Deborah's Journal

Here I am, practicing one of Chopin's Preludes, with Mr. Darcy -- 10 weeks old -- learning to love great music. Sometimes he flops over my right foot and we have a Discussion. Or he tries to chew on the pedal. Once or twice, he's tried to "sing," a sort of subdued howling. Mostly he plasters himself up against the piano. Lovely to have such an undemanding audience!

More very cool insights on writing from Kay Kenyon:

Think of it as a dance. In the dance of fiction, the author has the lead, but that doesn’t mean we control everything. Readers have their own moves, their own innate kinesthetics that will interplay with those of their partner. You. In fiction, the writer’s tools actually include the imagination and experience of the reader. Because readers inevitably bring these factors into play, writers enter into a partnership with them and use implication to excite the reader’s imagination. Even in the most commercial of stories, this partnership is always in play.

I love the image of a dance, partly because I love to dance and partly because, as davetrow says, "A dance has no opposite." By this, I understand that (once a level of competence has been achieved), each piece of writing offers its own joys and not every story is to everyone's taste. Romance writers like waltzes, not swing or Bulgarian line dances or ballet. They like Strauss waltzes and Brahms waltzes and if there were such a thing as jazz waltzes, they'd like them, too. If, like my lovely husband, dancing in 3/4 time makes you positively ill, then Romance is clearly not your cup of tea.

Then, of course, there are works so amazing and perfect and transcendent that they ascend to a different category of "Is Scott Joplin better than Josquin des Pres? Is Verdi better than Ralph Vaughn Williams?" (I'm cribbing from Teaching Company course by Robert Greenberg: "Is anybody better than Mozart?")

The interesting thing about us as readers is that although just about all of us agree such works exist, we don't agree on which ones they are. To me, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Part of the adventure is find out which ones leave us breathless. Like watching Baryshnikov (well, for me, anyway) or a world-class Argentinian tango duo.

Getting inside the reader’s head | Writing the World, the Official Website of Kay Kenyon