Tuesday 4/23/24
A lot of writing is about seeing. How one sees something and how deeply. You must see that thing in a way that no one else does--a more truthful way, if you like--and then convey that knowledge in a way that no one else would employ or think to, which makes everyone else see that thing in the more truthful way. And you must see the thing from the top to the bottom. What we see is often a surface. We mistake the surface for a whole. We're apt to think that we've covered this surface well, we have it "down," mastered. Then we move on, and we have no idea what we don't know because we've conflated what we think we know with this presumptive totality.
You know how we have coaches and guides for everything now? The writer is an actual guide of many sorts, and one type of guide he or she is is a seeing guide, a seeing coach. A seeing docent.
What the writer has to do as this guide, is make it seem as if they are not there, and the reader is guiding themselves. The idea of the presence of the writer must be removed. If not, then reading will feel like reading, and great writing is such that reading never feels like reading. It's beyond that and feels it--feels like one is having a life experience, because that is what one is having.
When the writer sees this way and does what I've been describing, the effect for a reader--within a reader--is this epiphany of something that, paradoxically, they may think has existed in their thoughts all along, or in what they've sensed and felt.
They might say, "I've always thought that but I never knew how to put it." They don't actually mean that they've always thought it. They may have never thought it. They likely never did. But it feels as if they had after the fact--call it, after the truth--like they're coming home to themselves, you could say.
That's something else the best writing does: It makes a reader feel like they're coming home, to their home, even if they've never actually been there. But they know it's their home. Their home of homes.
No one in Iowa is going to teach you how to do any of this. It can only come from you, because of something you were born with--if you were--and something you then worked every moment of your life to develop.
