Eric Mayer

Byzantine Blog



Home
Get Email Updates
Cruel Music
Diana Rowland
Martin Edwards
Electric Grandmother
Jane Finnis
jimsjournal
Keith Snyder
My Incredibly Unremarkable Life
Mysterious Musings
Mystery of a Shrinking Violet
Mystery*File
Rambler
The Rap Sheet
reenie's reach
Thoughts from Crow Cottage
rhubarb
This Writing Life
Woodstock's Blog
Email Me

Admin Password

Remember Me

1481855 Curiosities served
Share on Facebook

Writing From Experience
Previous Entry :: Next Entry

Read/Post Comments (7)

Although it is a few days old, I want to call your attention, to a post by Barbara Klaser in which she reflects on how how we process things that happen in our personal lives through our writing and artwork.

As I commented, some writers think they require a wealth of exotic experience to draw upon. But we all have a huge amount of experience -- any brain activity constitutes experience -- and the secret might be not so much having exotic experiences to process into fiction as processing our mundane experiences in exotic ways.

Then too, what we experience to begin with depends on what we observe. At any given moment there is more going on around us than we can possible take in and different people absorb different things, have a different point of view. It probably helps, if you write, to be able to pick out interesting details that wouldn't necessarily be what most people would notice.

Besides, no matter what experiences a writer might have had, they need to be reduced to words -- symbols -- which readers then translate back into mental images. And to do so, readers have only their own experiences to go by. I've never seen the Grand Canyon, for example. If a writer describes it, I might to picture it as being like the Genessee River gorge at Letchworth State Park in New York, where I've been, but much much bigger.

In a sense, the reader's experience shapes a piece of writing more than the writer's.

Of course, I could always picture the Grand Canyon described by an author as being like a photograph of the canyon I'd seen.

I wonder how often we translate the words we read in books into images derived from television or movies, rather than images from our own lives? Which presents the further question of whether readers experienced books differently before television, movies or photography, gave them a wide range of vicarious experience? Is that part of the reason early novels tended to be longer and more laden with description?



Read/Post Comments (7)

Previous Entry :: Next Entry

Back to Top

Powered by JournalScape © 2001-2010 JournalScape.com. All rights reserved.
All content rights reserved by the author.
custsupport@journalscape.com