I Me Me Meme*

Recently I tried to explain what memes are.

I started into a teacherly explanation about how cultural units behave like genes, getting passed on and, in many cases, mutating into new forms and a hundred visions and revisions. I said, “Think of the peace sign logo, urban myths, advertising jingles, jokes that fly around the internet, or expressions like “meme” where people have to guess at the pronunciation and exact meaning.

Because I couldn’t really remember the name of Richard Dawkins, the guy who originated the term, my lesson wasn’t complete. Later, I realized I called him Richard Dawson, the name of the former host of “Family Feud.”

And I didn’t mention memes people plant, laboratory-created connections passed around deliberately—usually x number things to say about y—appearing with the viral regularity of “Kilroy was here.”

Perhaps my feeling about these planted memes bleeds through my explanation.

Then, in a case of life imitating life, only a day or so after this conversation, I received this meme from one of my favorite bloggers, The Individual Voice:

List your five greatest strengths as a writer

Okay, I’ll comply. I don’t want to be a smartass, but first let me say that catching this meme is, for me, like an actor catching chicken pox. It’s one meme I’d rather not have. My earnestness as a writer is my greatest—and perhaps only real—strength. I try hard. I try hard to find the right word and the right number of words in a good order.

But that leaves me four more, so I’m going to mutate this meme deliberately in two different ways. Here is the first mutation. I’ll list the other four strengths I think writers need, which happen to be ones I hope to have:

2. Love of language: to me, writing requires loving words as little miracles. If at every juncture of choice, a writer settles for what’s good enough, the writing’s spirit will suffer. A little playfulness and desire to surprise goes a long way.

3. Delight in experience, every experience: Some days, I think I belong in the Home For the Easily Amused. I’ve been known to sit in a car outside a movie theatre debating whether to miss the start to listen to an NPR piece on aberrant zip codes. For a writer, everything is fodder for thought.

4. A sense of yourself as yourself and as a human being: Emerson said, “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men-that is genius.” Well, that’s hooey. We’re different. At the same time, however, writers do need a sense of what lands between familiar and strange. The former without the latter is banal. The latter without the former is synthetic. You aim for what Emily Dickinson called “amazing sense,” the zone between what’s known and unknown that makes writing emotionally as well as intellectually satisfying.

5. Faith in your reader: Readers can smell a writer who doesn’t think enough of them, and every reader-writer relationship is a partnership. I know some writers deliberately confront their readers, and slide them along a sharp edge or hand them stones until they can no longer stand, but even they want readers to stay. Writing is seldom about you in the end. You want to speak, yes, but you also want to be heard. You have to believe you will, that a reader is out there.

Which brings me to the end of my list, and ready to offer my second mutation. Here are five blogs/bloggers I’d love to hear address this question. No obligation—particularly if they don’t visit here to discover this request!

Mariachristina
red Ravine
Loud Solitude
How to Survive a Suburban Life
The Backstage Grumbler

If you feel I’ve eluded this task with my two deliberate mutations, please forgive me. I was only doing with this meme what we all do to real memes, absorbing them as we can, as our own, as something to pass through us before being passed on.

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