We Need to Have A Talk About Writing...

We can stand and marvel at the intricate workings of the brain. Experiences, memories: ripples of light, Synapses carrying messages. Watching it from within, a room full of people are in awe. It’s like they have discovered God, and God was here all along.

And then you read an excerpt from a novel, about how a lion upon taking over a new pack will slaughter all the cubs that are not his. His goal is to disseminate his own genes by getting the lionesses under his sway back in heat. He’s formulated this knowledge himself so that they will not waste their energy on cubs that are not of his line.

So beautiful, and so cruel.

I read some advice from Ernest Hemingway, I love the Old Man & the Sea so much. It was about walking into a room and walking out knowing everything that was in it.

The same article, which talks about an advice column Hemingway used to write as a young man, goes onto talk about how EH advises an aspirer to see the point of view of people balling you out, pinpoint the emotion, and write it down.

He recommends the same process for fishing; pinpointing the exact moment of excitement when the fish tugs at the line, monitoring the emotion, storing it away, and writing it out later as if it was the reader witnessing the event and not the writer.

I often muse on this exact process in my idle moments. I met a lady a few years ago, the girlfriend of my father-in-law’s oldest friend, who is an award-winning, published crime writer here in Australia. Novels, short stories: the works. I didn’t really talk to her much as I was a little tired, then a little drunk as it was a birthday lunch. But, I noticed she had very interesting conversation skills. She would ask a question and then offer a one sentence example of what she was asking. She was writing as she talked. She reminded me of my journalist Uncle. The one who first turned me against asking personal, probing questions of people.

Everyone's got an angle, even the lions.