So I had my first homework: write 500 words on any subject. You might think that the freedom to choose from any topic would make it easy, but no; constraints simplify choices.
Fortunately, inspiration was amongst the notes our course tutor gave us.
“I would concentrate on recalling exactly the line of the roof, the colour of the stone, which, without my being able to understand why, had seemed to me to be teeming, ready to open, to yield up to me the secret treasure of which they themselves were no more than the outer coverings” – Marcel Proust, A la recherche des temps perdu
I loved writing when I was younger, but I always had constraints to guide me. Assignments came with instructions; writing for myself meant finding something to write about and that’s where I struggled. But Proust’s words made sense. I’ll never have an entire story appear fully formed in my head waiting to be captured in prose, but there are beautiful moments I can write about. There are moments that want to be written about.
What are they, though? I’ve been job hunting recently, but that’s not really interesting to anyone but myself. Standing on the sandbar at Stingray City with rays slurping frozen squid from my hand? A lifelong memory for sure, but I don’t know if I can get 500 words from it. Something personal? The moment I learned something? How about the moment something went wrong?
And there it was. A moment of panic as I started to drown at the bottom of Stoney Cove.
500 words was far easier to write than I expected. In fact, adding words was too easy. I started with a list of key points, the things I felt were important, and extended them until each became a story of its own. When I realised I didn’t have enough room to expand a point I’d cut something else back but as I ran out of time I still hadn’t told the story I wanted to. In the end it felt I’d taken a budget of 500 words and squandered most of them on irrelevancies.
So what did I learn?
What I hadn’t thought about while editing was what was important about the piece. The thought that started it all, Proust’s secret treasure, was a moment that’ll stay with me forever; the sensation of wide-eyed panic kneeling in the mud of Stoney. As I tried to make space for each point, I lost sight of the fact that words were better spent on some things than others.
Sadly enough, I also struggled to find any better way to describe the bottom of an English lake in November any better than “cold”and “dark”, when that was the one image I wanted to get across.
The final nail in the coffin was leaving it until the last minute. By the time I submitted it, I’d already knew I hadn’t drawn the picture I wanted to. I’d edited across the piece more or less equally, giving too much space to things that didn’t matter and not enough to things that did.
On the positive side, I found it easy to restructure prose from an initial idea. I didn’t have time to make it better, but I already had ideas how to do it. And writing 500 words was easy.
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