I'm going to ask you to listen to this version of 'Sailing to Philadelphia' by Mark Knopfler and James Taylor. It won't hurt, take your time and come back.

Okay, you heard this lovely song. You probably have a tear in your eye, and you may not even know why. Stop and think about it: this song is about a survey line. What in the world?

This baker's boy from the west country

Would join the Royal Society. . .

It's all about the music. And the choice of words: 'It seems that I was born/to chart the evening sky. . .' Sure, the Mason/Dixon Line was a scientific accomplishment, and cool and all, but these songwriters make you want to burst out crying about it.

Boy, writers and musicians have power. They can make things sound more important. They can also put things in perspective. They can tell us, 'You might not notice, but this means something.'

Nineteen months ago, he mourned, partridges were here. Nineteen months ago the open pine forest was compassionate. What rare concentrated tragedies will have occurred within another nineteen months – not here, for this place has bred a tragedy greater than any recorded in the Nation's past – but elsewhere, all over the South, through back roads and on wharves and in legislative rooms, in foundries which rust because the fires have gone out?

MacKinlay Kantor, Andersonville

There was a prisoner of war camp in a field. Horrible things happened there. Kantor stops in the field, and thinks about it all. And then, he makes us think about it.

There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

John Hersey, Hiroshima

You could write a whole book and not make a reader stop and think like that one sentence does.

A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

He's describing the desolation of the Dust Bowl.

How Do They Do That?

Writers do that by noticing something nobody else notices. An innocuous field becomes the scene of horror. Books in a library turn deadly. The landscape of climate change reflects the human misery that results.

Charles Dickens was in the middle of telling a complex historical tale. He sent his messenger on the night coach to go rescue one of the characters. But he stopped to give the poor man bad dreams, as one had on night coaches, probably. Dickens paused to reflect on night travel.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page.

Dickens can't be beat. One reason is passages like this. You know that feeling you get when you look down a darkened street and wonder what's going on behind all those lighted windows? So did Charles Dickens. But then he thought about the fact that people are like those houses – unknown and unknowable. And then he thought about death. . . And he got all that from a dark street.

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested you try prose poetry. (You probably ignored me, being sensible people.) Here I'm suggesting that you try to find the telling detail, situation, or vantage point from which to launch your observations. Try to get the reader to stand where you're standing, and see what you see. Have the courage of your imaginative convictions, and make your point. Remember: without your help, the reader may see a cliché. With your help, they can experience the situation in a totally new way.

Another day will make it clear

Why your stars should guide us here. . .

Thanks, James Taylor. I'm feeling much better now.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

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