Filling In The Map

First, an apology. What you are about to read is not a story, an article, an argument, a diatribe, a speech, or even a joke. What you are about to read is a rumination, and if ever there was a concept that should be required to appear hat-in-hand and suitably ashamed of itself for existing, it is the concept of a rumination. Furthermore, this is a rumination on writers, which I admit suggests a certain amount of self-absorbtion and pretentiousness on the part of the author. So, I apologize, and even if that doesn't make this any easier for you to read, at least I feel better.

So, on to our subject: what is a writer? There's already plenty of literature on this topic (a fact that is in itself an argument for the belief that consciousness exists primarily to admire itself). Most writers agree that what they do is difficult. Of course, they would; ask a fry cook about his job and within twenty minutes you'll believe he comes into work every day and puts more blood, sweat and tears into his Big Macs than Michaelangelo put into David. But what I'd like to put forward, humbly and without any attempt at self-aggrandizement,  is the central reason why the writers, at least, are right.

Writing, in its most raw and primal sense, is an attempt to communicate through language. Think about that for a minute, and recognize what kind of quagmire language is when used as an artistic medium. Every other art form uses one of our five senses: painters use sight, musicians use sound, chefs use taste and smell, and there's even an argument to be made (which I will not make here) concerning a certain world's oldest profession using touch as an artistic medium. Language appeals to none of these, but refers to all of them. It is, basically, a paint made up of common experience, imagination, and dumb luck. Paint a picture in words, show it to five people, and you have five different word paintings.

Asian cultures have less difficulty here. Their languages have, for the most part, remained unchanged for thousands of years, pure and homogenous, maturing like fine wine. Asian languages are like deep wells, with a fraction of the amount of words we're used to, but with an astronomical amount of meaning and poignancy built into each one. By comparison, Western languages, which are mercantile, intensely idiomatic, and constantly stealing from each other, are like shallow pools, containing staggering amounts of words and such a sad lack of depth you wouldn't even have enough room to doggie paddle.

So, keeping all of this in mind, what is a writer? My idea is that the closest practical analogy to a writer is a cartographer. And I do mean a cartographer; the best classical writers were explorers AND cartographers, but much like in cartography, there isn't a lot of land left to explore these days; as a whole lot of famous people have said, "There are no new ideas, only new ways to express them." That being said, a map doesn't only have outside edges; it has inside edges too, places between point A and point B, places thousands of miles wide shaded in darkly and labled "Forest" or "Ocean," and it's the cartographer's job to fill them in. This is exactly the writer's task. For example, let's say we have our point A and our point B. Point A is love; point B is resentment. There is no word for halfway between the two; that part of the map is a big, black nothing. The writer can't just look up the word for "halfway between love and resentment," and simply writing it down like that is graceless, and the reader comes away feeling nothing. The writer has to penetrate into that lack of language and find a way to fill it in, to make the reader really feel what's in there. He has to come back from the space between two words, two ideas, and fill in the map for the reader, and a lot of the time the idea isn't even as simple as "between A and B;" sometimes it's a place between A, B, C, D and F, et cetera ad infinitum.

That shit is hard. It's the difference between telling and Showing, with a capital S. It's what separates good writers from bad. It can take an entire book, for a novelist. It can take an entire series of books. Poets have torn out their hair trying to cram the place between A and B onto a page of poetry. Take Harry Potter (I know it's not exactly Tolstoy, but it's a good, salient example). Through seven fairly lengthy novels, it is driven home to us through frequent off-handed remarks that Harry has his mother's eyes. In book seven, the final installment, we learn that Professor Snape has harbored an unrequited love for Harry's dead mother almost his entire life, which is the motivation for his persecution of Harry and at the same time, his protection of him as the last living remnant of the woman he loved. Snape's dying words, spoken to Harry, are simply, "Look at me." Now, the author could have had Snape say, "I want to see your mother's eyes as I die," which would be the equivalent of shading in that place between ideas and calling it the forest. Instead, the author draws a road through that forest, forcing the reader to travel down it, to think, "Why did he say that?" and then to remember whose eyes Harry would be looking at Snape with. The emotional impact is the difference between being shot with a BB and being shot with a cannonball.

Our ability to do this with language is what gives writing its timeless appeal. A painting will make us feel something, but often only if our personal stars are aligned correctly, and often without conscious intention on the part of the artist. This isn't to say that writing is a more valid form of expression, only that writing has a versatility shared by no other art form. It is more challenging, because a writer may reasonably attempt to express any combination of ideas or emotions, to show their reader the way through that forest, and in the end, though all trails are difficult, they are all there, in any direction the cartographer chooses, waiting to be blazed.

The other difficult thing about writing is coming up with a good ending.

The End