“Visual Writing” a la KVJ

When you seemingly run out of things to write about sometimes you end up writing about writing.

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My recent explorations into the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (KVJ) have been uncovering some startling similarities in outlook and style that I was hitherto unaware of.  I am not saying I am in the same league as KVJ as a writer (Heavens, no!) but maybe he is a grown man and I am a kind of baby brother.  Maybe we share some DNA but I am significantly smaller in size and lacking in the ability to fully function as an adult (read: “write”) but I keep crawling nonetheless.

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In continuing to read Suzanne McConnell’s “Pity the Reader: on writing with style” I stumbled upon something this morning that was revelatory.  She pointed out that KVJ would doodle during class at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop where she was a student of his.  This was connected to the fact his father and grandfather were architects, his sister was an artist, and his three children were all painters to some degree or other.  All this to say that “Vonnegut was tuned and trained to the visual, as well as the audial.”  This is followed by the key paragraph which is a KVJ quote:

“The people who were senior to me at the Sun [Cornell University’s newspaper] were full of advice. . . . The theory was that large, sprawling paragraphs tended to discourage readers and make the paper appear ugly.  Their strategy was primarily visual—that is, short paragraphs, often one-sentence paragraphs.  It seems to work very well, seemed to serve both me and the readers, so I stayed with it when I decided to make a living as a fiction writer.”

These ideas are revelatory to me because over the past 10 years that I’ve attempted to grow as a writer I’ve used photographs/creative images along with short almost poem-like paragraphs to convey what I want to convey to my (mostly imaginary) readers.  I keep these writings in my blog and you can scroll through hundreds of entries without finding one that lacks an image or has an unwieldy paragraph in it (never mind the preponderance of poems).  

I used to think this approach might be a crutch, but now that I’m reading this about KVJ I feel I can embrace it freely as my particular way of communicating what is inside me.  As an added bonus, the doodles I’ve made in countless classes and meetings over the years no longer need to be a source of shame or embarrassment. 

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Maybe my job has something to do with it as well or there has been some cross-pollination going on.  I am a Consultation Liaison Psychiatrist at a hospital and I see patients who are primarily there for medical reasons but with a significant psychiatric overlap.  Other services consult me to have patients evaluated for a variety of reasons to include psychosis, mania, suicidality, delirium, dementia, withdrawal, depression, anxiety… and the list goes on.

It is important that my documentation is accessible and easily understood.  I accomplish this in part by utilizing short pithy paragraphs that are easy on the eyes and do not bog you down in a mass of words on the screen.  It is a common pitfall when I have medical students or residents working with me that they will try and submit a complex Borg-box of dense writing that no one will bother to read or if they have to read it they will become irritated in the process.  No one enjoys being forced to be “assimilated”.  

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It is in this context that I can better understand what I’ve been trying to do with a peculiar structural style that began with a writing experiment from 2016.  It started as a writing exercise where I was meandering with an idea but keeping all the paragraphs small and of uniform size, almost like a poem.  At some point I realized it was actually helpful in moving the story along and forcing me to be more deliberate in what I was trying to say and what images were being conveyed.  Instead of a diarrhea of words I was dropping rabbit pellets along a path to an ending.  

After I finished this first experiment (The Hovel) I assumed it was a one-off and just an exercise of sorts, but the second time I tried it the flow returned and carried me along in a way that was unlike the struggles of “free” writing.  And now I have about six or seven of these type stories in my blog.  They are visually peculiar, like bricks stacked one on top of the other.  Maybe this is not exactly what KVJ had in mind but I enjoy it and hopefully it can “serve both me and the readers” whomever they may be.