Gaining perspective
Owing to being horrifyingly millenial I find there is a quote from Friends for every occasion. Not a useful quote, of course, it’s more that in most situations there’s a line from Friends trapped in my brain that is thematically relevant. I’m seeing that my parents might have had a point when they questioned whether my sister and I really needed to put that video on again.
In this instance I wrote the word Perspective and thought of Rachel, patting Ross on the face, and saying ‘If time was all you needed to gain a little perspective’ (he has, we know, gained no perspective at all. He didn’t read her ‘let-ter’).
As well as outing me as someone who grew up at the exact right time to have every episode of Friends etched onto the underside of my skull, I’m telling you this because this email is about perspective and that quote, though unrelated, is basically the crux of all of it.
There comes a point in every project where you are, ostensiably, done. At least for now. I’m there, or very nearly there. I’ve been writing on and off for a few months and maybe the story is finished (with caveats) and now I need to look at it in a completely different way.
Around the time that I was eating episodes of Friends for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I was also drawing a lot. I’d draw and draw and, as I was in the throes of glorious, flexible youth, I would fold myself into knots on the floor getting closer to my page. Do you remember that? When the hope was that you could get so close to your work that you might fall into it or, at the very least, you might managed to draw the minutely detailed image you were holding in your head; that the hand might, finally, be capable of replicating your imagination.
I think writing is a bit like that. You get closer and closer till your face is right in it. At this point I can identify a paragraph in my story by the first two words; ‘ah we’re at the komodo dragon section’ I’ll think, in response to the words ‘She sat-’. (there is no komodo dragon in my story, this is a fun little misdirect!). I’m stuck in the swamp of my own writing and I can no longer view it from a reasonable angle. Which is annoying because most reader are, you hope, trying to come at books from a reasonable angle.