Letter to Writer, Emerging(Part 2 of 3)
Once you’ve mastered Baseline Writing and Advanced Baseline Writing (see Part 1), you’ll be ready to tackle the next two levels, Cinematic Writing and Transformation Writing.
III. Cinematic Writing
Cinematic Writing is just that. What you’re writing is a movie, and you’re the camera.
Many of us are visual learners. We process information visually. This is why movies, television shows and You Tube videos are so addictive.
Make me feel like I’m right there with you, be that Costa Rica, or Costa Mesa, or more prosaicly, the cereal aisle at Costco.
Now, imagine if movies appealed to all five senses.
Include all the senses: not just sight and sounds, but smell, taste and touch.
Use word pictures, metaphor and simile.
Here’s what the poet Ezra Pound did, in his very evocative impression of a Paris subway, in his two-line poem “In a Station of the Metro”:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
In just 14 words, Pound distills our entire humanity to a haunting, indelible impression. He’s also playing with language here, notice the consonance of the letter “t” in “petals” and “wet” and the alliteration of the letter “b” in “black bough,” AND the half-rhyme of “crowd” and “bough” This is cinematic writing at its apex.
The cinematic writer says to us, “I’m going down to the bus station at rush hour. I sense that there’s something epic occuring there, even though it’s a fairly mundane setting (public transportation), even though you might think there’s little to be captured.”
A writer knows instinctively what most do not. A writer knows where to look and how to capture what they experience concisely and elegantly.
Look at the work of the fiction writer Raymond Carver. He’s not a poet like Ezra Pound, but he lyrically distilled the people and the small towns of the Pacific Northwest in a way no one had ever done. Read “Cathedral.” Read “Vitamins.” Read “They’re Not Your Husband.” Watch Robert Altman’s 1993 film Short Cuts, based on a several Carver short stories.
IV. Transformation Writing
Transformation Writing is deeply intentional, moving beyond Baseline and Cinematic writing.
Transformation Writing means driving out of town, to what seems like the middle of nowhere, then driving another 19 miles up a curving, treacherous road to a spot where the asphalt-maintained pavement leaves off, and only gravel or packed dirt remains beneath your car. And when the road ends, you park your car and walk along a footpath, or maybe there’s no footpath at all, and you have to carve your own way into the wilderness.
Show us something new, in a way we have never seen it before. How did it change you? How can it change us?
Transformation writing is about capturing impact, importance and significance, when the merely personal becomes deeply personal, and out of that, the personal becomes universal. W
What you feel on the surface means something to you. What you feel deeply, resonates with everyone.
Let’s go back to the pony rides of my Santa Barbara childhood. I can tell you about Don’s pony rides as a memory through entry-level Baseline Writing. I can tell you the exact location of pony rides by telling you the street name, the names of the ponies, or how much the pony ride cost (a quarter for three laps around a ring).
This is a surface-level of nostalgia, and the “I Grew Up in Santa Barbara” Facebook page is filled with posts just like it.
In Cinematic Writing I can actually place you on a pony and let you know what it felt like to ride that pony in the afternoon ocean breeze, with the smells from a nearby char-grilled hamburger spot. I can write about the feel of the leather reins in your hand, and the lumpy saddle beneath you, and the taste of the dust stirred up by the other ponies ahead you.
Through Transformation Writing, I’m going to bring you into my emotional world.
The pony ride was my first human interaction with larger animals, and my first experience of being physically out of control and scared for my safety. I can talk about exhilaration and fear living in the same moment.
Even prior to the ride, there was the bargaining (and begging) with my parents to take me to the pony rides, and then the letdown and disappointment when it didn’t happen. From that, I can give you a quick portrait of my Dad (who would reply to my request to ride ponies, “Let’s Not and Say We Did”), speculation about the state of my parent’s marriage, or whether a quarter was even available (at one point, early on, it wasn’t), or I can take you back to my parents remembering a time when they were children during the Depression, when a pony ride was a luxury, on par with a plane ticket today.
Look how much ground I can cover, just thinking about Don’s pony rides in Santa Barbara. I also think Wallace Stegner references the pony rides in his short story “The Women on the Wall.” (1950).
Read anything by Frank McCourt, or Richard Russo’s memoir Elsewhere, and you will know exactly what I mean by Transformation Writing.
In Transformation Writing, the writer speaks to elements of impact and the development of the person who became the writer. It’s highly personal, but in a strange alchemy, the personal becomes universal. Everyone can relate.
This essay originally appeared in Letter to a Writer, Emerging (2022)
