I was writing some notes to some of my creative writing students last week, and I began repeating myself with the same old cliches: “Show me, don’t tell me” and “This really wants to push into the abstract. Make it concrete.”
And this began my thinking… pondering… which led me to….
Words are powerful, but couple them with human imagination, and you are getting very close to magic… or ART. And that was the point of my critiques. Yes, it’s cool to make me think of a bird or a tree or a sunny day or tall man. I wasn’t thinking about it before you wrote it… you planted something there… that’s cool. But that is not really good writing. That is not ART. That is simply communicating: “I want a plumb from the fridge.” Okay. I didn’t know there was a plumb or a fridge and that you had a need. Now I do. “I see the tree.” Okay, now I see in my imagination T-R-E-E. I didn’t see that before. That’s cool. Again, however, that is not actually ART, it’s simply communicating with words. All languages do that. If you boiled the critique down, you could say, “Yes, I see a tree, but it’s my tree I see… it’s abstract. You say T-R-E-E… we all see our own unique tree trapped in our own unique experience.”
And then it hit me. The point of creative writing, imaginative writing (no matter what genre) is to not just make you see a T-R-E-E. it is to makes you see MY TREE, the one in my head; the one I am staring at right now in my imagination. That is the power of real ART. And that goes with the characters in your imagination, the plot in your imagination, the setting in your imagination – all of it. I want you as a reader (who reads one word after the other from left to right) to suddenly see and feel and hope and dream and attach to the characters and settings I see in MY imagination, the story I am unfolding – the movie of the imagination I plant in your head.
No wonder artist were called witches. No wonder the Puritans banned imaginative writing and called it lying. When really done well, it is the catalyst for transformation in a soul, a society, an entire world. It is unstoppable, all consuming, like something going viral. This is my goal as you enter my fictional worlds (The newest one coming out in August BTW – Gods of IMAGO ;), the goals of every fiction writer from the beginning of time: no theater or sound or film here… just words, my words, so you see what’s in my imagination. Wow!
I guess the question is: have you seen any good trees lately?
Greg Belliveau 