Learning to Write VII
He has lost his way. He reaches out, wondering what is around him. It is night but there is no moon, not even the twinkling of the odd star. The ground is uneven. Slowly he begins to realize that these objects are the trunks and branches of trees, there is the tangle of undergrowth and if there are any wild beasts in the area they are holding their silence, watching quietly on the sidelines.
Although he can see nothing, he has the feeling that a way forward exists, and the very fact of forging his way forward in the darkness will eventually bring about the conditions for light and, subsequently, sight. As he fights to orient himself the light from the rising sun penetrates through the thick growth of the forest, and he begins to see.
This is how Dante opens his master-work, the poem, the Divine Comedy.
But it is also how most writers, if you corner them, will describe the act of writing, at least the beginning of that process.
I don’t know whether to use the word desire or the word compulsion to describe what takes the writer into that darkness and keeps him or her there until the sun comes up. Neither of those words exactly identify the feeling, but it is something like desire or compulsion which is at work.
Perhaps it is a wish to die to the light of our everyday world, to plunge into the unknown in the hope of discovering something new, something unheard of or unimaginable?
Table of contents for Learning To Write
- Learning to Write I
- Learning to Write II
- Learning to Write III
- Learning to Write IV
- Learning to Write V
- Learning to Write VI
- Learning to Write VII
- Learning to Write VIII
- Learning to Write IX
- Learning to Write X
- Learning to Write XI
- Learning to Write XII
- Learning to Write XIII
- Learning to Write XIV
- Learning to Write XV
- Learning to Write XVI
- Learning to Write XVII
- Learning to Write XVIII
- Learning to Write XIX
- Learning to Write XX
- Learning to Write XXI
- Learning to Write XXII
- Learning to Write XXIII
- Learning to Write XXIV
- Learning to Write XXV
- Learning to Write XXVI
- Learning to Write XXVII
- Learning to Write XXVIII
- Learning to Write XXIX
- Learning to Write XXX
- Learning to Write XXXI
- Fictional Character
- How Many Plots Are There?
- Making Metaphors
- Four Walls and One Passion
If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to my RSS feed
What next?
- Next post: Presque vu XIII
- Previous post: Extract - Irony and Carol Shields
An astute description of an almost indescribable process.
Love the Plath quote, too. In fact, I’m thinking of having it tattooed on the back of my hand.
jb says: So, you recognised the process, Patry? You’re right, it is difficult to get hold of.
There is more than one Sylvia Plath quotation in the database, but if it’ll fit on the back of your hand it must’ve been: Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
I’m fond of Elizabeth Bishop’s description of writing as seeking ’self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration’: basketball’s zone, as I’ve said in a post yesterday.