Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Under my Nose

Under my Nose

On my work desk is a small print of a painting by Sir Frederick Leighton called Andromache in Captivity. In this painting are about twenty-five people gathered about a fountain in period Greek attire and in the middle of the composition is Andromache. She is in a dark blue robe looking down at the ground, “Pensively.”

Yesterday, Linda said, “You know, I have seen prints of Andromache, from this painting, in our years of wandering around antique shops. I looked closely and the light came on… “Of Course!” I answered, “So have I, now that you mention it….so have I.”

You might not be aware that I wrote a Greek Style Stage Play called Andromache and have always been fascinated by the character. I pride myself in being a “Connectional Thinker,“ and to have Linda point this out to me was a bit humbling. The truth of something important in my life did not connect and it took her to point it out to me.

We do this all the time as writers and the truth of it has never been so evident as in reviewing the Outlines that came in at the end of the EWW course. I have a premise that when an author gets an idea they immediately build a fence around it and anything not inside that fence gets excluded from the story.

I lamented all through the course that many of my students were test driving something they had written earlier and it was almost locked in stone and when I suggested changes they became exceedingly frustrated. There was only one student that I am fairly sure began the EWW with only a vague idea of where his story was going and in the end his fell together with an amazing clarity. This is not to say that the other students didn’t produce good outlines but they struggled to break out of the box and while some made inroads (Poked holes in the box) the box never truly went away.

Now I think they learned a lot from the experience and when they write their next novel they will used the EWW process to the fullest of its potential. They won’t get locked in early on and will let the exploratory vignettes lead them in amazing and unexpected directions instead of using the process to try and validate something they had already become firmed up in their minds.

Once those constraint equations are written, that box the story window, making the connection with matters outside the box are all but impossible. A writer simply must do the developmental work and that includes more that some research and write an outline more for the sake of form than utility. The outline allows the writer to hang ideas there-upon and frees up memory space for taking important long walks in the forest of possibilities.

I think research is as much a key for turning up these ideas as it is for getting the facts straight. If your mind is so crammed full of story line balls, suspended in the air, there isn’t much left to make the connections, like the one I failed to make with Andromache, when the evidence was literality two feet beyond the end of my nose.