75: Writing From the Heart
2/11/2014
Well, I did it. Chapter Eight: Dissolutions is finally done. All 83 pages worth. The last scene was much easier and better than the one before it, just as I thought it would be. Only three pages but written ten times better. It seems that I do best when there aren’t a lot of preconceived elements to orchestrate, and when I can go slow and play with the mood/tone and the language. I really like how this ended. The details and the wording worked out much better than I’d planned. The knife was a last-minute idea – the notion that this story could have gone in a darker direction with murder. But that’s not the story I mean to tell. Not yet anyway. We will meet Kinjul again in Part Four where his fate unravels, but not now.
Present-Day Reflection
8/8/2026
I envy literary writers who can get away with writing purely from the heart, seemingly winging it without the burdens of plot or storytelling. Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient comes to mind. Not because it has no plot or because it doesn’t tell a story, because it most definitely does. All the novels I love do. It’s more because I can never really recall what the plot or story is, except vaguely, even though I keep reading the book over and over again. I read it over and over again because of Ondaatje’s use of language. It’s probably the most beautifully written book I’ve ever read.
She unskins the plum with her teeth, withdraws the stone and passes the flesh of the fruit into his mouth.
He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died.
The story and plot are pointless to me though. It’s the poetry and sensory evocation of time and place. Quiet intimacies, and subtle nuances of awareness for how things are when someone is truly paying attention to life. Ian McEwan is another one, who described it in Atonement as that vital knowingness about the ways of the world which compels a reader’s respect.
…a squirrel’s skull as light as a leaf – shows a nicety of awareness. As does the follow up – But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets… Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know.
McEwan isn’t the poet that Ondaatje is, but for me he is by far the better writer because he’s the perfect blend of diction and story. McEwan’s plots and stories are very memorable because they’re not there just to show off his pros, his pros is there in the service of the story. And for me, story has to come first.
Frank Herbert’s Dune and Richard Adams’ Watership Down are books I try to emulate because of the blend of diction and story. And though their use of language never rises to the level of McEwan’s, I like their stories better than his. For me, the perfect book would blend the imagination and world building of Herbert and Adams with Ondaatje’s poetry and McEwan’s vital knowingness about the ways of the world that compels respect.
This is my goal in writing the Batu Saga, even though it’s an ideal I know I’ll never achieve. I brush up against it every now and then in the scenes like I just mentioned in the entry from 2/11/2014, and once in The Wounded, as well as a few other places. But I’m afraid my writing from the heart has, more times than not, taken a back seat to plot and storytelling. And the Ondaatje-type poetry is virtually non-existent.
