As I’ve met more and more students who have trouble allowing themselves to write, I’ve also noticed certain problems in the writing they produce. For a long time I didn’t connect the feeling about writing to the problems in the writing. Then I began to wonder. Time and again, I came upon problems that at first seemed minor, technical, peculiar to one person, or easily fixed; but they proved hard to fix-as if they arose out of something deep within the writer. And when they were solved, a weak writer sometimes surprised me by becoming remarkably good.
Here is what I noticed: first, stories that were somehow untold, in which nothing much happened, that were as brief as could be, and that arrived, finally, only at a feeling-a character’s feeling when something was over. And I don’t mean stories like the best short short stories in which some brief action is described so powerfully that the work is stronger than its longer counterpart. I mean stories with their hearts left out, so when I asked a student, “How did these people know each other in the first place? What really took place on that day they disagree about?” five page stories about somebody’s mood suddenly turned into twenty-page stories about a series of events-apparently events the author had had in mind all along.
I came upon stories that were not told, and also stories that seemed to be told reluctantly: narrated so mysteriously, with so few stated facts, that I didn’t know what was going on.
— “Silence & Storytelling” by Alice Mattison
in The Writer’s Chronicle, February 2009
Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.
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