Extract from Life-Writes:

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!