From the Writer's Confessional

I have a confession to make.

As a fiction writer, I struggle to create detailed characters and settings -- at least in a physical sense. Sometimes I forget that the reader can't see what's in my head as I write -- what the girls seated around the cafeteria table are wearing or what posters are hanging on the wall of the main character's bedroom. And sometimes, I can't see the finer details clearly enough to write them in. Or, if I can, I can't translate those images into words that give the figures who haunt the shadows of my mind life on the page. Yet.

Maybe this is because of something in my creative DNA. Choreographer Twyla Tharp calls it "focal length." In her book The Creative Habit (a staple on my writing reference and inspiration shelf), she proposes that "All of us find comfort in seeing the world either from a great distance, at arm's length, or in close-up." According to her classification system, I am a great-distance person. Or at best, on good days, an arm's-length person.

What does this mean to my writing? It means that the close-up, make-you-feel-like-you're-right-there sensory details don't come easily, or naturally, to me. This is something my critique group finds incredibly (or at least somewhat) annoying, even though they don't put it that way exactly. But they do beg and plead -- persistently -- for more visual and tactile and gustatory and olfactory (love that word) cues so they aren't left guessing.

It means, that at least in early drafts, my characters are doomed to float around in a vast, empty, undefined space. They are stranded in the middle of a big white room or left standing aimlessly in front of a blank green screen. After all, it's hard to tell what kind of sneakers a character is wearing or how she eats an Oreo when you're seeing the fictional world she lives in as a pea-sized blue-green orb floating in a vast universe.

It means silencing my inner critic long enough to get a first draft on paper, knowing that I'll have to work at adding arm's-length and close-up sensory details to future drafts in order to bring the story's fictional world into clear enough focus for my readers to inhabit. Not sure yet if that will happen in draft 2 or draft 92 (Jack Gantos swears he writes everything 100 times), just that it will.

Seems that the great-distance perspective creeps into my real life too, like the way I view the community of professional, published authors. I know it exists, have orbited it for a number of years now, and have even been lucky (or proactive) enough to visit it and get within arm's- (or even pen's-) length at writing conferences and book-signings. But for now it remains an elusive, shadowy world built on shifting sands of creativity, hard work, and inspiration.

For now, I content myself by keeping that distant marbled orb in my sights, knowing that my writing journey is bringing me closer every day. And that one day, I fully intend to inhabit that world just the way my characters will inhabit theirs.