Take a break from all this commotion, a breath from feeling. Reflect if you will on the style of your story’s prose—the story of you. Exactly how are you written? Do you, like many others, have the perverted desire to adopt a system and a norm? It’s true that you were written before having the norm and the system. But so was everyone else.
Oh, yes, this is going to take some time. Reread it all. Consider the arrangement of words and, too, the thinking, either intuitive or formed, behind these bizarre arrangements. Come to some emergent conclusions. It takes many hours, as all good things do. Analyzing, you’ll discover that your stylistic system is based on two principles, and in the best tradition of the best classical writers you immediately uphold these two principles as general foundation of all good style: 1) to express what one feels exactly as it is felt – clearly, if it is clear; obscurely, if obscure; confusedly, if confused – and 2) to understand that grammar is an instrument and not a law.
Let’s suppose there’s a girl with masculine gesture. An ordinary human creature will say, ‘That girl acts like a boy.’ Another ordinary human creature, with some awareness that to speak is to tell, will say, ‘That girl is a boy.’ Yet another, equally aware of the duties of expression but inspired by a fondness of concision (which is the sensual delight of thought), will say, ‘That boy.’ You, being you, might say, ‘She’s a boy’, violating one of the basic rules of grammar—that pronouns must agree in gender and number with the nouns they refer to. And if indeed you do this, you’ll have spoken correctly; you’ll have spoken absolutely, photographically, outside the norm, the accepted, the insipid. You won’t have spoken, you’ll have told. Capicsi?
Thus I end my homily; thus I END you.”
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