For some who might never have heard of Zane Grey’s “Riders of the Purple Sage,” it was made into a 1996 movie for television with Ed Harris and Amy Madigan. As a child I was a punster who loved Westerns. As you can see, my character hasn't changed. The movie retains the story’s enigmatic quality without sacrificing the grittiness you expect of the Western novel.
Zane Grey died in 1939, three years after Larry McMurtry was born. Having penned over 80 novels, Grey’s are considered some of the best Westerns ever written. My neurotic aunt who read only Westerns had bookcases full of her favorites, Louis L’Amour and Larry McMurtry. A practicing psychiatrist until her early nineties, she said Westerns helped her relax and forget her self-absorbed neurotic patients.
So who cares? Westerns are out. Forensics are in. Er, close your eyes and try not to laugh. Envision Law and Order’s Dennis Farina in chaps and a badge, a courtroom with Sam Waterston in Luccese Western boots, facing down Spencer Tracy in a dusty pair of Laredo Basics. Move CSI Miami to Dodge, and put David Caruso’s red hair under a big white Stetson. The old cliché, there’s nothing new under the sun, is nonetheless valid.
While the purple sage has ridden into the sunset, the digital age is this generation’s zeitgeist in new clothes. Forgive me if sometimes I can’t resist using one word instead of the three or four it takes to say the same thing. The experts tell writers we must write to please our readers or we won’t have any readers. To be honest, I always want to write to please me. I tell myself, ‘If readers don’t know what the word means, let them look it up the way I do.’ Not.
There's is a happy medium between dumbing down to the lowest common denominator and, when the ego gets in the way, deliberately trying to impress the elitists. In my experience, not all PhDs can spell, and many graduates of urban public schools become great writers. F. Scott Fitzgerald flunked out of Princeton. Ernest Hemingway had other things to do. Prairie Home Companion’s Garrison Keillor of radio and print is especially insightful and earthy when talking about writers.
“Writers are vacuum cleaners who suck up other people’s lives and weave them into stories like a sparrow builds a nest from scraps.”
Wish I had said that. An insatiable storyteller of fiction and non-fiction, I think the writer’s happy medium is simplicity—in one’s own style, in one’s own language—plain American English. There’s so much more to say, but why be prolix. Yikes! Good scrap hunting, and happy nest building.
“Simplicity-Courage-Humor-Soul”®
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