them, and every night ground their most brittle leaves into a pipe mixture in the palm of his hand. He would reach up, snap off a leaf, and then sit back in his old chair and talk to us, my sister Anne and the new one Norah and me, until it was time to puff out more delicious fumes, (from Among Friends)
Fisher uses no elaborate metaphors here or easy puns. Her play comes in the form of a constellation of precise words and images that transport us from our own time and place to that little room so long ago.
Fisher's restraint stands in sharp contrast to the hallucinatory wordplay in Act of the Damned by Antonio Lobo Antunes:
At eight a.m. on the second Wednesday of September, 1975, the alarm clock yanked me up out of my sleep like a derrick on the wharf hauling up a seaweed-smeared car that didn't know how to swim. I surfaced from the sheets, the night dripping from my pajamas and my feet as the iron claws deposited my arthritic cadaver on to the carpet, next to the shoes full of yesterday's smell. I rubbed my fists into my battered eyes and felt flakes of rust fall from the corners. Ana was wrapped, like a corpse in the morgue, in a blanket on the far side of the bed, with only her broomhead of hair poking out. A pathetic shred of leather from a dead heel tumbled off the mattress. I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and the heartless mirror showed me the damage the years had wrought, as on an abandoned chapel.
Even those who prefer a much plainer style need an occasional swim in a surrealistic sea of language — if only to cleanse us of our word complacency.
All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words. The writer sees and hears and records. The seeing leads to language.
"The writer must be able to feel words intimately, one at a time," writes poet Donald Hall in Writing Well. "He must also be able to step back, inside his head, and see the flowing sentence. But he starts with the single word." Hall celebrates writers who "are original, as if seeing a thing for the first time; yet they report their vision in a language that reaches the rest of us. For the first quality the writer needs imagination; for the second he needs skill.... Imagination without skill makes a lively chaos; skill without imagination, a deadly order."
WORKSHOP
1. Read several stories in today's newspaper. Circle any surprising word, especially one you are not used to seeing in the news.
2. Write a draft with the intention of unleashing your writing vocabulary. Show this draft to test readers and interview them about your word choice and their level of understanding. Share your findings with others.
3. Read the work of a writer you admire, paying special attention to word choice. Circle any signs of playfulness by the writer, especially when the subject matter is serious.
4. Find a writer, perhaps a poet, whose work you read as an inspiration for writing. Circle the words that interest you. Even if you know their meaning, look them up in a historical lexicon, such as the Oxford English Dictionary. Find their etymologies. Try to locate their first known use in written English.
Novelist Joseph Conrad once described his task this way: "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see." When Gene Roberts, a great American newspaper editor, broke in as a cub reporter in North Carolina, he read his stories aloud to a blind editor who would chastise young Roberts for not making him see.
When details of character and setting appeal to the senses, they create an experience for the reader that leads to understanding. When we say "I see," we most often mean "I understand." Inexperienced writers may choose the obvious detail, the man puffing on the cigarette, the young woman chewing on what's left of her fingernails. Those
Fisher uses no elaborate metaphors here or easy puns. Her play comes in the form of a constellation of precise words and images that transport us from our own time and place to that little room so long ago.
Fisher's restraint stands in sharp contrast to the hallucinatory wordplay in Act of the Damned by Antonio Lobo Antunes:
At eight a.m. on the second Wednesday of September, 1975, the alarm clock yanked me up out of my sleep like a derrick on the wharf hauling up a seaweed-smeared car that didn't know how to swim. I surfaced from the sheets, the night dripping from my pajamas and my feet as the iron claws deposited my arthritic cadaver on to the carpet, next to the shoes full of yesterday's smell. I rubbed my fists into my battered eyes and felt flakes of rust fall from the corners. Ana was wrapped, like a corpse in the morgue, in a blanket on the far side of the bed, with only her broomhead of hair poking out. A pathetic shred of leather from a dead heel tumbled off the mattress. I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and the heartless mirror showed me the damage the years had wrought, as on an abandoned chapel.
Even those who prefer a much plainer style need an occasional swim in a surrealistic sea of language — if only to cleanse us of our word complacency.
All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words. The writer sees and hears and records. The seeing leads to language.
"The writer must be able to feel words intimately, one at a time," writes poet Donald Hall in Writing Well. "He must also be able to step back, inside his head, and see the flowing sentence. But he starts with the single word." Hall celebrates writers who "are original, as if seeing a thing for the first time; yet they report their vision in a language that reaches the rest of us. For the first quality the writer needs imagination; for the second he needs skill.... Imagination without skill makes a lively chaos; skill without imagination, a deadly order."
WORKSHOP
1. Read several stories in today's newspaper. Circle any surprising word, especially one you are not used to seeing in the news.
2. Write a draft with the intention of unleashing your writing vocabulary. Show this draft to test readers and interview them about your word choice and their level of understanding. Share your findings with others.
3. Read the work of a writer you admire, paying special attention to word choice. Circle any signs of playfulness by the writer, especially when the subject matter is serious.
4. Find a writer, perhaps a poet, whose work you read as an inspiration for writing. Circle the words that interest you. Even if you know their meaning, look them up in a historical lexicon, such as the Oxford English Dictionary. Find their etymologies. Try to locate their first known use in written English.
Novelist Joseph Conrad once described his task this way: "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see." When Gene Roberts, a great American newspaper editor, broke in as a cub reporter in North Carolina, he read his stories aloud to a blind editor who would chastise young Roberts for not making him see.
When details of character and setting appeal to the senses, they create an experience for the reader that leads to understanding. When we say "I see," we most often mean "I understand." Inexperienced writers may choose the obvious detail, the man puffing on the cigarette, the young woman chewing on what's left of her fingernails. Those
Similar Books
