About a year ago, I came across a fantastic podcast called “A Writer’s Life”. I would recommend it to any serious writer, especially if you have a sarcastic sense of humour and don’t mind being offended at times. This podcast is actually so good I’ve listened to several of the episodes twice, some even three times, and I’ve actually cried with laughter listening to podcast host Dan Black’s fantastic rants and ramblings.
One of the things I have to thank Dan Black for, was that he did something to rekindle my interest in the classics. I’ve struggled for a long time with overcoming the notion “old books are boring”, because for so many of them, that’s absolutely not the case. Besides, as I’ve matured and gotten a bit older, my own tastes have changed to, and I’ve grown used to styles that I found too dry when I was fourteen.
The list of classical authors I had never read, goes on for miles. Even the most famous ones I had barely touched, certainly not since reading simplified excerpts at school. Authors like Dickens, Tolstoy, Austen, the Brontë sisters, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway. A favourite of Dan Black’s was Gabriel García Márquez.
And so it was with great joy that I, a couple of months ago, discovered my parents actually owned a García Márquez novel, namely the famed “Love in the Time of Cholera” (“El amor en los tiempos del cólera”) from 1985.
Life got a bit busy after that, as life does, but now I’ve finished it, and oh my. What a wordsmith.
We’re all unique, of course, and we prefer different things. I have a distinct weakness for rich details and imagery, and striking metaphors, such as the quote in the post “wounded panther”, which uses exactly this as a most striking metaphor. It’s used nowhere else in the book, and yet it is so clear, so striking, exactly what is meant. I went around for days after reading that line, chewing on the words, tasting them.
Oh, the beauty. Oh, that I might learn to write like that. Oh, that more people would strive to write like that, employing precise and original imagery to convey their meaning – not getting caught up in cliches, nor in sugary “literary” language which is so caught up in being literary, that it becomes exhausting or even boring to read. (Will I be mauled by trolls for saying something like that? Oh, come on. We’re writers. We can we should we must do better!)
I did wonder for a while what to draw for this post. I realized that drawing a panther here would work against the very thing that I think the metaphor does so brilliantly – that that thing is something which really can’t be done with imagery. Metaphores are a treasure of writing and storytelling, communicating on a different level than lines drawn with a pencil. So I drew some blossoming almond tree branches; the almond tree being another, but much more concrete, image in the book.
PS: The last episode of “A Writer’s Life” was put up on November 11th, 2015, but nonetheless, the 34 that are up are amazing. You can find them here: http://awlshow.com/ or wherever you get your podcasts (probably).
Lys Wordsmithery 