Friday thoughts to ponder- Create Horizon: Every reality has a place where vision stops, where the walls, mountains, trees, or curvature of the Earth won’t let us see further. The basic feeling of location comes only because we can’t see everything at once. The same goes for readers. If they are to belong, they need horizon, a way to distinguish here from everywhere else. There are countless ways to make this happen—a small stream of facts that murmurs of faraway business, a finger of smoke, something we see in the distance, anything that lets us know that a factory is churning, that a reactor is reacting. The most stunning and explicit version of this—at least in my mind—is Love in the Time of Cholera. Even the title suggests the up-close and the faraway. In the story, the narrator occasionally reminds us of some distant affairs—national turmoil, sickness, and brutality writ large. And those affairs occasionally haunt the immediate. Sometimes, horizon is crucial to the narrative tension—to the way we feel while drifting with Huck and Jim, romping with Ennis Delmar and Jack Twist, or romanticizing Antonía. The narrators in these stories create horizon differently, but it’s there and it’s crucial each time. Scenes are often imbued with a sense of up-close and faraway—in other words, space. And without space, there is no reality. I should, though, admit that this might get dangerous. A clumsy or self-involved narrator can abandon the main characters in favor of abstract exposition. But horizon doesn’t require lengthy passages. It needs only a quick turn of the head, a brief glance into the distance, or a squint over someone’s shoulder. If characters are like people, they’ll look up from their own laps—even their own cell phones—often enough to remember what’s out there. ~ John Mauk (excerpted from an article in Writers Digest)
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:36:18 +0000