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How to Say When April 30, 2016

[Editor’s note. This week’s post is adapted from unpublished correspondence, dated c. 2008, to a young writer.]

The first question a writer must resolve is the why of her writing. What is your dream—what is your purpose. What do you need to accomplish.

All words—all images—process from that choice. All directives have consequences that likewise proceed from that choice. Think of the images used as an arrow. All arrows have a direction; they do not wander—they pierce an object in a straight line of trajectory.

If your images do not commune with your reader, your trajectory is alienation. And it becomes your life.

That is from the long view—the causal effect of art on you, the artist. The impact of alienation on your work, however, derives from the reality that all words have power. It is a power not merely because of how each is defined (definition) nor how each is felt (connotation) by the human community at large.

Nor merely because of how each subjectively connects to you, the writer.

Nor merely because of their impulse within the reader (which would vary from reader to reader)—I mean here how they charge or ignite ideas and impressions within each.

Words and images have power in a cumulative sense—how they relate to each other. They are defined and resonate (or not) dependent on how they interact in the work itself.

That way of relating to each other might be said to be kind of like life itself: each piece has the individual power of its words and images and a collective one formed by the community of the words in each piece.

Art styles that are chaotic [what I have come to call ‘firewords,’ coined from fireworks] place the greater strain on community.

When a writer uses images that lack beauty, he must replace them with pathos. That is what ‘dark beauty’ is. Without either beauty or pathos, you risk alienating your reader. The reader’s participation in the process is critical to the exercise of writing. If you lose/alienate your reader, you do not get a second chance to catch him.

That tension between writer and reader is the great equalizer. Lovers—friends—family—they all laud and cry out, “Magnificent!” when introduced to the work of those they know and adore.

The world has no reason to.

The real horror of writing is knowing when to say when. It is, finally, what divides the amateur from the true.

Scary thought.

©2008 Valerie Isobel Freer. Unpublished papers.