Violently Ill

Well, I haven't posted in a while because I've been incredibly sick. A flu went around my family and I laid in bed for about three days and ate nothing but popsicles. I didn't eat anything from 1:30 p.m. last Monday until the evening last Wednesday. Then I didn't have an appetite for a few days so I ate like a little bird. I lost about four pounds.

Anyway, last week I didn't read the book I was supposed to but I did this week. Hilariously, I read 300 pages of it in one seven-hour period. The last time I read 300 pages in one sitting was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This time, the book was Watership Down .

I've always wanted to read it because I disturbingly look back fondly on watching the movie when I was little. Disturbing because it was bloody and frightening although one redeeming quality was Art Garfunkel singing a song called "Bright Eyes" at the end when the Black Rabbit comes to get Hazel. I played the song in my head at the end of the book.

The book reminded me of everything I love about reading. It's a straightforward journey with a protagonist, obstacles, and a climactic fight. I really wanted to know what happened next at every turn. I also cared incredibly for the characters. Like I said a while back, it's hard to read a book when you don't care about the characters in it.

And it reminded me of a lesson I've learned about writing, one I impart to my students - particularly those who try to write fantasy. Here it is: the language and dialogue does not have to be Old English or fancy or anything of the sort. It can be everyday language. It can include colloquialisms. It can be "wrong" for its time period. I've always had a problem with this. I don't want to read a lot of jargon I have to decode to understand. Furthermore, no matter how the dialect, accent, and language would have actually sounded, to those who speak it and those who hear it on a daily basis nothing sounds out of the ordinary and to their ears it sounds like "normal" speech. And don't get me started on American actors trying to do accents - please, Hollywood, stop it now.

Anyway, in the book, a sea gull says "Piss off!" and though you do have to be paying attention to the "Lapine" (rabbit language) in the book (so there is, in fact, a bit of this problem in it) at one point you realize one rabbit says "Eat shit and die!" to another rabbit. It cracked me up when I figured it out, which didn't take long because I had been paying attention. In John Gardner's Grendel , a retelling of Beowulf from the monster's point of view, the monster, old as the Earth itself almost, says "fuck" and I believe maybe even "dude." I love it. This is okay because the way the two books are set up, you believe the monster would say this and you believe the rabbits would, too. Anyway, it makes the characters more real, in my opinion.

I used to write fantasy stories and the characters - princes, angels, knights - would speak in horribly affected accents or all in capital letters. A knight might say, "Thou must stay and I wilst protecteth thee." You want to vomit, eh? An angel would say, "I MOVE HEAVEN AND EARTH FOR YOU." Yeah, all in caps like that. Cheesy, "Spew forth this frothy vomit that contains my soul" kind of stuff. Then, when I was fiction editor for the undergraduate magazine at college a story was submitted. Thirty-two pages of elves and princesses and flying and swords and dialogue like I used to write. I ran screaming and decided right then I would not try to change my characters' dialogue. They would just talk to each other, be it ancient times, 1800, or the future.

For a friend of mine, I would also like to warn that not enough rabbits die in horrible ways for you to enjoy this book. These are, inexplicably, good rabbits who don't deserve torturous deaths. I know that's hard for you to swallow. There is one violent scene where many, many rabbits are murdered by humans and though I know you abhor violence I think you needed to know that in this one scene all the your rabbit hate is satiated.

Anyway, Watership Down gets an A.