About When You See It

Post 1882:

Good writing comes from the same place as bad writing, or at least it should. A desire to deliver engaging characters and stories and feelings to a person you’ve never met—something like that.

How to do it? That’s the tricky part. I think it’s talent, but more than anything, trial and error. Time. Sitting with your own work. Thinking about your own work. Studying, enjoying, and hating other writers’ work.

Metaphors and similes and comparisons trip a lot of writers up. They can be helpful or destructive, cutting or clunky. I’m reminded of this as I read Doctor Zhivago. Turns out it’s a book as well.

Here’s a little passage that struck me. Keep in mind, it’s a novel full of such examples:

Rodya and Lara were used to hearing that they were on the verge of ruin. They understood that they were not street children, but in them was a deep-seated timidity before the rich, as in children living from an orphanage.

Okay, simple enough. But not. These kids live scared and full of fear, worrying about a future of hungry bellies and sleeping out in the cold. They aren’t in this position, but that is what haunts them. The author wants us to know how separate they feel from rich people, so he uses children from an orphanage as an example to make his point.

Whether it’s fair or not, we all have an immediate image of orphanage children in our minds the second we see this on the page. With a few extra words, the author has helped us to fully relate to Rodya and Lara’s “deep-seated timidity.”

This is super non-hack writing. Efficient, helpful, and effective. Good thing, too. This being a Russian novel, we need space for the other ten billion words in the story. Break out the vodka and the sad mandolins and get to work. Cheers and see you after.