Heck, I'm still looking for that personal work that moves me every
time I see it.
Being moved when done , is more that one can desire, Nothing else
matters.
In your position, Cheerskep ,you work to please others as I did in
toy biz.
That was much harder to do and so.... enjoyable when it was a success.
mando
On Mar 2, 2010, at 4:00 PM, [email protected] wrote:
In a message dated 3/1/10 6:04:57 PM, [email protected]
writes:
1. Do you experience a difference in the a.e.'s you get when you
observe
another person's work than when you make your own work?
2. Do you experience a difference between the a.e. you feel when
you make
your
work and later when you see or hear the same work?
My answer is a rather bleak but firm "yes" to both questions.
1. It's notorious that editors and writers with very reliable
sensibilities when judging the work of others can't see their own
work clearly. I
used to talk about "editors' novels": usually "well made", but with
all the
resonance of balsa wood. A stipulative definition of "reliable
sensibility":
the ability to anticipate the reactions of a script's ideal
intended readers.
As an editor/publisher I could do that with a high batting average,
but as a
writer judging my own effects, I'm not dependable at all. (For some
reason
I do tend to be right when I think I've been funny (i.e. the
audience does
indeed laugh), but on much "bigger" factors my judgment is a crap
shoot.)
2. I revise repeatedly, and after every revision I cry, "Ah -
at last I
got it right." On my hard drive there are forty or fifty revisions of
almost every play.
There are many remarks about why this should be so. Here's one.
When we
write, we are liable to be thrilling to a scene running in a vivid
mental movie
through our heads - without realizing that the only things our
readers are
seeing is the words we put on paper. When WE read those words, they
evoke
for us much of that vivid associated notion - but those
associations have been
forged only in OUR heads - not in our readers'.
Dylan Thomas wrote some poems I love - but Fern Hill is not among
them, and
the reason is that in Fern Hill he repeatedly uses words that in his
childhood were obviously associated with a treasury of sights and
sounds that
arose anew in his mind when he used those words again. They have no
such
associations for me.
That error - the writer's entertaining in his own mind notion that
isn't
evoked by his written words - has broader manifestations. We're
often
astonished to observe a writer failing to realize a given
development in his story
is unbelievable. This sometimes happens because the writer has
supplied to
his own mind explanatory data that it hasn't occurred to him needs
to be
conveyed to his audience.
As an editor when I asked a writer to explain some turn of events,
he has
said, "Oh, that's because -" and I've had to advise him: "Don't
tell ME -
tell the READER." The writer is "so close to" his material he often
fails to
see the necessity for certain preparations, set-ups.
Sometimes the writer's failing is in assuming his audience shares
his avid
interest in a topic. Imagine my enthusiastically creating a scene
in which
two scholars wrangle for eight minutes about an abstruse puzzle in
ontology,
and thinking this must be great theater because look how excited I am.
Almost everyone writing on this forum must have, upon seeng one of
their
lines reasonably misinterpreted, murmured to himself, "That's not
what I meant
at all." You'd spot a similar ambiguity in another, but not in your
own
locutions.
Perhaps you as a visual artist recognize hints of this sort of
thing in
your own experience. (But you're not stuck painting with words -
"symbols" that
you count on to evoke the visual thing you have in mind. You can
paint that
visual thing directly.)
How about you: Have you ever "finished" a painting and loved it,
only to
look at it again months later and wonder how you were ever
satisfied with
that?
