Yes! Just as a day–or a life–is an accumulation. One of the things I run into often in my fiction workshops is writers who want to shove information into a story at a pace that suits their own impatience–rather than at a speed that matches a reader’s way of encountering a world. And even when you want to undermine that “usual” speed of reader perception, it’s good to have a finely tuned sense of when you are going too far, too fast or too slow. This sense is ultimately a function of the writer’s perception of audience–of the reader most likely to be caught up in the same sluice the writer is riding. I think Lish is one of the best at recognizing how accumulation works; many of his own fictions blaze directly into a self-conscious accretion that quickly becomes something much larger than the self–though it is always, in a distint way, about the courage it takes to not know and still make good on one’s promises.
Anyway. The more I write, the more its starting to look like a slide show. More than don’t-tell-me-show-me, I find myself cropping the images more, scaling dialog back. “In all things, synecdoche” has been my mode du jour. Though the occasional run-on sentence or florid inventory of a scene is necessary, it seems, to smooth out the terse morsels. Linguistic gravy on peas. But if a story is an accumulation, the good ones are certainly well-curated collections.
Yes! Just as a day–or a life–is an accumulation. One of the things I run into often in my fiction workshops is writers who want to shove information into a story at a pace that suits their own impatience–rather than at a speed that matches a reader’s way of encountering a world. And even when you want to undermine that “usual” speed of reader perception, it’s good to have a finely tuned sense of when you are going too far, too fast or too slow. This sense is ultimately a function of the writer’s perception of audience–of the reader most likely to be caught up in the same sluice the writer is riding. I think Lish is one of the best at recognizing how accumulation works; many of his own fictions blaze directly into a self-conscious accretion that quickly becomes something much larger than the self–though it is always, in a distint way, about the courage it takes to not know and still make good on one’s promises.
So is navel lint.
Anyway. The more I write, the more its starting to look like a slide show. More than don’t-tell-me-show-me, I find myself cropping the images more, scaling dialog back. “In all things, synecdoche” has been my mode du jour. Though the occasional run-on sentence or florid inventory of a scene is necessary, it seems, to smooth out the terse morsels. Linguistic gravy on peas. But if a story is an accumulation, the good ones are certainly well-curated collections.