mo·men·tum
A publisher recently declined my manuscript but provided helpful constructive feedback.
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A literary inventory, as opposed to any sort of list, is an accounting, a reckoning of possessions. And it seems to be in the nature of inventories to suggest not only what's been gained, but more properly what's about to be lost and what the prospects for further loss might be. ... Inventories give us an addition, but metaphorically and narratively they imply removal, de-acquisition, and nothingness—the subtraction effect of narrative undoing, which will imply the undoing of the character. You start with the accumulation, but you end up with an erasure.
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When does a mere listing of objects acquire pathos and unexpected grandeur? At the moment when those objects are about to disappear, when they are about to be gone. ... It takes a certain act of curating, a certain gift of focused attention, to admit to the mind’s inner chamber a cigar box with the lid made into a pin cushion. The reader has to take on an inward quietism simply to read such a passage properly. Things about to disappear do not register when we are speed-reading; they just disappear faster. Any writer takes a risk in stopping time to preserve a moment and artifacts from the past, and none of it will work without love. But after all, every novel takes place in the past. When the book is printed, the narrative, whatever it is, is over.
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If you want a story to support the weight of the characters’ feelings, it helps to keep things moving and to have a multiplicity of other characters. Stories cannot always support emotions without the force of lyric language, but the problem of too much lyric language in a narrative is that, without contrast, it clots the atmosphere. In a narrative, dramatic actions and the everyday objects in the setting will support and cause emotions. Let the objects and the actions carry the feeling. If you want to make a child’s sorrow dramatic, don’t spend time laboriously describing his feelings about his grandmother. Just have someone run over his bicycle.
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The point of the image is not just image itself but its effect on our sense of time. Such lyric images can rarely support an entire story, because their very frozenness prevents them from yielding logically to a subsequent scene, and narrative is what happens in time, through time. … Stories and novels require connecting tissue, dialogue, and dramatic action that has consequences in other actions, not merely other images.
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Anyone can write an image caught by chance, in silence, with nondirective action: such eloquent imagery is not hard to write. What’s hard is not forcing a meaning down its throat. If you let out your inner high school English teacher and force a meaning on your imagery, making the meaning explicit, the reader will read it, get it, and rush onward. But if there’s something widowed about the imagery, something that escapes meaning, the imagery will then stick to the reader, and begin to haunt.
