Writing Group Recap, Feb 11-14

“I too must write, in order to snatch that vision from obliteration by time" (Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life). "Transform an Absence into Language" (Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death.)

moi, very young.

“We write about the dead to make sense of our losses, to become less haunted, to turn ghosts into words, to transform an absence into language”(Edwidge Danticat, Writing the Final Story.)

(This reminds me of the Audre Lorde quote from earlier in the week: “The transformation of silence into language.” )

Danticat says that Annie Dillard “…exhorts us to write as though every story were our last, as though we were dying…at the same time assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients.”

And this reminds me of DeBeauvoir talking about writing as “snatching that vision from the obliteration of time.” I love this so much. To snatch the story from from time! Yes, time tries to pestle the stories from our minds and obliterate the visions. To write the story is to snatch it from the violent hands of time.

Danticat talks about Tolstoy and Faulkner. Tolstoy developed a secret code of winks and blinks to be able to describe death, on hid deathbed, to whomever might be witnessing his own death.

Then she brings in Flaubert: “A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable.”

Danticat says: “This is also true for a powerful scene, or series of scenes, in a novel. A great scene should be unchangeable.”

Something to think about when editing: to get the story distilled down to the point where every sentence and scene is absolutely intrinsic to the final puzzle. If you take one piece out, it changes everything. If you take one piece out, the structure collapses like falling dominos.

Anyway, I love, love, love thinking of transforming an absence into language. In meditation we do just the opposite. We obliterate language with the breath and become pure awareness; we become the absence of thought.

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