Innermost Thoughts
“Writing
has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does or
music. If you are born knowing them,
fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.”
Truman Capote.
It
was Marcel Proust who said that the voyage of discovery lies not in finding new
landscapes, but in having new eyes with which to view them. It was a former tutor of mine, Bob
Clay-Egerton, who introduced the concept of the ‘mystical mug’ into his
teachings to demonstrate how we ‘see’ things:
Pick
up an ordinary drinking mug. Imagine
that the mug is floating in front of you at eye level, the handle standing out
to the left. Imagine now that you are
describing exactly what you see to a blind person. What do you actually see? Assume you have never seen a mug before; it
is a strange and wonderful phenomena.
You would have to say you saw a roughly square or rectangular object but
perhaps tapering slightly towards the base.
It appears to be convex towards you.
Standing out to the left is a curved projection, joining the main body
just below the top and about two thirds of the way down the body. You describe the colour and decorative
pattern if any. Sex? If it has any it
must be male, because of the projection.
The
blind person then has the mug described to him by someone seeing it from 90
degrees to the right of the first observer.
Same general shape, colour, texture and pattern but no projection. It must be similar but not the same. Sex?
No projection, so it can’t be male.
No hollows, so it can’t be female.
It might, therefore, be neuter. The next description comes from someone
viewing the mug directly from above. The
basic shape is now circular, either tubular or cylindrical, and flat at the
end. A single stem projection juts out from
the main body as the top of the handle covers the rest from view. Same colour but no decorative pattern. It cannot be related to the first or second
object at all. Sex? Projection indicates
male, hollow cylinder indicates female; might be hermaphroditic.
If
several people viewing the mug from the top, bottom and four sides (let alone
at oblique angles) gave a description, the blind person would assume they were
all seeing different objects, some of which may, or may not be related. If each viewer described what he saw to an
outsider who had not seen the mug, none of them would believe the others had
only described a different view of the same object. Someone familiar with a mug might realise
what it was, but even then, the description, if it could be evaluated by those
who had never seen one, would not convey what it was made from, how it was
constructed, fired, decorated, glazed — or even what its purpose was.
We
use for this example of selective angles of viewpoint - a simple mug. Imagine how complicated it would have been
to describe, from different angles, an old-fashioned typewriter! The more complex the subject, the harder it
is to imagine its nature and purpose.
Yet many writers (and some tutors) approach writing from a limited
standpoint … that black is black, and white is white. Never stopping to think
that there might be forty shades of grey in between the various different ways
a subject might be viewed or written about.
There are innumerable planes of existence on different levels, in many
dimensions of time and space. Mankind
exists, physically, in one dimension … mentally he can penetrate other levels …
spiritually he can reach even more … it’s all a matter of perspective.
So
… in all aspects of our writing we need to develop the ability to see things
from all angles. The successful writer
‘sees’ everything from every angle and viewpoint, and weighs this in the
balance before committing themselves to action.
For the purpose of Life-Writes, we will substitute our readers
for the blind person of the exercise.
They can only ‘see’ from our writing what we want them to see. If our characterisation (in terms of empathy
and/or human interest) gives the opposite impression to what we originally
intended, then the picture has become distorted and the creative dynamic of the
plot or narrative is lost. And if a
writer complains that an editor or competition judges has ‘missed the point’ of
a story, then it’s probably because it wasn’t made clear in the first
place.
Ø Always
keep the lesson of the ‘mystical mug’ in mind!
