Let the Crazy Child Write!

Finding Your Creative Writing Voice

Clive Matson

• Editorial: New World Library
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781577312932
• Categoría: Filología
• Categoría: Escritura creativa

Twelve lively, in-depth chapters reveal how following our untrained impulses — our creative unconscious or "Crazy Child" — gives an authentic grasp on writing stories, poems, plays, and essays. Let the Crazy Child Write! introduces exercises that explicitly tap this knowledge and also presents guidelines on how to give, and receive, constructive feedback. This is the first how-to-write text to give full credit to the creative unconscious since Becoming a Writer, the 1934 classic by Dorothea Brande. Matson goes further by developing writing techniques step by step: Image Detail, Slow Motion, Hook, Persona Writing, Point of View, Dialogue, Plot, Narrative Presence, Good Clichés, Character, Surrealism, and Resolution.

Chapter 1

Image Detail

Without … playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

CARL JUNG, Psychological Types

We begin with “image detail” because it’s essential for strong writing, and because it’s fun. Every moment of our lives we are surrounded by sensory information — the stuff of image detail. Your Crazy Child delights in it.

An image detail is that small part of an image that sticks in our minds. The worn green fabric on the end of a diving board, the pearly scar on a lover’s neck, a piece of chewed gum in the boss’s ashtray — these are image details. We remember the object, or the person, or the feeling of an entire scene from one detail.

The details that catch your attention in life are the same ones that catch your attention as a reader, and the same ones that work for you as a writer. Much of the adventure of writing is discovering which details are most gripping for you, the observer. As you look around, some details will strike your eye, and some of these will tug at your breastbone.

You are starting a journey and it is filled with fascinating images. What about that boy leaning out of a car window with a green carnation in his teeth? What about that peculiar interview with your boss? Maybe her eyes teared up, and at the same time she unwrapped a fresh piece of gum.

Writing is largely a matter of paying attention. You need to see, hear, taste, feel, and smell details in order to write them. You might notice them instantly and choose them in a snap — because they rise unbidden from your unconscious. Or you might turn a scene over and over in your mind, getting to know it well, before you find the appropriate detail.

Either way is fine. Whether you write slowly or rapidly is simply a signal of how your Crazy Child works. It’s the part of you that feels. Those twinges and gasps are from your creative unconscious, from your Crazy Child. So are the sharp, brittle facts that come from deep inside with an utter clarity, the ones you know must be true.

The goal of Let the Crazy Child Write! is to help you establish a working relationship with your creative source. In this chapter you will be introduced to your Crazy Child, and you will become familiar with the kinds of details it sees.

How Image Detail Works

Small details provoke our minds to fill in the entire picture. Especially effective are odd or dissonant details. We remember the experience of diving when we remember the worn fabric of the diving board under our toes. We see the entire blue plate when we remember a shell-shaped chip on its edge.

These small, odd, or dissonant details work because of the close attention that is required to see them. You need to be quite near the plate to notice that shell-shaped chip in the first place. You can do this by moving close physically, or by zooming in with your imagination. The reader, by taking in your words, comes as close to the object as you are.

If you write that you had your elbow on the boss’s table when you saw that gum in the ashtray, the reader imagines being in that same position. If you write that you see a pearly scar when your cheek is on your lover’s shoulder, the reader’s cheek is there too. The reader’s nervous system is automatically present, and fills in the scene as the words are read.

This picture-making might sound rare or exotic, but it is neither. Picture-making is automatic in every human being. It is the job of the human imagination to make images. By “imagination” I mean more than simply dreaming something up willfully. I mean the automatic imaging process that goes on beneath our awareness.

Creating and processing images — sensations, feelings, thoughts, observations, memories — goes on all day and all night. We might notice images only a few times during the day or in the morning when we remember a striking scene from a dream. But our imagination is always busy.

An old saw about a three-legged dog states, “You can’t imagine a three-legged dog running.” But as soon as you read that sentence, your nervous system contradicts it — you do see that three-legged dog. And it’s running. The dog is ridiculous, clumsy, endearing, inspiring, or even oddly graceful.

You have at this moment demonstrated how the human nervous system works. Your nervous system began to register the three-legged dog, and your Crazy Child made an exact picture. Your nervous system and your Crazy Child did their everyday job. You were stimulated by an odd detail — the dog with a missing leg — and your imagination filled in the picture.

Powerful Image Details

I have already talked about small and odd details. “Small,” however, does not necessarily mean physically small. An image may be small only in comparison to the larger picture. On the roof of a Los Angeles nightclub is a neon martini, and in the martini is a blinking pink olive. That olive may be two feet across, but it is small compared to the cocktail glass.

Any picture that the reader can complete by imagining part of the body is also powerful. One writer uses hands to convey an image when she says the afterglow of lightning “looks like fingers poking down from the sky.” I instantly imagine my fingers hanging down.

The shape and motion of the fingers mimics the shape and motion of the lightning. The technical word for this comparison, using the word “like” or implying its use, is “simile” (pronounced sim-i-lee). A simile works when the image and reality both contain a similar feature. Both “simile” and “similar” come from the Latin similis, meaning “like.”

Homer’s “rosy-fingered dawn” is almost a cliché because it has been quoted so often. It’s widely quoted in the first place because it’s so appropriate. Long, thin clouds stretched across the dawn sky do look like fingers tinted with a rosy color, and the fingers reach into the day. The image fits the event.

We feel anything strongly that relates to the body. The body is, after all, where the nervous system resides, and any detail that in some way touches the body becomes vivid. When we hear of children in our cities moving their beds out of the line of gunfire, we see this clearly — very clearly. We do not have to be there.

We imagine the scene. We move the bed, with the child, in terror or in a nightly numbness. We imagine the bullets angling through the window, we hear the thudding sound and see the shards of glass — our nervous system makes sure we do this. We see the entire scene, just as we see that three-legged dog, loping awkwardly down the street.

Images Other Than Pictures

The term “image” applies to any sensory impression, and every sense receives and creates images. A particular smell is an image, a sound is an image, a taste is an image, and so is any particular touch. There is also an important sixth sense — the kinetic sense — that gives us images of motion and momentum.

So far I have discussed images as visual impressions — images that we see with our eyes or imagine with our mind’s eye. Images from other senses work in the same way. Small, odd, and dissonant details are vivid, and so are details that relate to the body.

What is there, then, about place that is transferable to the pages of a novel? The best things — the explicit things: physical texture. [Stories] … need the warm hard earth underfoot, the light and lift of air, the stir and play of mood, the softening bath of atmosphere that give the likeness-to-life. … .

EUDORA WELTY, Place in Fiction

Repeated Image Detail

It may be powerful to repeat an image detail. This is especially true if the detail is changed slightly when it reappears; it has a way of adding meaning to itself.

I have already repeated a few details, on pages 1, 2, and 3. That chewing gum in the boss’s ashtray might mean more on page 2 than when you first read it. It might be disgusting, instead of a curiosity — it has accrued feeling with repetition. You can forge a unique sensation by repeating a detail in a story, poem, play, or essay.

Image Detail in Stories

Linda Cohen uses image details in the following excerpts from her novel-in-progress about early twentieth-century immigrants. We can read how revealing her details are, and also, when she repeats them, how they gain power. Her main character, Rose, has just met Sal in the restaurant where Rose is waitressing:

She finally looked up into the man’s broad face. He smiled at her and a reddish-brown scar formed a little diamond under one of his eyes.

She looked away as she spoke, outside the front door as it opened again. “We have very good hamburgers here.” All that hair he has is frightening, she thought. I’ve never seen anyone look so much like he came right from the animals. Darwin was right. Except this man came direct from a bear.

Rose pushed past the cook’s station through the swinging doors and into the bathroom. She put down the toilet seat and sat on top of it.

The reddish-brown scar that makes a diamond is an excellent detail — small and odd. It brings me right next to Sal’s face. Cohen also shows us Sal’s hairiness, and, in the last sentence, shows an odd detail about Rose. When Rose sits on the toilet seat, it’s a purposeful action: she is using the bathroom as a place to be alone and think.

… it’s so hard to be a waitress and think at the same time. She put up their orders, then rushed over to where the cereal was and poured out two bowlfuls and a pitcher of milk. She carried it all on a tray to Sal. His legs were stretched out onto the seat of the chair across from him, and he was reading the newspaper again.

“I’m sorry I took so long with your cereal.” Rose extended her neck to see the newspaper open to the business section, with a banner at the top of the page that read: “Coolidge Prosperity: Unemployment Way Down/Production and Consumption at an All-Time High.”

Notice how the phrase “extended her neck” gives a precise feeling about Rose and about her relationship to Sal. It’s a small, odd, physical action, and others will follow:

… Sal sat up straight and confident as he poured milk into his second bowl of cornflakes. He took a spoonful of cereal and watched it move toward his mouth. The scar under his eye formed a little diamond again. …

There’s the scar again, and in the next excerpt two new details appear. The reader is becoming acquainted with Sal one detail at a time, just as you do in life. Both the reader and Rose get to know Sal at an equivalent pace:

A sharply chipped tooth peeked out from the side of Sal’s mouth. He was smiling at her with wide open eyes, his long eyelashes nearly touching the eyebrows on his low fore-head. …

He took Rose’s hand, wrapping his big fingers around her smaller ones. … With her free hand Rose fidgeted with the narrow brim of her hat. She let her other hand hang limp in Sal’s, unsure of what to do next. His hand felt bumpy and hairy, like a paw.

Sal’s hairiness has become a singular attraction and it comes up again, bearlike and sexy. The next image gives another detail we can relate to our bodies:

… Rose’s bloomers and waitress skirt were hidden under-neath her coat as it flapped against her calves. …

The reader gains a sense of the styles of that time. As we stand with Rose, we can feel the wind on bare calves. Rose and Sal then go to a social meeting:

“How do you do, all of you.” Sal gave a little salute with his hand and took a slurp of coffee.

Edmund, the college graduate, took a sip of black coffee from his cup, then set it down so loudly and casually on the saucer it nearly spilled.

Sal’s wariness and Edmund’s uneasiness are displayed as they drink coffee. Next Rose and Sal are outdoors, and we read details about their bodies, shadows, the air, and a leaf:

“But you embarrassed me.” The breezes were coming out of nowhere, finding the only bare skin on Rose’s neck.

“Your mama doesn’t go for Italians?” Sal grinned and glanced over at Rose’s house, then he moved away from the streetlamp until he was under a tree. The shadows of leaves bounced around his face and coat.

“Rose, you’re a beauty. I saw it right away. I’ve gotta tell you that.” Sal reached up and pulled a leaf off the tree. He began ripping it apart.

We see a new facet of Sal as he tears up the leaf and we see the tree anew, just as we would in life. Throughout these excerpts Cohen brings us next to the characters and directly into the scenes. Her details have this effect because they are small, odd, and dissonant.

Imaginary Image Detail

Image details that you imagine work ...