For a few years now, I’ve been doing my thinking while running around my local reservoir. On good days, I write down what I think about (and, on bad days, I just get breathless and complain about my ageing knees). If you want me to do the ‘too-much-information’ thing, the truth is my memory is getting really bad and, if I don’t create a concrete record, I know these things will be lost forever. Some of them, at least, must be valuable to someone, or so I tell myself. Hence, the ‘Reservoir Blogs’ were born:- thoughts on the craft of writing.
My first offering from my running is this: “Every scene is like lovers fighting over who takes out the trash. The plot is ‘who takes out the trash’ but that’s not the essence of the story.”
‘What the hell does this mean?’ you might ask. Well, I think it means that scenes are never about what they appear to be about, if you insist on reading the text literally. Rather, they are like every argument you ever have with your partner. They appear to be about taking out the trash (or something similar), whereas they are really about ‘you don’t love me any more’, ‘you’re not listening to me any more’ or some such deeper emotional conflict.
As writers, our job is to portray the surface argument in such a way that the reader guesses or imagines that the accusation/insecurity is lurking beneath the surface. The trick is to make the readers think about the characters as real people and then those readers will naturally infer for themselves that the characters have real inner lives. The ‘real’ story happens in that inner life. It’s not written in the text at all… which brings me to the subject of elision.
I can’t remember who first told me this (I know I stole it from somewhere), but the writer’s most powerful tool is not the pen, the keyboard or the thesaurus, but the reader’s imagination. Consequently, if you want the readers to imagine things, you need to leave them things to imagine. If you tell them everything, then no imagination is possible. For example, ‘a dainty red car with a looping scratch of rust along the driver’s door’ leaves far more for the reader to work with than ‘a Sunset Red 2004 Ford Fiesta, number plate RK54 UUM, with fog lamps and lowered suspension’ even though the latter probably gives the reader a more accurate picture of the actual car.
So that leads me to a second and concluding thought (blazing run around the reservoir today with no knee pain): “The skill of a writer is in shaping what he or she leaves out. The reader’s imagination expands into the elision the writer creates.”
Contributed by D.N.Martin
leicesterwritersclub.com 