10:30pm October 6, 2010

That thick, sensory writing style I wish I had more of.

I am realizing much of this writing makes things sound rather empty. A usual failing of language. I will try again.

Have you ever read an author with an intensely descriptive prose style? The kind I want to call ‘thick’, and full of overlapping sensory imagery and analogies? The kind that seems to drive some people up the wall while others get completely absorbed in it?

Well, I can’t generally write like that, which is why I’m describing the writing rather than writing that way. But if you cut out all the words and left only the thick layered sensory display the words point at…

…that’s what I’m experiencing all this time when my descriptions of what is happening are along the lines of “can’t make words happen” or “spent all day doing nothing”. It’s one element of how things have been as long as I can remember.

Where “I” am located in all of this can be anywhere or nowhere. But this is how things are. Although ‘thick’, things are not generally murky. There’s an extreme cleanness and clarity at the same time as the thickness/richness. It’s too bad I lack the writing skill to make even things as flimsy as words evoke such depth, or I would be able to express my experiences much better in writing. (This is one reason why I feel like my writing can be unintentionally deceptive.) As it is, the main way I can express such things is in the background colors in most of my paintings.

The basis for comparison that allows me to describe this at all, is the thin flimsy hollow flatness that happens when my mind gets sucked into the world of words and ideas. Useful place in some respects but I wouldn’t want to live there.

When you see me struggling for words, on the other hand, just remember that all that blank space in my writing is filled with that stuff I’m not a good enough writer to properly evoke. It can be frustrating to spend hours immersed in such things and only be able to write either nonsense or one flat little sentence about lacking words, or ability fluctuations, or having a blank mind, or (most often) nothing at all. The blankness is one of ideas, not of experiences. The way all this works is a choice my brain seems to have made without my knowledge or consent, but I have learned to trust the wisdom of my brain’s choices in areas like this. My immersion in these experiences may cause serious problems doing certain things, but it makes the common problems of feeling empty or lonely virtually impossible.