Wordsmithies
I used to write with music playing in the background. The lyric of a song could set me off writing an entire story about some sentiment in the song. For example, the line ‘Rael, imperial aerosol kid’ from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway inspired a boxful of notebooks crammed with ideas and eventually a novel of 130,000 words. The songwriter, Sting, goes the other way, where he reads a book and writes a song that boils down the essence of a book.
Artists feed off each other for ideas, for different ways of expressing emotions. Poets have to find powerful words and line them up one at a time to create something marvelous in a minuscule space. Novelists need to be equally careful with their words, but they have the luxury of being able to circle around the main point, drawing the reader into the intended mood by stealth.
We write to tell stories, but we also write to use words, to watch them slowly move across the page, savoring certain phrases for their rhythm and beauty. That’s why it is so hard to edit things out, even when we know it will improve the pacing of the overall work. There is a temptation to say ‘to heck with the story, I’ll just write,’ but sharing our words and our stories is our ultimate goal, so we must sometimes defer to our audience and hit delete when we’d rather not.
All art and craft is an exercise in precision and precision seems a cold process. Perhaps it is cold in a good way, though. How else do we get a shiver from having found the exact way to describe something?
Amy
Artists feed off each other for ideas, for different ways of expressing emotions. Poets have to find powerful words and line them up one at a time to create something marvelous in a minuscule space. Novelists need to be equally careful with their words, but they have the luxury of being able to circle around the main point, drawing the reader into the intended mood by stealth.
We write to tell stories, but we also write to use words, to watch them slowly move across the page, savoring certain phrases for their rhythm and beauty. That’s why it is so hard to edit things out, even when we know it will improve the pacing of the overall work. There is a temptation to say ‘to heck with the story, I’ll just write,’ but sharing our words and our stories is our ultimate goal, so we must sometimes defer to our audience and hit delete when we’d rather not.
All art and craft is an exercise in precision and precision seems a cold process. Perhaps it is cold in a good way, though. How else do we get a shiver from having found the exact way to describe something?
Amy
posted by Seven Authors in A Private Conversation at 9:48 AM
2 Comments:
Oh, Amy, your stealth has got me! I love this distillation of my whole writing quandry. Victoria
Amy,
What you wrote struck me. We write to be read and, therefore, we have to strikeout wonderful bits of text.
But don't we also write because that is our way to get to our insides? SO, we also must write to just write. That becomes my journal. Adding to that journal is important.
When I'm working a lot on my book, I don't have the need to journal as much. But I still need to journal when I am stressed out. Journaling helps me know my thoughts. If I don't write down my thoughts, I may not consciously know them.
Writing is our way of accessing information within ourselves.
I've spent a bit of time with professional dancers. Dance has been my second expression; I love it. But I have noticed dancers explain things very differently than writers. They have trouble with language, they aren't agile with it the way I am. Their primary way to say things is with movement and space, while mine is words. They use dance to access information within themselves.
Because we are writers, you and I need to write for the sake of writing. Writing for the reader is really secondary for a writer.
We want readers for some of our stuff, but we must also write when we know we will be the only reader.
Even for me, I write a journal and this is extremely helpful, but it is rare that I ever read it later. It is mostly crap that I write in my journal, boring crap, and it does me a world of good to write it.
Reva
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