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| Representation |
| No amount of planning can make the reader hear the music in your mind, or see the abstract design you perceive as you look out over a cranberry bog coming to fruition in late September. Writing can convey only certain things well, and others not at all. Therefore, you want a writing process based on realistic expectations. Your essay on banning cigarettes in public places, or your memo on how to maximize profits while still maintaining goodwill, almost never convinces readers directly or gives them a sense you have the final answer. Writing a scene between a husband and wife, even if based on an amalgam of your own experiences and those of your friends and relatives, will not match the actual time, space, or feelings of such moments. Writers can evoke similar responses, but such attempts involve risk and experimentation, because words on a page create a particular kind of experience in the reader's mind. Writers depend on representations, distillations of experience, thought, and imagination. These representations have the capacity to enact, in the theater of the reader's mind, passionate thoughts, feelings, and images. Conscious, careful selection, whether the representation is a word, symbol, or underlying metaphor, is crucial to both power and clarity in prose. Representation is an act of economy in writing. I am not talking here about being brief, or "boiling it down." That is a different kind of economy, and one that is often dangerous. I had a writing client in government whose instructions were to reduce everything to one page, no matter what the subject or how much work had gone into the report. Almost half of the allotted page concerned who the writer was and where he could be found in the Pentagon. Distilling ideas or feelings into the symbols that are words on a page is not a matter of falsely or foolishly simplifying meaning. This skillful selection of the best words, evidence, examples, and structure out of an infinite number of possibilities, and of building a bridge to readers, forms the basic act of good writing. As a writer, you will always have too much material, most of which you will have to leave out. What you want is to suggest, to prompt the reader's mind. You are always sorting, scanning with incredible speed the different whorls of thought and feeling and instinct in order to pick out the best for your neat, linear rows of words on the page, or the bright letters on the screen. Writing well, under pressure, pushes this process to an even higher intensity. Writers constantly look for ways, in both structure and content, to signal, to indicate, to say more of what they have to say than they can actually get down on the page. If your task is to write one page, you need to fill it with the knowledge of a hundred pages. If your job is to read twenty books and thirty articles and come up with a twelve-page paper in a week, you must select with the greatest concentration, leaving crucial evidence behind, striving always to find the most representative, the most characteristic examples of your argument: not only the facts, experiences, and opinions, but the words themselves. Many people cannot come to terms with this need to select. Some do not write at all or fail to finish their writing on time, because they are so keenly aware that they can never tell the whole story. When writing under pressure, it is as important to understand this need to select, to represent, as it is to analyze the writer's relationship to readers, to anticipate the readers' questions, and to resolve the writer's questions. But as with all of these preparatory questions, a writer's appreciation of representation must be tucked away finally, to let the process of writing begin. |
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