cliodhna’s wave

I love writing. I love putting words together and making a story. Sometimes the story comes first and sometimes the words come first. Sometimes it’s just a name and an idea. My problem is finishing it. Not an unusual problem I know. I can never figure out exactly how to finish the story. I have two finished long stories to date and lots of little ones. One children’s novel which needs to be rewritten (again) and an idea for a book that I could never quite get together involving a man named Winkle Ferrydinkle who left the shores of the faraway sea to go past the mountains of forgetting to find out what is on the other side.

I actually think writing a children’s book is harder than writing for adults. There is a simplicity to well written children’s books that is so difficult to achieve. They also have a shorter attention span and you need to catch and hold them, keep them in the world of the book. Look at Tove Jannson and the Moomin Books, it’s like taking a dip in a cool mountain pool reading her stories. The water is clean and pure and feels soft on your skin and so refreshing after the hot sun.

It has taken me a long time to actually learn this simplicity and to see it in all of the great novels and story books. We only really notice it by its absence. A book annoys us because it is too intellectual, or wordy, or opinionated, or we can feel the writer lecturing us through the characters. One of the best pieces of writing advice I gleaned from my travels was the phrase ‘Show, don’t tell’

Show us through language what is going on. Build the picture in our head of what the character is feeling /doing/seeing. Avoid ‘he was sad’ and instead remember the tempest scene in King Lear where the storm outside reflected perfectly the turmoil that was happening in the kings head. We only have words and they are tools that can be manipulated and controlled just like any other medium.

The other thing that daunted me was conversation. Man, how I avoided it. But, know what? I avoid it in real life too. I am not very good at talking to people. I am a bit of a closet recluse that only now this late in my life am I coming to really recognize that about me and accept it. I avoid people I don’t know very well, they make me uncomfortable. I am never sure about the intricacies of conversation and communicating with people. It takes me a while generally to open up, and thats fine, I am not going to push myself or feel bad about it. Thats who I am.

But… this translates into my art and my writing. This is where I push myself to be open and reveal myself. It means I hate writing conversation so it is the part of writing I need to practice most. Or maybe find my own style that doesn’t rely on conversation. Find my own way of telling things. I can think of a few authors that are dreamwriters, that write a strange world of shifting space that the people say almost nothing in. Also anybody see Belleville Rendez-Vous? Beautiful cartoon and I think there is about five words said by the characters all the way through.