(no subject)
"How good it is to play this quintet, to play it, not to work at it -- to play for our own joy, with no need to convey anything to anyone outside our ring of re-creation, with no expectation of a future stage, of the too-immediate sop of applause. The quintet exists without us yet cannot exist without us. It sings to us, we sing into it, and somehow, through these little black and white insects clustering along five thin lines, the man who deafly transfigured what he so many years earlier had hearingly composed speaks into us across land and water and ten generations, and fills us here with sadness, here with amazed delight.
For me there is another presence in this music. As the sense of her might fall on my retina through two sheets of moving glass, so too through this maze of motes converted by our arms into vibration -- sensory, sensuous -- do I sense her being again. The labyrinth of my ear shocks the coils of my memory. Here is her force in my arm, here is her spirit in my pulse. But where she is I do not know, nor is there hope I will." An Equal Music, Vikram Seth.
Wow. Just wow.
To me, there is a particular incomparable beauty in novels when the writing is lyrical, when it flows and dips and suits the story perfectly, when it makes you gasp with delight, sigh with envy, at the pure skill displayed by the author. I can only hope to be able to write as well as Vikram Seth when I am older, because I always seek to embody that sense of lyricism. I want people to be swept up by my writing; I want them to gasp with delight at a clever turn of phrase, I want them to feel a physical ache in their chest when they read a particular poignant line that perhaps speaks to their own sense of sorrow. I don't seek to be a mere "workman" of prose; I want to make it into something beautiful.
The authors I've been reading recently -- C. S. Lewis, Erin Morgenstern, Vikram Seth -- have such a way with words. It takes my breath away. Their stories are all so different, their lives diverge in innumerable ways, and yet, there is much of that same skill. I find myself stopping, rereading passages, just to focus on the beauty of their words.
I'm well aware that my writing has a long way to go. I tend to be rather cliched in my terminology and phrasing. I'm not quite as good as description as I would like. Perhaps I would say that I am better at writing than most people my age, but I know that there is so much room for improvement. Reading more frequently has shown me that; it's given me something to aspire to. My writing is not quite workmanlike, not quite poetic. It's somewhere in the middle. I enjoy my writing style, but it's yet to mature. I know where I need to change, where I need to tighten things up. And by reading, I see how other authors achieve the effect I want in my own writing, and it's teaching me so much.
That passage I quoted is too lovely for words, don't you think? The subtle turns of phrases ("deafly," "hearingly"). The metaphor ("these little black and white insects clustering along five thin lines"). The delightful expression of sadness and joy in turn. The craftsmanship in the sentences: "The labyrinth in my ear shocks the coils of my memory." Those two paragraphs are only a hint of the writing that's pervaded this novel through the last eighty pages. It's not so much the plot that keeps my attention, but it's the descriptions -- of his life, of the joys of music, of the sorrows of love lost and so longed for after so many years. Beautiful. The rest of the novel is sure to contain some more lovely writing as well. I just want to soak in it because Vikram Seth does make me feel every word. If only I could have that sort of skill. It's my ultimate goal as a writer.