Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Hello friends

I'm sorry that the last post was so scattered. I wrote the first paragraph one afternoon and then three days later came back to it... this did not lead to continuity. I'm not sure if I really have that much to say about how seductive it can be to write openings other than it is :P

I think, in a way, writing can be like reading. When we read, we start off with huge ideas of what the story could be, and then the writer narrows those down for us. When we write, we can find ourselves being squeezed, knowing we need to narrow, and feeling that pressure, but being unable to do it because we haven't decided what we want to happen and we have no idea where our story is going.

Being a writer is fascinating--when it's not frustrating. It's such a unique art. I really don't think there's anything like it, except thoughts, and living, and becoming aware of things. It's one of the only art forms that really expresses the interior life, mainly because it is the language of the interior life. Which is interesting. It can be hard because the language of our art is the language of our daily lives, our interior lives, our reading lives... if you put an artist in a prison cell with paint and canvas they'd be able to create for a little while before going insane. I think a writer would go mad quite sooner :P

I speculate that many writers take English in school because in doing so they're surrounded by writing, and while that can be overwhelming at times, it's also part of our artistic relationship--writers do not live in a void. No artists do.

I think that writing necessitates the ability to maintain two perspectives at once: the overall scope and the minute progression of tone. Tone is an interesting thing in writing, I have found it is a life-saver. Knowing your character's emotion is one thing, knowing what sort of tone that demands is another. I had been working on "The Mark," my current novel, and I wrote this scene and it just felt wrong. I went back and re-read from the scene before and saw that in the "wrong" scene the tone had changed completely from serious to one of levity, and that there had been no real reason for this.

I am probably not being specific or in-depth enough. Sometimes I don't know how to be. My mind is very much "big picture oriented." So those are some of my thoughts.

Until next time.

2 comments:

benjamin said...

what do you mean, 'we'? you mean 'you'?

M. said...

I suppose I do, though I was attempting to speak generally :P

Post a Comment