Writing in Three Pictures (Writing exercise)

About halfway through Natsume Sōseki’s meditative novel Kusamakura, the protagonist, a traveling artist, is bathing in a steam-filled bathhouse as night falls. Floating blissfully in the stone bath, the artist wonders: How might I communicate this particular emotional state in a picture?

He goes on to describe two kinds of artists. One simply portrays concrete reality as faithfully as possible. “A greater artist, however, will impart his own feelings as he depicts the phenomena and bring them to vivid life on the canvas.” (All my quotations from Kusamakura in this blog entry are from the 2008 Penguin Classics translation by Meredith McKinney.)

What these “objective” and “subjective” artists have in common, says the narrator, is that “before either one touches brush to paper, he will wait for a clear stimulus from the outside world.” But there is a third type of artist, who starts with the feeling he wants to convey and then seeks an image to represent it. “Such an object, however, is difficult to discover and, once discovered, difficult to make coherent. And even when it is coherently conceived, it often manifests itself in a form radically different from anything found in the natural world.”

The author summarizes the three types of picture this way:

In an ordinary picture, it’s sufficient to portray the object; feeling is not in question. In the second kind of picture, the object must be compatible with feeling. In the third, all that exists is the feeling, so one is forced to choose some objective phenomenon as its expressive correlative.

When I read this, I couldn’t help but see an analogy to writing. Depending on our purpose for a piece of writing, we can write with a higher or lower level of subjectivity. Sōseki’s three types of picture can’t correspond exactly to writing, since writing is so different from visual art, but we can definitely have fun with the basic concepts.

Here’s how I portrayed a written scene as the three different “pictures” in Kusamakura.

• “Ordinary picture”—representing a subject simply and objectively:

In the western sky, a hot-air balloon in muted red, white, and blue passes near the morning moon, low and almost full. As I drive my car, I see the balloon fly farther from the moon while, to the north and at farther distances, more balloons come into view. All are in vintage shades, with one in bright yellow.

• “Compatible with feeling”—selecting and portraying a subject in a way that allows a typical emotional response:

Driving to church on a very cold morning, I see in the western sky a hot-air balloon suspended near the massive, chalk-white globe of the moon. The balloon is in vintage shades of red, white, and blue. As my perspective alters and the balloon continues to drift, the two objects draw far apart, while to the north I see more balloons come into view, all in muted colors—except for a single bright-yellow one.

• “The third”—portraying a complex emotion that goes beyond a concrete subject:

The morning is very cold as I drive to church. In the western sky, I see a hot-air balloon in vintage red, white, and blue suspended near the massive, chalk-white globe of the moon. I slow down, wondering if I want to pull over and take a picture, but practicality wins out. My camera phone likely won’t be able to capture the sight, and I am already late for church.

As I continue to drive, my perspective alters and the balloon continues to drift. The moon and the balloon draw far apart. Then, to the north, more balloons come into view—all in subtle shades except for a single yellow one. I don’t remember ever seeing this delicate palette of colors in a launch before.

The morning feels magical. I hurry into church. Later, back in the parking lot, I hear the cry of birds: three long bodies racing across the sky. I think they are cranes.

Writing Exercise

Ready to give it a try? Choose one subject or scene and portray it with the three levels of subjectivity described by Natsume Sōseki. With this exercise, don’t major on minors—it’ll be impossible to apply the three approaches to picture making in a literal way. Instead, be flexible, have fun, and be open to what you learn about writing along the way.

How did it go? Share your three “pictures” (or your experience with this exercise) in the comments!

The Transcendent Emotions of Arthur Machen

The Welsh author Arthur Machen, a pioneer in the genre of weird fiction, would not seem equipped to generate the terror that his tales evoke. He was a typical Victorian, sentimental and sincerely religious, with a sometimes stodgy and far-rambling writing style.

I just read a volume of his stories, and nearly every one had a moment of supreme horror—not the kind that makes you jump out of your skin but the kind where you realize you’ve been clenching your stomach without realizing it.

Machen did not need to be a supreme stylist or even a technically brilliant storyteller to write fiction that transcended time. All he needed was an honest connection to his own emotions and a dogged commitment to telling each story until the feeling it raised in him was elicited in the reader. His fiction strikes our emotion like a bell because of two authorial traits:

• He was honest about what aroused his feelings—Machen was horrified by spiritual menace. He believed in dark forces and the destructive power of evil, and his stories feature human beings overcome—either physically or spiritually—by creatures of unrestrained wickedness. He did not see a need to hide or explain or justify his fear; he accepted it as a real thing and therefore valid within his stories. As a result, even if Machen’s supernatural premises aren’t convincing to all of us, his emotions certainly are.

• He honored the life-span of emotions—Machen knew that emotions don’t always explode like fireworks, launched and then fizzling out within a couple seconds. In his short stories and his long ones, he exemplifies the slow burn, taking the time required to set scenes and establish events. Not every moment of each of his works is frightening. Some stories hit their pitch of fear in one short paragraph at the exact climax and others (a great example being The Terror) reach a sustained, multichapter point of horror after pages and pages of—let’s be honest—rather boring detail collection. I’m not excusing the boring parts. What I am saying is that getting through them is absolutely worth it.
  

William Strunk Jr.’s Face (Writing exercise)

In his 1979 introduction to The Elements of Style, E. B. White fondly and memorably describes the book’s original author, William Strunk Jr.:

From every line there peers out at me the puckish face of my professor, his short hair parted neatly in the middle and combed down over his forehead, his eyes blinking incessantly behind steel-rimmed spectacles as though he had just emerged into strong light, his lips nibbling each other like nervous horses, his smile shuttling to and fro under a carefully edged mustache.

This is one of the most evocative descriptions of someone’s personal appearance that I have ever read. It strikes an impressive balance between the detailed facial descriptions provided by Victorian authors and the vague descriptions we find in contemporary literature, which usually note hair color and nothing more.

White uses three techniques to paint a word picture of his beloved college professor:

• Choose expressive words—The modifier puckish describes not only appearance but personality; it tells us the types of expressions we might expect to see on this man as well as the spirit behind them. (Off the top of my head, other words that do this are dour, drowsy, angelic…)

• Give specific details—White lists “short hair parted neatly in the middle and combed down over his forehead” and “a carefully edged mustache.” We can effortlessly imagine how the hair looks as well as the precision of Strunk’s personality.

• Describe movement—My favorite aspect of this description is White’s depiction of a face in motion: Strunk’s “eyes blinking incessantly…his lips nibbling each other like nervous horses, his smile shuttling to and fro.” Expressions are just as important as features in constituting a person’s unique appearance, and far more important in conveying personality.

Writing Exercise

Describe a person’s face. Choose a person you have observed in real life or on-screen, not someone in a still shot. In addition to portraying the person’s features, try to evoke facial movements and expressions so that it is easy for the reader to imagine the person in action.

How did it go? Share your character description in the comments!

Writing Is a Puzzle

The past few days, I have been working on a jigsaw puzzle. Amidst a painful time personally and collectively, I find it soothing to center my attention on the process of assembling one thousand individual pieces into one image.

Every time I build a puzzle, I try a different strategy. Edges first? Sort all the pieces into colors? Begin with the most interesting part of the picture? Start by getting that pesky blank sky or mass of tree leaves out of the way?

No matter what approach I use, though, there always comes a point when I lose all sense of direction. The pieces look the same and I have no idea where to put any of them. The only way to progress is to keep trying: poring over each piece until I recognize where it belongs, or trying out a piece in different areas of the puzzle until I luckily hit on its rightful place.

It’s detail work. It’s grunt work. It feels chaotic.

Writers love the “planner versus pantser” discussion. We talk about whether we prefer to plan out our writing in advance or fly by the seat of our pants. Most of us use a hybrid.

But no matter what approach we use, there comes a point when we feel like we are floating untethered in a universe of words. There are no compass points and no gravity. Every step we take gets us nowhere.

When that happens, we can try the following.

Put in the time

Hard work is, well, hard. People often choose to become writers because they love that magical feeling of flow, when words are running from the pen like a mountain stream and beautiful worlds are being effortlessly created. Writing starts out as playing, but somewhere along the line it turns into work (like all worthwhile things).

Be a grownup. Keep working. Eventually, you’ll catch that flow again.

Take a break

Sometimes I quit the puzzle for a while. A few hours later, I’m talking on the phone or eating my dinner, and my eyes wander to the puzzle on the table. Suddenly I know where to put one of the pieces.

When you need a break, close your laptop or shove your manuscript in a drawer. Return later with fresh eyes and a clear mind. You’ll find that at least one of your writing problems has solved itself while you were gone.

Accept chaos

Not knowing what to do next is part of life. Randomly trying one thing after another can feel pointless and unproductive. Guess what—in that chaos, something new is being birthed. Losing our sense of direction can cause us to try things we wouldn’t otherwise. Seemingly unconnected thoughts link up. We lose our preconceptions and see things upside down (which might be right side up). Yes, it’s frustrating and even scary. The answers you need are out there in the darkness . . . but you need to reach for them.

Enjoy the details

When I’m studying each puzzle piece individually and trying various locations for it, I can enjoy the details of the picture I’m assembling. I find myself noticing shades of color, leaf shapes, architectural details, even the outlines of the pieces themselves. Each piece—and its connection to surrounding pieces—becomes significant.

It’s easy to overlook how important each piece of our writing is. We have our favorite parts of things we’ve written, and we often ignore that transition paragraph or that scene where our main character waters her plants. But every single piece of a writing project is important. (If it’s not, your editor will cut it. See how that works?)

So welcome the details. Find a way to care about every part of your writing, even the parts that don’t seem to matter—because actually they matter very much.

Trust the process

Sometimes, it’s not till I fit one puzzle piece into place that I’m able to find where another one goes—and another, and another. A puzzle can only be done one piece at a time, and the same goes for writing. Trust that after each step you take, the next one will become clear.

Oh, and if you see in this blog entry a metaphor for life right now, feel free.

Toni Morrison and Peter Dimock

Major help in translating the lectures into readable manuscript came from Peter Dimock. I am grateful to him for his intelligence and his rare and graceful editorial prowess.

— Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)