I wish Arts & Letters Daily didn't link to articles that hurt my head.
Play It As It Lays, she [Joan Didion] explains, began “with no notion of ‘character’ or ‘plot’ or even ‘incident,’” but with pictures. One was of a woman in a short white dress walking through a casino to make a phone call; this woman became Maria. The Bevatron (a particle accelerator at Berkeley Lab) was one of the pictures in her mind when she began writing A Book of Common Prayer. Fiction, for Didion, was the task of finding “the grammar in the picture,” ...
Of course I read that and immediately linked it to Mary Gaitskill (June 21 here):
...give words to what is wordless and form to what is formless through creating pictures and images that...make a connection to the deeper body of the story — the viscera or unconscious.
Didion continues:
...the corresponding language: “The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement.”
Gaitskill:
...the plot or the theme functions almost like a conduit; an ineffable content which can be compared to a person’s unconscious or the guts of the body; you don’t see the unconscious but you feel it, you may misunderstand it but you feel it.
No, that's not the same thing. Gaitskill's talking about the intensely, intimately, internal, your guts, Didion is talking about an external referent, pictures.
That's enough. I'm not getting lost in another essay on writing at 10 p.m. on a Friday night. GOOD NIGHT!
