Flow of Words

This essay is part of The Headlight Review’s series, “The Process,” which features writers describing the steps they take to develop and realize a literary work. Writers discuss their inspirations, stages of their drafting, the swings and misses, and the messes they’ve made.

A narrative can focus on the story of a single creation or may instead frame a process the writer employs on a regular basis. We dig hearing writers talking about writing and understand not everything can result in success. Failures can tell a story, too.

In addition to a submission call, we asked a quartet of our favorites—Jason Crawford, John Henry Fleming, Robin Silbergleid, and James Whorton Jr.—to participate. These essays will kick off our series.  

We hope to continue publishing narratives on “The Process.” Any writer interested in participating may contact THR with a pitch, or we’ll be glad to look over a submission in its entirety.

Word count: 1500 or thereabouts. Multi-media essays are encouraged.

Brighton, New York, is the town where I live. From here to New York City is a ninety-minute flight. Amtrak is slower, but the seats are more comfortable, and you can carry your pocketknife on the train.

To make the trip three hundred years ago, you would have walked a beaten track between Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, and Oneida towns until you came to the Mohawk River, which would carry you east through a green valley. At Cohoes, you'd have dragged your boat past the falls and set it into the Hudson River to ride the water south to Manhattan and the Atlantic.

My house in Brighton is near Allen's Creek, named for Timothy Allyn, an early white settler who built a mill on it in about 1790. Though he left after only one summer, every current map and survey still shows his name by that creek. It meanders from here, gaining volume and joining another stream that empties north into Irondequoit Bay, where La Salle landed in 1669 prior to his trip down the Mississippi River, which he claimed, along with all the land drained by it, for the king of France.

Enos Stone, another early white Brightonian, remembered a large colony of rattlesnakes where Allen's Creek meets the road. He used to kill rattlesnakes there in the fall when films covered their eyes, blinding them, he thought, though he admitted he was not sure of that. Their oil was good for stiff joints, and their bile could be mixed with chalk to make a pill for fever.

I have not seen a rattlesnake by Allen's Creek. There are ducks, gray squirrels, smooth rocks, Norway maples, cottonwoods, and ashes with their bark falling off. The fish are small, none more than a couple of inches. The creek is always worth a visit.

Words are also flowing all the time around here. At any Brighton stop light, you are likely to see a driver talking out loud inside her otherwise empty car. Maybe the hands-free phone is on, or maybe she is talking to herself.

Words! The other day, I was reading something online and found myself lost in a dense paragraph. Phrase by phrase, it made sense, but I could not put any of it together. I started over. Though boring, the thing seemed erudite. The syntax was varied, the vocabulary fairly sophisticated. The tone was assured. It just didn't seem to be saying anything. On a lark, I tried Googling "AI detector." I copied and pasted some sentences into a text box.

A message appeared: "Your Text is AI/GPT Generated. 100% AI GPT."

Someone who knows more about it than I do told me that the generative AI chatbots are really just "autocomplete on steroids." Autocomplete is something I am familiar with. Eleven years ago, I bought a green iPhone 4c and discovered that I could hardly begin tapping out a text message before my new iPhone offered three choices for the next word. For example, I would type

             Are you

 and the iPhone would suggest

             hungry             ready               alone     

 Does three hundred years sound like a long time ago? Thirty years ago, I was teaching English 101 at a community college in Tennessee when we first got computers in the classrooms. Our lessons included how to turn the computer on, how to save your work to a disk, and how to use the mouse to cut and paste a sentence. The computers were great big beige tower-style PCs. They were not connected to the internet. Each keyboard had a mouse pad next to it. These were necessary because, at that time, computer mice worked by means of little roller balls on the underside, and the balls would not roll correctly on a Formica desktop.

You also had to remove the mouse ball now and then to clean it.

All of those giant PCs and their mouse pads are taking up space in a landfill now, where they will remain for another ten thousand years. The latest version of Microsoft Word is online. Not only will it cut and paste and check your spelling, but it will edit your prose.

Up by the door in our computerized classroom, we had a crank-style pencil sharpener screwed to the wall. I don't see those much lately. They have gone the way of pay phones. If we still had pay phones, they would be useless, since nobody carries quarters in their pockets anymore. We still have pockets, for now.

A pocket is a useful tool for writing because you can carry a pocketknife in it, which is good for sharpening your pencil. The pencil as a tool for writing has never been topped, as far as I know. It is cheap, and it is readily available. It is portable. It doesn't require Wi-Fi, and it doesn't have a noisy fan. It doesn't ask you to take a moment to fill out a brief survey. It doesn't ask you to like it.

Writing is pretty hard. The first problem is that strictly speaking, nothing happens twice. Every thing and every experience is new. The second problem is that, for language to make sense, it has to flow in patterns. Subject-verb, subject-verb-object, interjection. Article-adjective-noun. We inherit these patterns. They are almost generative in themselves. What's hard is not producing more words but getting the right words. Some stale formula is always offering itself, ready to make the world less strange by suggesting that we have seen this thing before, which we haven't, because every thing is new, and nothing happens twice.

The third problem is sounding like a human being. A human writer comes from somewhere, grew up hearing certain cadences, loves certain books, not others, and has been banged around by life in a particular way. A person's voice is an expression both of a self and of a community, even when that person is only talking alone in a car. Even when that person is quietly writing sentences that may never be read.

The work of writing is not just to say something, nor even just to say something interesting, but to use one's voice to give an account of the world.

The pencil is not a perfect tool, and here I will admit that I do have a pencil mark in the palm of my right hand, the result of a pencil accident several years ago. I own a Subaru Impreza that has a double hole in the fabric of the driver's seat where a pencil somehow pierced and re-pierced it sideways. Some pencils are better than others. My favorite currently available pencil is the Musgrave Test Scoring 100. Made in Tennessee by the Musgrave Pencil Company, they cost 85 cents apiece.

My most loved pencil of all time was the Sanford EarthWrite. They were made from recycled paper and didn't sharpen very well, but the lead made a dark line and a scratchy sound. I still have a packet of ten that I bought at the Eastern Kentucky University bookstore for $1.49.

But great pencils are easy to find. The ones I get at the grocery store are perfectly good. Yellow pencils. There are some truly crummy pencils out there, too. I will pay the extra ten cents for a decent pencil.

When a pencil is too short to write with anymore, I throw it away, and I feel great about that. The pencil lasts long enough, but not too long. Ten thousand years from now, when visitors to Earth are digging up Paper Mate pens and wondering why the caps are gouged and bent up as though some creature with teeth has been chewing on them, the pencils will have turned back into dirt.