I’m at work on a novel and one of the joyous surprises is how frequently magic appears on the page, unbidden. It doesn’t come out of nowhere, but out of the threads of the story I’ve been weaving with a conscious awareness of the plot and where it is going. Coming from screenwriting, I’d imagined, before I started writing this book, that I understood the shake and rhythms and pacing of the book and that the plot I’d outlined was more or less the plot I’d follow. What I’d learned, however, is that the plot of this novel is just the skeleton and that the writing itself is the flesh and the spirit that animates.
So yesterday, as I was making good on my pages, some words found there way onto the page that weren’t expected, and it wasn’t just the words. It was the ideas, the concept, the metaphor that I realized would add another bit of texture to an already texturally rich book. This, I realized, is what language is, it’s how it weaves its magic, it’s why story imprints itself so deeply into the imagination. Words have one meaning. And, then, through story, they have another. Whole layers of meaning piled on top of one another — or, more accurately, woven into a tapestry – until a world is made. In my story, my protagonist is weaving a tapestry from the many disparate experiences of his life. He is, in other words, as we all are, consciously or not (and most often not) weaving the story of his life from all the things that have come to him unbidden, and all the things he’s chosen, and all of his passions and longing and pains and disappointments, all of it grist for the mill, or threads for his loom. And that got me thinking…
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