Tuesday, January 31, 2012

I want intimacy.

I know it's the goal of all writing to manipulate your reader. To make them feel what you want them to feel, and see in their mind the same things that you're imagining in yours. I get that, and it's not an original thought on my part. What do I do though when the things I want to express are things that I myself cannot grasp, but only feel them as they pass through me? Feelings that are like a breath that only exists so long as I let it go right after I take it in. If I hold it, it just becomes stagnant air that no one wants, not even me.

The types of scenes I want to write the most though are ones where intimacy is expressed. I want to show you something that is private, that is sacred, and that is important in the context of my character's lives. I don't want to waste anyone's time with meaningless, flat settings and scenarios that have no sense about them.

When I say sense, I don't exactly mean it in terms of your five senses. At least not the way they observe and relay information, but rather, the way they evoke memory and notice change, and likewise become dull from repetition. One can walk outside every day, from their front door to their car, and never really notice what's going on around them on the way. It's because they see it every day, smell it and hear it, and it doesn't really matter.

Sometimes though, the light hits your path a certain way, or the wind comes carries a special scent and briskness to it. You become reminded of the last time you were out on a day like that, and more than just recognizing the difference between a sunlit and rainy day, you feel the passage of a season. You remember the last time you were actually out on a day like that and not just watching it from your window, a flat change of a display picture that even your eyes are only dimly aware of.

It can even happen inside, to, that one morning you wake up and whatever setting you had left the heat on wasn't enough to combat the frigidness outside. You know that the autumn is over and winter's begun, and trudging barefoot through that foot thick layer of extra cold that's flows along your kitchen floor, you start to think of all the other mornings just like it. Younger mornings, when you got up for school instead of work and pissed and moaned every step of the way.

Sometimes you walk into that room you thought you've forgiven and remember all the beatings and suffering you dealt with inside of it. Sometimes you walk down the stairs you go down every day but just this time you remember the last time you and a friend sat talking on them with liquor in your hand and a lighter heart.

I want everything to be vivid like those times, but I don't know how to muster it. If I wax poetic about every single description and action my characters observe or take, it becomes and overload, and none of it's important. If I space it apart, I have to fill that space with crap that I don't feel it's worth it to write about. Though it's a flip of the coin or my BAV whether I think that weaker writing around it enhances it or poisons it.

I'm at a loss to figure out how I can make everything special when the only way to make something special is to keep it scarce.

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