A day for a door, I think. This rather splendid one is a side entrance to Notre Dame in Paris and seems to me to forbid rather than invite, but it makes me curious, all the same. It's not the kind of door that I'd go barging through without having been asked, and that's because instinctively all of us know our place.
Just as we know it in the real world, we have a sense of it in our writing too. As a result of painstaking self-editing, self-examination, together with precious feedback from editors, agents, teachers or friends, gradually we get a feel for the type of writers that we are -- great at character, good at landscape, crap at structure -- that kind of thing. This can be a comfort and a constriction at the same time, so it can be useful to put any assumptions that you have to the test.
This sort of work is best done at a nuts and bolts level, as it is here that you can put yourself stylistically through your paces. Try writing a piece of description is vividly as you can, chucking in every kind of metaphor, simile, onomatopoeia, assonance etc in an extravagant and reckless fashion. Then rewrite it, draining all the colour away, so that you are left with something pared-down and restrained. This will help to orientate you between the two poles of your natural writing style: by locating the extremes, it is easier to find a middle way, to establish your comfort zone, to know your place. It can help to show you whereabouts on the chromatic scale you belong.
No comments:
Post a Comment