What I like best about summer is the opportunity for being 'in the moment'. Do you know what I mean? When you silence all the voices – let the background chatter fade away, still the talk in your head about what to do next – and let your senses expand. When you are 'in the moment' you're watching, listening, feeling. . . and trying to develop those as-yet-unnamed senses that allow you to preserve space/time in your personal data banks. My memory is full of such moments, and I treasure them.

It's one of the reasons I enjoy going to the pool on a hot day. Yeah, I know adults either want to read a book or engage in competitive lap-counting, and kids want to jump up and down, splash, and shout a lot. That's why I prefer empty pools. What I want to do is to lie back in the water, stare at the blue sky, and let my mind go blank. (Quiet in the back.) It's amazing what will come to you if you stop trying so hard to think.

So this has what, exactly, to do with writing? I hear you ask. Quite a lot, really. Let me explain.

Most writers think writing is primarily about plot. They're worried about the story. Often, the story keeps moving, moving, moving, driven by the writer's need to get somewhere. Rather like most people in the world. But you know what makes great writing? When the writer remembers to stop and be 'in the moment'. Just for a second. It makes all the difference between a so-so story and one that will stick in the reader's mind for a long time. Let me give you a few examples, and I think you'll agree.

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. he didn’t seem to be really trying.

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Never mind the detective, the client, or the mystery. I defy you to remember a Chandler plot, anyway. But stopping for a moment to contemplate that stained-glass panel is a stroke of genius – and unforgettable.

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees.

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor. . .

Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman

When that memorable poem begins, if you're not 'in the moment', you're nowhere at all.

Longfellow wrote an action-filled poem about the night the American Revolution got started. But right in the middle of the tension and military horseback riding, he put this:

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,

In their night encampment on the hill,

Wrapped in silence so deep and still

That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread,

The watchful night-wind, as it went

Creeping along from tent to tent,

And seeming to whisper, "All is well!"

A moment only he feels the spell

Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread

Of the lonely belfry and the dead. . .

'Paul Revere's Ride

I'll bet you can think of other examples. (Share them, please, I'd enjoy learning.) Why do these pauses, these 'in the moment' scenes, deepen our appreciation of a text? I think there are several reasons. One, they help us engage more with the text by making the story seem 'realer'. Also, they cause us to draw on our own sense memories. When we think about that cemetery, we bring our own experiences of them to bear. An 'in the moment' scene can make the following action seem both more logical and more exciting, because it heightens the contrast between resting and active perception. All of those things are true. Here's another reason, as set out by a master storyteller:

. . . I rummaged through my memory in an attempt to locate myself in time on the same day that Sophie walked through the gates of hell. The first day of April, 1943 – April Fools' Day – had a mnemonic urgency for me, and after going through some of my father's letters. . . I was able to come up with the absurd fact that on that afternoon, as Sophie first set foot on the railroad platform in Auschwitz, it was a lovely spring morning in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was gorging myself on bananas.

William Styron, Sophie's Choice

Styron's narrator, Stingo, goes on to tell the story: he was eating so many bananas because he was about to have a military physical, and he was underweight. If he didn't register properly on the scales, the Marine Corps wouldn't take him. He squeaked in by a matter of ounces, and the medic made a joke about April Fools' Day.

Styron uses the 'in the moment' image of the induction physical to contrast Stingo's experience of historical events with Sophie's. At the same time one character was being 'weighed' by history – in a semi-comical but hardly threatening fashion – another was being 'weighed' by much harsher judges: ones with the power of life and death. Sophie was forced to make a cruel, life-destroying choice on that day, while Stingo was faced with the decision to eat bananas. Life is not fair, writes Styron, whose character's dilemma seems to wrapped up in what philosopher Bernard Williams called 'moral luck'. The frightening notion that events on this planet can have that kind of horrific simultaneity may lie behind our compulsion to remember where we were, and what we were doing, when Pearl Harbor was bombed, or John F Kennedy shot, or the World Trade Center attacked. And it may have a lot to do with the power of writing 'in the moment'.

Writing 'in the moment' helps us orient ourselves to the fictional world. Often, these scenes become the touchstone by which we recall the contents of our favourite pieces of writing. I was able to look up the Styron reference because that passage impressed me so much when I first read the book – about 30 years ago.

We often forget that we can only write about time. We live in time. Fish live in water: do they ever think about it? Probably only when they land on a boat deck, gasping without it. We don't notice time. Sure, I notice that I've been writing for 45 minutes (and still haven't got to the point). I notice that the sun is beginning to creep around this side of the house, and will soon be in my window. But I don't feel time around us. Perhaps the best way for us to do that is to stop and feel both time and space by noticing everything we can.

All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.

So wrote Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. I'm not sure I agree with that. I suspect that if time passes, and no one is paying attention, it might just get lost. But what do I know? Maybe all moments exist in Slaughterhouse Five because the Tralfamadorians are really paying attention. Anyway, if the moment is in your mind, you can definitely retrieve it.

Stop and do that. Use those aware moments. Build those 'think pauses' into your writing. People will appreciate.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

24.07.17 Front Page

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