fwriction

Sam Cooney, writing for The Rumpus, gave me something brilliant to enjoy this morning. You should, too:

“Imagine this: you swim out amongst a group of boats fastened to their moorings. These boats are ordinary. They exist, lolling heavy in the water, anchored to the sandy floor. Each one is of a particular size and shape; some are new and some old. None are distinctive or exceptional. The tide moves them, waves cause them to sway – these boats are corpulent for their burden, almost pathetically. So you decide to free them, to rid them of their weight. You swim up to each and cut the ropes, you throw everything overboard and you untie all their anchors. You jettison all that is cumbersome. And what then? Well, the boats begin to float. But not like you thought they would. They don’t float across the water, but instead, they float upwards into the sky. Each yacht and speedboat and dinghy lifts off the water so that before long, the air is filled with the undersides of a thousand hulls.  By freeing the boats of all their weight, they have become extraordinary.

Of course not every writer wants to be magical, but any writer who desires relevance should be able to show their readers that they have access to the magical. Writing laden with minutiae ages quickly and is easily forgotten. This is not to say that detail is the enemy, but heavy, fixed detail is. The famous Chekhov quote declares that you cannot mention a shotgun hanging on a parlour wall unless you intend to fire it before the story’s end. That shotgun could alternatively be an axe, or a length of rope, a tomato or a grandmother. The strength is not in the object itself, but in what it embodies.”