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Take a scrap of paper and answer that question — don’t think about it too much, simply respond — Why do you write?
There
are so many reasons: to bear witness; to tell stories; for the trance;
because you have to… If you have ‘to get rich’ you might be in the wrong
place (not that it can’t happen, but generally money is better as an
offshoot than a direct aim). In short, there are many great reasons for
writing.
Asked by Geoff Dyer what he saw as the ‘job of his life’ John Berger said”
Perhaps
I am like all people who tell stories — storytellers lose their
identity and are open to the lives of other people. Maybe when you look
at their entire output you can see something that really belongs to that
one person. But at any one moment it is difficult to see what the job
of your life is because you are so aware of what you are lending
yourself to. This is perhaps why I use the term “being a witness.” One
is witness of others but not of oneself.
For Berger, this sense of witnessing involves total immersion and openness to other people and to other places.
Finding the rapture:
In Our Faces, Our Hearts, Brief as Photos, Berger describes one of those luminous moments when an ordinary place takes on an otherworldly quality:
Everything
was shifting. The three pear trees, their hillock, the other side of
the valley, the harvested fields, the forests. The mountains were
higher, every tree and field nearer. Everything visible approached me.
Rather, everything approached the place where I had been, for I was no
longer in that place. I was everywhere, as much in the forest across the
valley as in the dead pear tree, as much on the face of the mountain as
in the field where I was raking hay.
When
we write, we’re opening ourselves up in an extraordinary way. Writing
takes us into another space. As Virginia Woolf described it:
I walk making up phrases; sit, contriving scenes; am in short in the
thick of the greatest rapture known to me.
The
question for many writers is how to get to the ‘rapture’ without having
to go by way of resistance. Some lucky people never have a problem but
many will recognise this from Vladimir Nabokov:
Just
when the author sits down to write, ‘the monster of grim commonsense’
will lumber up the steps to whine that the book is not for the general
public, that the book will never — And right then, just before it blurts
out the words,– commonsense must be shot dead.
So begin by shooting common sense dead and taking your imaginations off-guard.
The
painter Paula Rego pointed out the importance of the ‘play’ element in
her work. In writing we can benefit from ‘playing with language’, which
permits us to relax our hold on imagination and memory. It lessens the
pressure to produce a finished piece and we are more likely to catch
that ‘peripheral vision’. This sense of play can also prevent the
personal critic in our head from intervening, Too often this voice sits
on out shoulder, frowning and muttering .
Chance
and ‘the random’ take us to unpredictable places and enable different
narratives. Working with chance allows the writer to challenge her
unconscious assumptions about what a piece of writing ‘should be’. It
also challenges the reader’s unconscious assumptions. Chance leads to
surprise, revelation, the challenge of paradox and the springs of the
imagination. It facilitates ways of finding subject, atmosphere and
voice, and of realising the imaginative into life. Using random prompts
helps to break down the chaos of possibility.
Think
about these prompts and write — keep going even if you are writing the
same sentence over and over or what seems to be nonsense.
She watches her sleep …
She remembers feet on white sand …
How long ago was it that …
Today they climb to the top …
sweat snakes down her face, she is paler with each second …
Even
when we find the right headspace, the next question will be about the
kind of writing you want to do. Writing involves making a lot of
decisions…
Making it real
Understand that you can have in your writing no qualities which you do not honestly entertain in yourself.
Walt Whitman in his journal.
The
adage ‘write what you know’ is often too simplistic. Not all writing is
confessional or springs from the life we’ve lived. Cormac McCarthy
hasn’t lived in early twentieth century America or a post-apocalyptic
society. Nonetheless, he writes about both. He write as convincingly as
Hemingway writes about war, which he did live through. Both are writing
what they ‘know’, in the sense that the work is authentic. It reflects
their passions, their values, the way they perceive and relate to the
world.
If
we care about what we are writing, then we owe it to the characters and
places we are witnessing to, to ensure the writing is as polished as
possible. ur writing will become: precise, sensory and take the reader
into the moment we are evoking.
This is exactly what happens in the description in chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby of a poverty stricken urban area:
This
is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat
into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms
of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a
transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already
crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars
crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to
rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and
stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations
from your sight. … The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small
foul river, and, when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the
passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long
as half an hour.
Similarly, in my novel, This is the End of the Story the politics, weather, music are major influences that build the picture of a certain kind of reality.
Writing about Place
Even if you are working from the mind’s eye, you must keep your senses open — observe, be precise.
Chekhov puts it like this:
Don’t
tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken
glass.. ur writing will become: precise, sensory and take the reader
into the moment we are evoking.
We write one true sentence and then the next true sentence. Every detail counts.
Be
wary of cluttering your writing with adjectives and adverbs. Hone them
back — use them with care and precision. And cut out the
qualifiers — kind of, sort of, just, very, really — they do no
work — somehow, suddenly… follow close behind — nothing happens
‘somehow’.
People
come in context — think of a grandmother or favourite aunt — you will
think of them in a place, most likely. Places tell us about
character — Gatsby’s ridiculous ice-cream coloured mansion. Don’t do the
lazy announcement thing — ‘Manchester, 1977, a dark and gloomy night in
a terraced house…’
Try
this exercise about a place that reflects a person. You might not
mention the person at all in the writing and they don’t need to make an
appearance. The person can be real or fictional:
First
choose your person. Make a few notes about them, think of the type of
place that would reflect that character — it might be a whole house or a
room, it might be a tent or an open field, a workplace or a boat…
Now describe the place in the present tense — make the description precise and visual, but don’t forget the other senses.
Make
every line like a photographic frame — remember, ‘Don’t tell me the
moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.’
Keep
in mind that in writing about your place, you are writing about
something you are not saying directly about your character, but you are
pointing to.
Cormac McCarthy’s opening of Suttree is a fantastic example.
Dear
friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets
lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the
drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or
abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim
perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors
where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall
walk save you.
Get
into the habit of making notes about places and make every sense work
overtime so that you begin to build place portraits the way a painter
might. Every detail counts. You won’t use them all, but you’ll start
writing more authentic settings. Put your characters into them to see
how they react there, see where they fit and where they don’t fit.
Place as a Reflection of Character
Writing
about place is powerful because places reflect character. At its most
acute the theory of pathetic fallacy gives emotions to place and
weather, as we see in Shakespeare’s King Lear:
Blow,
winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanes,
spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks! You
sulfurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving
thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder, Smite
flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world, Crack nature’s molds, all germens
spill at once That make ingrateful man!
Similarly,
the opening of Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist features a violent
rain storm that represents the dysfunction in the lives of Sarah and
Macon.
When
we write about places, it isn’t mere adornment — it isn’t only about
adding description. The places in which we set our stories help to
define our characters and events. A good sense of place makes a story
real and authentic.
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