The Write Muscle
I joined an online writer’s workshop called Critters a couple of months ago, and the critiques I’ve been getting back so far have been fantastic: insightful and smart and immensely helpful. To my surprise, though, I’m finding my reaction to other people’s work to be just as valuable as their reaction to mine.
I’ve been attending workshops, on and off, for the past six years, but they’ve always been flesh-and-blood affairs. I sat across from non-virtual people and communicated with them using sounds pushed up from my larynx to my mouth and then manipulated into various phonemes through the combined efforts of my jaw and my tongue. I’ve never been very good at this form of communication. My talk-muscles are wired to a part of my brain that was exposed to space microwaves as a child, and hasn’t been the same since. My write-muscles, however, are attached to an entirely different region, and seem to work just fine.
The upshot of all this is that I’m getting a lot more out of writing down my critiques than I ever did from speaking them. I’m realizing new stuff about the deficiencies in my own work, and about the nature of stories in general.
Last week I critiqued a story that had a lot of nakedly expository sections, where the author spent a good deal of time telling us about the characters’ mental state, motivations, hopes, dreams, etc. But there were also instances where he let their actions do the talking, and I felt like those bits gave me a much better insight into the characters’ minds. I’ve talked about the whole issue of showing vs telling before, but, as I thought about this, it finally occurred to me exactly why it’s often best not to spell everything out. This is what I wrote:
Because then we get the crucial insight filtered not only through the character’s regret (which gives it more power) but through our own consciousness as well. That’s the value of letting us come to our own conclusions. We attach our experiences to the character’s regret, which thickens the feeling in our mind and makes it more real to us, more personal. And you get all that for free.
It’s all about connecting to the core human experience. Language just doesn’t have the power to get down into our id; the best it can do is nudge us in a certain direction by invoking experiences buried in memory, or something deeper than memory. That’s the power of metaphor and symbol, of image and fantasy and myth. They stimulate the secret places that the literal can’t get to.
The trick is in finding out how to speak the strange ur-language of the id, of cutting away all the scar tissue of adulthood to get down to the base set of experiences that matter. Pablo Picasso once said that it took him most of his adult life to learn how to paint like a child. I didn’t understand what he meant before, but I think I do now.
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