The Tower of Babble-On and I just need an inverse dictionary, by Rena Silverman!

Potent and Cheerless. Sarcastic Tone. Manic leaps from the serious to the banal. Cute, patched-in catch phrases (hello can we talk about me now?) Rude, impatient and lazy interjections. Characters as mood-thickeners. Plot Treason.

And finally,

the dreaded tone alteration between dark-threat and scum-washed-out, as though Dostoyevsky would even give an extistential crap about being commander of some postmodern missile crisis.

This is our literary world these days.

I wish I had a single word for the type of writer born into the last half of the century. Because I’m 22 and I can’t stand how I write. It’s simple fact that there are some Definitions out there that just…need a word instead of a whole leaning tower of babble-on. These floating Definitions mainly apply to Writers’ Matter (of course they do. everything’s a circle goddamit). I’m sick of having to pile every active figure of speech into what could be a clean-cut noun when I just want to bitch simply to people about the difficulties of writing and the monsters I have to deal with inside and out and so i will now list some writerly definitions that I feel deserve a Word. or Two:

• A Tense rejection letter
• A great idea you’ve again, forgotten to write down.
• The joys and aches of seeing a friend’s work published before your own
• The guilt that follows
• The inept muse
• The almost-right word that’s right enough to the point where it is possible to convince yourself that indeed it is the right word, but you know there’s a better one out there, and no a thesaurus will not help unless you have all century why would you ask.
• The literary agent shmuck who loses your manuscript but bills you anyway
• A draft of a poem that you loved yesterday but hate today
• The creepily calm merciless editor to whom you pose the same question every day: what did I do wrong now?
• A news thing that has rendered your out-of-date manuscript.
• The act of turning your own book face-down on a barnes and noble shelf.
• The selfish need to own the word Novel.
• And that’s all.

If you have ideas for words that could fill these verb-loaded definitions please email me.

Cheers

Rena Silverman
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