Those are the five stages of artful writing: imagination of the effect wanted, imagination of the "material" that will effect it, selection, conjuring of words to convey that "material", selection.
For some writers, the narrative seems to flow out of their hands with such easeful instinct they're unaware of any premeditation. But the majority-and among them some of the greatest writers whose testimony has been available-talk of the frequent struggle to find the images and actions (and the words to express them) that will be the "objective correlative" for the effect they are bent on. This "prelibation", the anticipation of the wanted effect, is at once urgent and indefinite. Now imagination must come up with the needed narrative material - that is, suggest "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events" or more -- that sensibility accepts as being the best to do the effecting job, and then "put into words" that effecting narrative material -- words that, again, sensibility judges and accepts. The word 'narrative' is usually used to mean the lamination of things imagined and the words used to describe them. The artist imagines his specific scene and -- in a subsequent stage in the act of art -- conjures the words that will convey it. This real distinction is not advanced in the most famous single sentence ever written on the general matter, Eliot's line about the "objective correlative": "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." Eliot does not mention the difference between the writer's imaginative notion of the apt "external facts" and the words needed to stir in the readers' minds those notions the writer has in mind as he writes. My guess is, despite his ostensible articulateness about the creative act, Eliot never did see the creative moment with sufficient clarity. Articulateness is the muddled thinker's best disguise, and Eliot was certainly articulate. He did graduate work in philosophy at Harvard for three years during the Harvard department's softest, fuzziest decade. Just a few decades later, as that department became more and more "analytic", I don't think he would have lasted more than a semester - or indeed that he would have wanted to in that atmosphere of increasing logical rigor and consequent narrowness. Ultimately he did indeed have a poet's mind, and not that of a philosopher of language, but the latter is the posture of the man who wrote that line about the "objective correlative". In any case, for whatever reason I think Eliot seriously minimized the difficulty in finding and using the right words. The writer's imagination is not the simple, unitary gift it may seem. Her verbal imagination is distinct from all her other kinds of imagination. It took artful acts of imagination for Emily Dickinson to conjure the image/action/scenes she needed to achieve the effects she wanted, but then quite a different set of artful acts to select and combine optimally the infinite offerings of our language. She does much more than merely "give external facts". Indeed, giving just "the external facts" is literally impossible for the writer, for two reasons: First, she can't put forth the actual event or thing, or even the b feelingb at all - she can supply only words. Many of the words will be labels, but labels are not the object they label. Second, whenever we her readers encounter a word, there stirs in our minds not just notion of "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events"; each of our separate, varying minds conjures a glowing corona of countless personal associations. What the poet supplies can never be the "formula" for solely one "emotion". Still, the most gifted writers manage to produce effects that we intuit are startlingly close to the ones they wanted, effects that are apt, unique, powerful, and memorable. ************** Wondering what's for Dinner Tonight? Get new twists on family favorites at AOL Food. (http://food.aol.com/dinner-tonight?NCID=aolfod00030000000001)
