Friday, May 19, 2017

A Repost to Margaret Atwood


'To want to meet a writer because of their work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pate.'
- Margaret Atwood

So I've been thinking about this, and I disagree.

If you're lucky enough to have the right editor (the first and most important one being yourself), and getting the right editor is like being struck by lightning, your sometimes crazed ramblings, sometimes duplicated scenes, sometimes long-winded asides all get smoothed out and what you end up with is really what you wanted to say all along, with all the character flaws ironed out.

Because I do think our character flaws are mirrored in our writing. For example, when I tell a story I will often (immediately) go off on a tangent, then come back to the story then -- again -- have another aside (you see my instruments at work here, the parenthetical aside and the dash let me just interject dash dash) and I've been told by more than one (all male, btw) that they find it irritating.  I imagine this is because they're being asked to hold the main story line in their minds while then following the writer's mind into a different sphere, then come back to the main story, then have that linearity broken again, even if ever so briefly.

For some reason, I think women don't have as much of a problem, and this is probably because when they talk to their friends, especially if they're at home, they're also doing at least three other things: folding laundry, making a snack, soothing children -- and they're counting on their friends to hold the story they're telling for them ('where was I?'  And then a chorus of 'at the part where --' 'oh yeah!  So...')

Still, I do understand that breaking what is essentially a reader's concentration too many times would be off-putting, and now that I'm aware of it, I do try to keep it to a minimum -- both the length of the tangents and the breadth of the asides.

A friend of mine writes very descriptively.  I love description, the way it sets a scene, the way it puts you right there, but when it's extensive, when it tells every detail of an ordinary task (washing dishes, say), it can be not so much evocative (the point) as suffocating, because it doesn't leave any room for the reader to enter the scene with their own imagination.  As an editor, I would say select a few details then leave some in between out, because really, we all do know what it is to shower, to drive, to cook, to walk in a park.  I love it when it evokes that activity, but there's a certain tedium in being told 'then she put the dishes in the dishrack to dry, and picked up the handtowel to work on the wineglasses before putting them away on the right shelf in the cupboard next to the sink.'

Pick one or two details out of that, I'd say, and you evoke the rest.

But given the right editors, yourself then the next person -- who has to, who must, absolutely love your writing, that's the first prereq -- those bits of irritating distraction or feelings of tedium get lifted off, airbrushed out, and you're left with the way that writer thinks, with how she experiences the world, and what she values the most.

If she's good, anyway.

2 comments:

  1. unless you are writing about someone who compulsively does everything in the same order, places everything in the exact right spot. I'm thinking about the woman drying glasses.but I like digression, I love seeing how another's mind works and wanders.

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    1. So do I, and I love description too. But so-called 'non-sequitur' succinctness put next to another can be more evocative than anything. I loved the economy of your writing, and the breathtaking honesty. Honestly I just fell madly in love with you.

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