into eternity behind the pillars of creation. Reason gives fast pursuit but the catch is never done. Why must it be when the end is the end is the end? Raindrops slither down the damp wood and our fires won't burn for any bribe. The crime is only slavery... not you, my darling.

I'm a radioactive toy filled with evaporating purposes. Keep my right to freedom and keep my right to the skies. Give me the freedom to give up when I longer can, give me the freedom to throw my arms up, give me the freedom to shed a tear. To cry shamelessly. Dark patches of dried blood flake away into the wind while the sun sets slowly beyond the mountain, and sunflowers meet the Earth whence they came. The leaf, is airborne, skyward, as a souvenir of the true day.

The Lonely Perfectionist

A few months before, I had a plot simmering in my head about a lonely perfectionist. I let it go over time for lack of interest – the way I naturally developed the storyline didn’t go well with the other half of me, the “me” that wanted to concentrate more on the reaches of insanity and what insanity itself desired.

The Lonely Perfectionist

He was a lonely man, sitting alone in his dark room for hours on end, and when he emerged, rarely though that was, he would conjure great stories about himself, his brave conquests. The lonely perfectionist was an intelligent man, and into these stories he would throw in specks of his humiliations, his defeats, just to provide the tale with a sense of balance and some plausibility, as such. One fine day, when his only son comes visiting, the lonely perfectionist wishes not to open his long shut door. When the incessant knocks becomes unbearable, he leaves his chair and pulls the door open with an inexorable irascibility.

As the hinges creak against the damp mass of wood, so also does his past. A multitude of memories flash past his eyes, each more vague than its predecessor, and the lonely perfectionist only ignores them. He deigns them as the foolish who chase after what was done. He left his wife to fend for herself on the lonely and cold streets of Kzar (a fictitious town), he left his toddler son to beg; he thought, more so than wished, that he was leaving his past to die. And now, it had raised its serpentine head once more, rearing up against his bosom. He looks up at his son, for he is tall, handsome, and rich by the merit of his garb. As the old man opens his mouth to shoo the stranger back into the darkness whence he seemed to have emerged, the son silences him with a casual wave. They only exchange a stern stare, each delving into the other’s eyes with an immense hatred.

The rich, finally, hands the poor a purse of leather, albeit leaving him to claim it from near his feet, and departs. The old man is intrigued. “What scourge from the dead is this?”, he wonders; he picks it up, pushes the door back into its termite-ridden nightmare, and gets back to his study.

The room of the lonely perfectionist is small, housing only a chair, a table and no bed. Clothes lay strewn on the floor. When he moved into Alam, he had purchased this small room and the house on the other side of the wall. He had further permitted a group of young boys to move in, and he only asked of them to feed him night and day by pushing a small plate of rice and chicken through a crack at the bottom of the wall, and some oil and wick whenever he tapped his stick thrice. He cared not for the rent, he cared not for the tantrums they seemed to throw. He was a lonely old man, and he only wished to stay that way.

Years passed, and the arrangement saw itself fit to continue unperturbed. None had seen the old man come out into the daylight. He always was inside, poring over great volumes that he had carried with him from Kzar. What evil or demise these tomes spoke of, no living soul would ever know. The truth was, they were empty with not a single sentence or line or word, not a single tale or fable or moral, not a single hero or king or kingdom. The lonely perfectionist was a creator and needed for himself only a canvas; unto a world of madness he may have been consigned, but he created legends every day.

What he always did and would continue to do for quite some time to come, however, was keep the pages of these books to his ears, and they would speak to him the epics of the past. They don’t, nor do I, know whence these books come from. In fact, they, nor I, knew not whether they were such magical books, ones written by sorcerers and necromancers past. All he would do is sit and listen to them, and whenever he completed a book, he would stand up and dance for days together, stomping and pounding his careworn feet on the floorboards. He would sing, screeching and howling into the night. None knew which memory he was reliving, whose birth he was proclaiming. And then, all of a sudden, even as immediately as God’s wrath descended upon Sodom and Gomorrah, he would quieten. Not a sound would emerge until the lonely perfectionist had completed another tome, another past.

When he finally opened the purse, he discovered within it a hundred glittering coins of pure gold! Not a penny more, not a penny less, but a hundred! The old man knew not what to do with them. What a sensible man does with such treasure – thus was his thought. As he pondered, the few fragments of the past that had managed to survive, the love he was bestowed with by his wife and son from the days older than his discovery, return like the horsemen of the Apocalypse: perhaps his only son had come all this way to gift him another story!

And so, pushing away the faithful books into a pile, and the pile into a darker corner, the old man doused the lights. And then, he slowly leaned his head in toward the coins now laid strewn on the table. One by one, he pushes them to the centre, and yearns for them to begin to speak! Days pass, the morsels are neglected. The tenants are concerned, their plates have not been returned. The neighbours are angry, there is a stench emanating from the room. But the old man ignores them all, until finally, he begins to believe the coins are mute. The coins are mute! Thumping his fist angrily on the table, he begins to shout. “Speak, ye worthless!” and receives only silent humility in return.

“How can you not speak?! You even have the face some other man embossed on yours, are you not ashamed?! You have lost your identity, you have been unmasked, and you have no sorrow to put forth, no regret?! What are you?! Who beat you into this torment?! I have been magnanimous before, and I will be once more now, all for you! - so forth.

He can't stand the silence of the coins, bangs his head against the table. Finally, he is dead.

Thus passed the lonely perfectionist.

~

I know I've been working towards writing simpler over the last few months, but the story just seemed to warrant it. Like I was venerating von Goethe.

So, that’s how my story went. It was inspired by a dream I had: I was sitting in a dark room, banging my head (don’t ask me why) against a wooden table upon which was a lonely gold coin. Now, this was the problem: I knew I wanted to base the story on insanity – insanity would be my protagonist – and the old man, the antagonist. However, I kept walking into a cul de sac when I attempted to depict such madness, which also served as a clear reminder that I’m quite far from being a good writer. IMO, the good writer differs from the not-so-good writer not because he has a better imagination but because he has better ways of putting it down.

The Dreaming Grey: A poem

Mildewed in cold February were the leaves and grey
In the evening winds where they gently lay
        In pursuit of some joy forlorn
        Whereto the sands of time had never yet gone
        A winter’s fey, a winter’s fey
Mourned the mildewed leaves where they gently lay

Cloaked in dreary snow were the windows today
Overlooking streets where children ne’er played
        Forever lost in a neighbour’s dreams
        Lending an indifferent ear to our silent screams
        A winter’s lay, a winter’s lay
Called the windows unto the streets empty and insatiate

Unborn and nigh loveless were the words left to say
Yet hope remains for a callow to endure the starved clay
        When leaves may know their green again
        And windows may live their dreams under the rain
        A summer’s day, a summer’s day
So the children may remember the vaunt it is to play

A posse ad esse!

Any reality is better than this one.

Nebula had lifted early, his sanguine underbelly hoisted with the rising currents of this cauterized morning. The blue and green rays of light sprang through the miasma of constriction, vacillating between some vague yellow of progress and another pink proclivous of preservation, infinite lines bent around a myriad wrong choices and half as many right ones, bastard bubbles of turbulence surfacing here and there, intermittently. I turned away, shielding my windows with two vulcanized tentacles that seemed to have prostituted their comfort for subconscious pleasure; despite the desuetude, they stiffened in a trice to their embryonic vigour.

Smoke was soon at hand, seeking some sign of a susurration, some sedulous sweep of season over my stirring silhouette. I was a weak guest, a mannequin doomed in the confines of her hospitality to announce prowess, to proclaim achievement, to provide attention, to attain perfection, the convolution conspicuous for everyone to contemplate on, for my soul to smoulder under, for in the absence of fight, I am slave - united not by blood to some ancient sinew of perseverance but by endurance to a thew of rebellion; unfortunately, the cerise fruit needed years to ripen, to turn chartreuse. Until that spell conceded, I could and would survive in that receptacle of patience, walled in by a past fecund with enlightenment. Also, coffee, fulminated.

Propaganda occluded, with errorless aplomb and occupation, every orifice of audacious idiocy in the abode, a wild lope across the thousand tiles leaving a spoor of precipitous overawe assured by augmented obeisance or a reservoir of obloquy accrued by authority, all so voluptuously asinine as to leave some Communist speaker tower somewhere horribly jaundiced. A momentous blow to the occiput being the cause, so astounding was the devotion to routine that all the reproofs of religion unduly lolled forgotten under mountains of conciliatory atrocities, held by the throat in the throes of commitment.

Mansuetude was marked the hour of the coming of Sister, a distant vengeance stained on the blunt side of a knife, dried like dead blood, and it was dusk. Any reality, was it prophesized, to have been better than this, for in this hour the verdict is altered: she is the first among equals and second to none. Nefariously humbling was the spirit encumbering my desuetude shoulders – as had advanced the quick night. I suddenly found myself rapt on the other end of the swing of time, nay, a pendulum, and all was reset, for what had commenced with putative note now had crescendoed with palliative counterpart. Servabo fidem! Hic sunt leones! A posse ad esse!

A posse ad esse! A posse ad esse!

Notes

The above is intended to be a work of surrealist creative writing. Each paragraph describes a different time of day, different people, different objects, different conflicts - all at the same time. Feel free to interpret, to deduce, to infer, to be offended even.

1. Most of the words in the second paragraph, commencing with "Nebula...", place a stress on the alveolar ridge when they're pronounced - making it sound reinvigorating and aggressive when read aloud (alveolar plosive, dental plosive, uvular trill).


2. The first line of the third paragraph has an obvious alliteration in the first line.


3. The second line of the third paragraph has an alternating alliteration ("announce prowess, proclaim achievement...").


4. The whole of the third paragraph is built to reduce the stress placed on the alveolar ridge, instead diverting the tip of the tongue to the alveolar process of the lower mandible (alveolar fricative).


5. The fourth paragraph involves frequent usage of the phonetic alphabet that describes the pronunciation of the word "awe" (/ɔ:/).


6. The penultimate paragraph ("Mansuetude was...") contains a prosaic acrostic - with an ambivalent dedication to a friend - as well as completes the chronological cycle begun in the second paragraph.

Clean Writing For... Geniuses

There are enough articles out there that tell you how to write. Today, I'm going to tell you how NOT to write, especially how NOT to write something that is bound to frustrate the shit out of the reader.

[caption id="attachment_106" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="That definitely doesn't read right."][/caption]

We'll go through this in a series of points because I don't have the patience (for obvious reasons) to give you an introduction on bad writing, you have enough examples - and if you're around 20 years of age, you probably creating an example in an SMS message or a chat-window right now.

1. Periods (".") are important because they end sentences. They provide an invaluable break in the flow of thought in what you're writing. If you don't use this particular little dot, what you're writing looks like you've thrown it up - literally. Words don't deserve that.


2. An ellipsis is three dots in a row, one after another, without a space in between, like this: "...". That wasn't so hard, was it? Dot. Dot. Dot! It stands for either "to be continued" or "some text has been left out here because I think it's unimportant". Whenever you want to put that thought into the reader's head, you use the ellipsis. You shouldn't use it if the BOTH of us know what's coming next NOR in the middle of a sentence.


3. I'm not too particular about this one, but try capitalizing the first letters of your sentences and any names. The world's not going to end if you don't, but try it out, it could give what you're writing a classy look, like you're particular about things. I know, you're going to be put down as an intellectual dweeb for that, but when it comes to writing, things work differently.


4. I am QUITE sure none of you use Notepad or Wordpad to write these days. You either use MS WORD, that application that Mac users have or inside your browser, and I am QUITE sure that none of you still use IE6 - it's either Firefox, Chrome or that browser Mac users have. All three of them, note, have an add-on for checking the spelling of what you're putting down. In fact, they come with it when you install them. This is just to tell you that writing like that doesn't make you... "cool".


5. Stop using the word "like". Seriously. Use it only when you know what a simile is. A simile is like a metaphor.


6. Commas are beyond this world in their purpose. Please feel free to use them abundantly. You know, when you're writing to someone and you have no way of telling them when you're pausing and when you're not, a comma comes to the rescue, bold as it is. People will invoke a pause in what they're reading when they come across a comma. It's on my list of top 10 inventions of all time.


7. When you've learned how to use a period, you might be interested in the return button on the keyboard. When you press it, you get a paragraph, just like that, right out of nowhere, and a paragraph represents a more significant break in the flow of what you're reading. It's like this: you're organizing an event, and there are the lighting, sound and carpentry teams. It makes sense to have all the electricians in the lighting team and all the audio engineers in the sound team - all of them are humans like all of them are sentences, but the segregation is necessary to get the work done. It's a hard life, but it's better that way.


8. Hyphens bring words together to create hyphenation. An en-dash, which is the width of the capitalized "N", signifies a range (e.g., 6-10 horses); note: no spaces before or after. On modern keyboards, like the QWERTY and the Dvorak, the figure dash and en-dash are actuated by the same button, which is an outright tragedy, but let's move on. The em-dash is as wide as the capitalized "M" and demarcates parenthetical thought ("... I'm sure you know - like everyone else does - that you're a genius..."). It's also used to signify interruption: "So, as I was saying, you need to- BAM! Oh my god, you killed him!"

There you have it: 8 simple rules to make your writing look good, at least better than it already is. Please use them and write like a normal person - and by normal, I mean what it represented in a time as recent as 1981. I don't like the new definition.