Wednesday 18 February 2009

Not a Writer

I can't do descriptions, and so, sadly, can't be a writer. A real writer I mean, or someone who can really write. For instance, I look outside. "The roof was wet with rain." That's all right, but anyone could write that. That's not really writing. "The roof was wet with rain like ..." like what? I have no idea. It must have been wet like something else, some lovely little selection of words poetically grouped together, but I have no idea what they are. That's not the way I think. When I see a wet roof, a ditch, a muddy river estuary, I never find myself thinking they look like something else, or feeling the faintest desire to trasmute the sight into the strange medium of words, never mind being able to effect the actual describing itself. No such literary stirrings stir me. I just look. I suppose you could say the one thing I don't see when I look at a field or some other slice of the external world is words. They don't enter my field of vision. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I see words everywhere.

Andrew said...

You must be looking in the right places.