The Grasshopper Sunday Edition 4/16/23: Wonders
As above, so below
“I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
Writing is powerful magic when it reveals the wonder of life and living. And the horror of darkness. It’s real magic when tapping on the screen of a tablet can create worlds, depict that life and death, and make that believable.
It also has the miraculous ability to communicate those wonders and horrors to others. It can convince and convict and this is a great responsibility. I try to remember that when I hammer out a rant about some political lie or injustice, as I do nearly daily.
When I was younger books and reading were my escape mechanism, a way of getting away from the pressure of day to day life. I still fall back on that but less than I did in years past. My writing, as pragmatic as much of it is, is my new way to deal with the world, to think out loud and take my chances with the world knowing what I think.
Sometimes I think it shields me from the wonder of the world. As I write this I’m sitting in a leather chair in my apartment when a car goes by and I hear the choral chorus of the Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Just that phrase off in the distance sung by background singers in another time.
Then it was gone and I wonder…did I really hear that?
Openings
There is a huge market for fantasy fiction these days and the result is a flood of Tolkien-type fan fiction disguised as original writing. If you want to escape these days, and you live in the first or second worlds, you have almost unlimited options for getting away. Streaming TV has unlocked an almost unbelievable amount of storytelling and it can be overwhelming.
Fantasy writing, like anything else, is mostly terrible. As much as I have loved swords and sorcery in the past, when I tried watching Game of Thrones a few years ago I couldn’t get past an early scene when a young boy is made to watch a beheading. To me that was a cheap writer’s trick, to open with death and horror in the name of creativity.
We live in an ultra violent world, so violent that we take mass murders in stride. We have to because this daily horror here in the States is something we have to deal with and shutting down our anger is easier than trying to do something about it. If you want to see how words and phrases can change meaning, think about the phrase ‘thoughts and prayers’.
It used to show compassion. Then it became a cliche, and now it signals a cold disregard for violence that could be prevented but is not because there is profit in it. Protestors carry placards with phrase crossed out in an attempt to stop politicians using it as a cop out when faced with a crime they have tacitly endorsed.
You can’t underestimate the power of language and it is a power we wield as writers. There is responsibility in words and a high wire balancing act to get them right. Opening a TV series with a child watching a beheading is a cheap but effective trick. The problem I have with that is if a writer is going to use a trick like that before even establishing characters, I suspect they will go for the shock over and over again.
It is the opposite of using writing to explore wonder. It lacks subtlety and that is something I look for as a reader more and more these days. It was always hard to find but in these violent times it seems like a quaint concept, to let a story unfold gradually.
I understand that with TV and film you have to grab attention ASAP or you’ll lose flighty viewers. The first five or ten minutes is the first act that sets the stage and identified the conflict that drives the story. When it is a video or film, this can be done visually, but writers have to paint a picture and subtlety is often more effective than diving into the action.
It’s worthwhile to examine the openings of classic novels like Gatsby or The Lord of the Rings. That three ring extravaganza starts with a birthday party, not exactly heralding the darkness to come. But it is a set piece, effectively introducing several of the main characters.
In Gatsby, Nick, the narrator of the story, sits on his cottage porch watching a green light flicker across the bay and thinking back to the story of his eccentric but very wealthy neighbor. It’s dusk and whenever I read it I can feel the warm breeze and the humidity of the evening. All created with a few well-chosen words.
Both openings take you into unexpected stories, with violence only where needed to move the story forward.
“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula
“Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
“I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, the more I love.”
― Alice Walker, The Color Purple
It’s Friday afternoon, April 14 and it is clear, sunny, and 82 in Western NY. Next Tuesday we will have a high of 45. Welcome to Rochester, NY where the weather changes constantly. This past winter we only had about 50” of snow, less than half of average. But Buffalo, only 60 miles away, had three times that.
I troll the news for things to write about but only if I think I can bring a new perspective to a story. I learned to read at age three, by accident. My mother would sit and read a book to me and follow along the words with her finger as she spoke and I picked up the language from that. Partly because of that head start, I am a natural speed reader so I cover a lot of territory every day in my quest for a story.
A lot of the time I have something I want to write about but can’t find that angle. I believe if there is value there, it will find me. Wonder is both a verb and a noun and the two usages are quite different. One is curiosity as you wonder about something. The other is a thing, as in there are wonders to be found here. And then there’s wondrous, an adjective.
I wonder…
Did you write today?
Martin
1162 words
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I love your writing Martin and I so dislike the way violence has become gratuitous.