Less is certainly more when it comes to reaching the essence in writing. I've learnt that over the years. The temptation is to describe something whether it be a person, place, sensation or feeling. That often means going to great length to try to 'get there' using a lot of adjectives or adverbs. The secret is to convey a sense of impression that fleeting sense of recognition that comes before we try to analyse snd dissect. I am thinking a great deal about impressionism at the moment as I am writing a novel about Monet and those who surrounded him in the French village of Giverny. It is interesting to see that as his sight began to fail his painting changed. Because detail was blurred for him he developed a way getting under the skin of a subject to its inner core.
Ezra Pound has written a very interesting exposition of his process of writing his poem about a Metro tube station. He describes trying to fid a way of describing the faceshe had seen until it came to him: not in words but in 'little spots of colour' However,he wrote a thirty line poem, at first, and destroyed it. It was work of 'second intensity'Six months later he wrote a poem half that length, a year later he came up with :The apparition of those faces in the crowd:Petals on a wet, black bough' He says this kind of poem is an attempt to record the precise moment when a thing outward and ibjective transforms itself
into a thing inward and subjective.
ESSENCE
This is what I am striving to do.
I know from my own recent attendance at your writers workshops, in good old Shoreham,how useful your ideas are in encouraging individual creativity in myself and others in what is a very diverse and interesting group.I am finding this blog especially helpful in reinforcing basic truths about creativity and writing which seem to be universal in my experience.Thank you,Jenny,for this blog.I will be following with great interest and will encourage others, interested in any form of individual creativity, to do the same.
ReplyDeletewarm regards,
Jeremy Montefiore