Pausing is Progress #1
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Fictionalizing The World
Lately my writing focused on an essay about fabricating details. While talking to another writer, she wondered about a personal story of hers; at the time she had been in London and she questioned if she could alter a details about someone she came across. She asked is that lying to the reader? I had an answer I firmly believed and wanted to express that in writing.
The essay begins —
In the distance, in this little nook just off the bike path, a clearing where a bench faced the Colorado River, trash is littered everywhere. It's a peaceful day, people jogging, walking dogs, and taking strolls in company. But as my bike rolls closer, the wind lunges at the surrounding trees and they begin to wrestle.Ahead, hundreds of sheets of paper strewn about. Pages in the bushes, pages around the bench, and braking at the foot of the scene, pages in the water too. I hop off and lean my bike against the bench. What's going on?
[…]
Musings
The Job of an Artist
Something I realized while writing this essay, Artists pause and poke around in places where everyone else pass by, too busy to stop. It's in those places that we discover the life behind "piles of trash".
On the streets, people are busy, don't have time to pause and poke around. As too in the digital streets. People while reading online, don't have time to poke around articles. They want the message quickly and easily.
My essay is one way writers must leverage this.
Motivations and Perception
One of my favorite ideas is how our motivations shape what we see in the world. I remember this Tony Robbins exercise. Try it: For the next 15 seconds, look around the room for anything blue. Then, do the same with red. Our motivations, such as "find all blue objects", dictate what we literally see in the world.
As too with characters in stories, their motivations dictate what they see. This is why, I believe, in movies when characters are in a dark place internally, it's always fucking raining. The world is colored through a melancholy lens.
In my own life, I've had sad days when it's sunny, and I hear people outside my house happy and socializing about, say, a cute puppy, yet all I hear is the woman's shrill voice and her loud talking distracting me from writing. Because of my mood (and motivations) I can't share that sunshine with her. And clouds rolling in with buckets of rain would make my life soooo much easier.
How this looks in drafting stories. In my essay, in the initial draft, my character was enjoying a peaceful bike ride through nature. So when he saw the trees blowing with the wind, "the trees danced with the wind." In later drafts, my character was angry (from his struggle to write a story) so now, "the trees wrestled the wind".
Depending on our character's motivations, our descriptions of their world change as they perceive it differently, at times through a blue tint, other times a red tint.
The pillows are fluffed, the blankets are warm.
Talk soon,
Arthur
I like the motivation and perception exercise. Changes the way you look at things!