I have always viewed writing as a way to create moving pictures in a person’s mind. Sometimes the movement is just the steady closing in on the moment of discovery when everything is crystal clear, intense, sharp to the senses. Other times the view is like the image made by a really fine film camera where everything in the background is slightly blurred and only a single impression is cast in sharp relief to the mind’s understanding. I love building those images.
Yesterday I was working on my story having set aside a few minutes. I had been writing intently working on a particular scene. The time seemed to have been endless, and I had stopped to back up and view what I had written. Silly, but I highlighted the new text to check word count, a bit over 500 words. Disgusted, I set to again to refine the images and dialogue to make it feel bright, deep and authentic. Even now my mind still keeps running back to the little scene, noting that I had kept the view small, never moving out to create a sense of place, a feel for the desert, the loneliness and the irony of feeling chilled in the intense burning heat of a too hot planet.
Friday or maybe Saturday, I’ll bend over that scene again, work on the distanced view, come in close again and finally find that something of what I had hoped to have wrought was on the screen tapped by the steady rhythm of the cursor blinking.
