As one student of writing to… whoever might be listening. I’d like to go over something that has held residence in my skull for the past week or so. And in “explaining” it, perhaps it will come clearer for me.
So here it is.
Often, when writing, we find ourselves trying excruciatingly hard to paint a vivid picture. Often, I find that I fail flagrantly. Because, like a photo, words can’t capture a breath or spectacular moment in time. They simply serve, in a limited capacity, to convey emotions from which we derive meaning.
The human mind, on the other hand, holds the full power of this “emotional code”. We need words to hook up this immensely powerful engine up to our story. Then a reader’s brain can grasp the image by itself.
I read quite a bit (even when it means carrying books up mountains in my pack) and recently I’ve been noticing some of this use of pre-existing emotional connections in my favorite writers.
Childish Delight
“That’s childish Man.” I glanced reproachfully at the drizzling sky. Then at the barbed wire fence separating me from a nice dry shed. With an adult’s distaste for getting wet, I cringed at my prospects.
But 60 seconds later, I sat beside my tarp-covered pack. Happily reading Feeding the Rat (by A. Alvarez), while the wind whipped my 99 cent swizz cheese poncho around my ears.
In my mind, I was now the warmest of a group (myself, Alvarez, and Mo Anthoine) sitting on a tiny ledge. High on a dark wall in the Dolomites, as a nearby waterfall froze. A. Alvarez is an excellent author.
Egged on by him [Mo], I killed half an hour by reciting a complete version, with variants, of ‘The Ballad of Eskimo Nell’, and when I tried complaining about the smallness of the ledge we were tied to -each with one buttock on, one off- all Mo said was, ‘Well, you can’t have everything.’ It was the coldest night I have ever sat through, and one of the most uncomfortable, but by no means the gloomiest.
I was sitting in a storm. I was half soaked. But I too was quite happy. I wasn’t sitting 1,000ft of the ground, with frostbite, next to a frozen waterfall. But…
Alvarez had given me an emotional link into his story and my mind brought it to life. Resulting in fits of giggles. The rain dripped off my nose. You can’t have everything!
Being Real
And that’s what I’d like to utilize in my writing. How about a couple more examples.
Someone switched off the last lamp. I lay in the dorm at Hogwartz Backpackers in Dunedin, drifting over the frontier of sleep. On my night stand sat This Game of Ghosts by Joe Simpson.
Now Joe’s book held me entranced. As a climber myself (far below Joe Simpson’s class), his excellent tales telling the mixed fear and joy that is climbing hit me at home. Joe also possesses that rare literary talent that I so admire in an autobiographer: stark honesty.
Shortly after reading of Richard’s death on Shivling I became deeply depressed. It surprised me since I had never been depressed before and could find no good reason for it. The more I tried to work out what was happening to me, the worse I became, until I seemed to be spinning in a spiral of vicious circles.
Depression is strange. She never seems to stem from any one sad thing. When we’re faced with a personal tragedy, it’s a mental war for survival. And our minds react in kind.
Depression, rather, apparently emanates from an absurd plethora of roots. Most (e.g. busy work, that fuzziness in the head, sleep deprivation etc) not readily connected to the dull ache. The confusion sprinkled in, drives the final nail.
Joe’s acknowledgement of this confusion draws you closer. You, the reader, can literally feel his pain and, with it, the instinct of those hard put on, to pull together. This writing is made powerful.
Points of View
It was also while while reading This Game of Ghosts, that I decided to try writing this post. I sat on the deck of the Interislander Ferry crossing the Cook Strait. A young rascal, on the dodge from his parents, stopped and leaned on my pack. As I glanced up from the print inches from my nose, he grinned and was off again.
In the book, matters were more serious…
Joe Simpson and Ian Whitaker were climbing the Bonatti Pillar. As dark began to surround them, the two climbers made bivvy on a pedestal in the granite wall.
An hour later, as Ian was preparing to do something smelly of his end of the ledge and I was zipped in my bivouac bag, there was a sickening lurch accompanied by the grinding sound of splintered granite plunging into the abyss.
The pedestal had been waiting decades for an excuse to leave its parent wall and now left Joe and Ian dangling helplessly over an abyss of 2,000ft.
We hung side by side on the tightly stretched V of the handrail rope. Shining our torches down, we were horrified to see the remains of our two ropes, cut to pieces by the falling rocks. All our equipment, including our boots, had gone with the ledge.
We looked at each other and giggled nervously. No ropes! Two thousand feet up and no ropes!
The wall was out of reach and, in any case, now devoid of holds of any kind. It wouldn’t have mattered. Without ropes or even footwear, climbing up or down would be suicidal. And there was more to come.
There was something wrong. I twisted round, grabbed the rope and hauled myself towards the ring peg. The rope shifted again and the ring peg moved. I lowered myself gingerly back on to the rope. ‘Oh my God,’ I whispered.
For over twelve hours, the two men dangled on a peg slowly working its way free. Each time one would shift his weight to relieve cramping muscles, the rope shifted and sent painful fear shooting through both. Twelve eternal hours they lingered over the edge of death before a rescue team, alerted by their flashlight signals, arrived.
Here, the author Joe Simpson shifted the perspective, brilliantly, from his own to that of Yves. Point man of the rescue team.
As his team lowered Yves over the granite roofs beneath the summit, he felt the full weight of the 2,000ft chasm opening beneath him. He could see the two men dangling helplessly below him. And he felt remorse over how long it had taken to get to them.
Yves was lowering in line with a ring peg, to which a rail rope was attached. He had already decided that he would clip into it, when the two men started screaming at him! One was trying to communicate in broken French (Simpson), but he couldn’t understand beacause the other was yelling in English (Whitaker).
As Yves’ foot came level with the ring peg, the nearest man struck out at him.
My chest swelled to capacity, as though I might be choked by the intensity of the excitement. Yves didn’t know the danger, but I did. I was on the inside of a mystery. Unable to help.
At the time, I couldn’t tell why I felt like jumping up and down, making a public spectacle of myself. Perhaps Joe tripped the mental mystery circuit. Perhaps… anyhow, it was very stimulating.
In any case, it was clear the effects of exciting the chemically unbalanced, dazzlingly powerful imagination of the reader’s mind. Generally, trying to consciously implement these concepts fills me with an acute distress.
On the flipside however, I sometimes find myself using them without forethought, in an effort to lend color to a scene. Crudely, if I’m lucky. But I think the more we write, the luckier we get.
