‘Reservoir Blogs #1’ came to me while running through the slushy mud around one of Northamptonshire’s most important water sources, hence the title of this post: my ‘Reservoir Jogs’ shall henceforth be known as the ‘Reservoir Blogs’. (Yes, that’s as good as the puns are going to get. But no, that’s not me running. I run funny; no way am I taking pictures.)
Anyway, here’s my big literary idea: “In writing, 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 does this mean?’ you might ask. Well, I think it means that scenes are never wholly about what they appear to be about based on the text. Indeed, sometimes, they aren’t even about the way the plot is moving forward. 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 about who holds power in the relationship.
To show something ‘real’ as writers, our job is to portray the surface argument in such a way that the reader guesses or imagines what accusation/insecurity is lurking beneath the surface. This touches on something that I absolutely believe about the art of writing: the trick is to make the readers think about the characters as actual people and then infer for themselves that the characters have inner lives. The ‘real’ story happens in that inner life. It’s not written in the text at all.
It all brings me to the conclusion that: “the writer’s most powerful tool is not the pen, the keyboard or the thesaurus, but the reader’s imagination. The real skill of a writer is in shaping what he or she leaves out, so that the reader’s imagination expands into the elision the writer creates.”
That’s all I have for now. If you agree/don’t agree, post some comments in the comments section below, subscribe to the website and please, please do check out Forged Truth’s first ever publication, The Typewriterists, out now on Amazon:
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I’m finding your reasoning very persuasive because it certainly seems to fit poetry. Didn’t you ought to see your doctor about memory loss? Mind you, having to write things down must be a useful discipline.
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Thanks. Memory is a whole can of worms. So far I still score way ahead of my age group, just not as good as when I was eighteen.
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