The time will come When, with
elation, You will greet yourself arriving At your own Door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other’s welcome. And say, sit here. Eat. You will
love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your
heart to itself, the stranger who has loved you. All your life, whom you
ignored, For another who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from
the bookshelf, The photographs, the desperate notes, Peel your own image from
the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
-- Derek
Walcott, Love After Love
There will come a time for you as a writer when you will finally and deeply look inward and draw upon
your own experience and wisdom to create a bevy of characters. You'll find some
likable and some not so likable. Villains maybe. Really bad guys. Or heroines. Really great gals. Whatever. You’ll be asked (by yourself) to come up with perspectives,
characteristics and qualities that are perhaps
1. eminently believable, 2.
incredibly naïve 3. beyond the pale,
4. embarrasingly irrational, 5. almost divine, 6. captivatingly witty, 7. wickedly fascinating… the list goes on. How will you do this? How well will you do
this?
You may, at this moment, have no idea how it will all fall into place.
Hello In There
Here’s a hint: All those characters?
Hello! Strangely enough, they are all parts of you. And even more
strange, you know it. But you forget it. So reminders of this verity can always be
useful, especially when tempted to fall into stereotypical descriptions with
all the attendant stock clichés and boring behavioral quirks. One way to keep
the characters fresh, alive and believable is to observe yourself as you set
about engaging in a behavior that you’ve done a million times, oblivious and unconscious. In other words,
observe yourself minutely as you do something very ordinary in a new way that
may or may not make any sense. This might sound as if you have to participate
in a sort of split personality experiment for a time. Maybe so.
Practice Being Strange
Jill Jepson in her insightful book Writing As a Sacred Path moves
through a series of writing exercises designed to create a strange and unfamiliar milieu which in turn results in an altered perspective. Think about this: Could the act of writing in a physical position that is unusual, maybe even uncomfortable,
spur a certain approach to perspective
that comes only by observing and
doing simultaneously? Try this:
· Stand up.
Write a short a description of a beautiful stranger, standing up. You, not them. Or not.
· Use a different surface. If you are usually at the table, try a reclining chair or a
folding chair, or a sofa. Get down and dirty on the floor maybe as you write a
10 minute description of a charming villain who appears at a dinner party for a
select group of friends you’ve known since fifth grade.
· Other possibilities? Simple changes feel strange and awkward, as you can see. To take it to the
extreme edges of strangeness, go into the bathroom, kitchen or bedroom and find
a surface you would never think to use for writing upon. Now write about how
you feel about writing in this way.
Greet Yourself Anew
I like the advice novelist Henry James once gave to an aspiring writer, "Try to be a person on whom nothing is lost." What I think that means is that you must learn to do it and then learn to watch yourself doing it at
the same time. While observing everything everyone else is doing as well. It’s all perspective, all the time, isn't it? In the end, don't take anything too seriously, not even all this stuff about how to be a better writer. No, in the end what really matters is just to get up every day, greet
your sweet self anew and give back your heart to itself saying, 'sit here, eat, I love you.' Today, please feast on your own life. Thank you.
