Writing as image making
While browsing Meg Miller's Are.na page, I was immediately drawn in by the title of her top channel: Shimmer Around the Edges: Writing as Image-making
From the channel introduction, it seems Miller also noticed this pattern in writers talking about how ideas shimmer at the edges of consciousness.
She mentions, coincidentally—sometimes these things happen, right?—Joan Didion’s essay, Why I Write, which I bought her book last week and haven’t read yet.
She quotes Didion saying:
When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges.
Look hard enough, and you cannot miss the shimmer. It is there. You cannot think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop.
I have read a similar statement from Virginia Woolf in One can't write directly about the soul.
Or how Nabokov would capture delicate words like butterflies.
Miller also quotes Philip Pullman from The Golden Compass, writing about ideas that hover and shimmer like a soap bubble.
A little hard to grasp for me is how Miller thinks about these hard-to-grasp ideas as images. She continues:
There are many more examples of writers whose ideas come as images, or whose writing comes out as simple and lucid as a photo; the descriptive practice of ekphrasis poetry stretches back to the ancient Greeks. And anyone, whether they consider themselves a writer or not, has a bank of memories that live as images in the mind and float to the surface in quieter moments.
It is more clear on Didion's text, how these images help her writing:
Just as I meant “shimmer” literally I mean “grammar” literally. [...] To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. 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.
