“To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.” Akira Kurosawa
This is quite a commitment. To stay awake and aware. To look when perhaps you might prefer to look away. That social gesture, also a gesture of self-preservation, to avert the eyes, glance away, not see.
As I write this, my dog is alert beside me on the couch, his tail high, his ears forward, his hind legs pushing him as tall as he’ll go and his front legs perched on the arm of the couch. An owl hoots rhythmically in the distance, and Bandit’s tail wavers with each hoot. There is a squirrel who lives in the trees above our house, lives as if only to torment small dogs who cannot avert their eyes, whose whole stocky bodies tremble with the thrill and frustration. Oh, that thrill and frustration should be familiar to you, writer. There is the object of your desire, that which you long to capture on the page, and there is that unbreachable distance between you and it. You need wings, magic, a miracle. When it’s in sight, you cannot waste time daydreaming of the tools that would carry you there, you can only tremble with longing and do your best to catch it. Our Bandit will spend his whole life chasing squirrels in trees from the ground below. Seagulls on the beach headed out over the ocean. I’ll tell you a brutal secret. Catching anything isn’t the point. I’ve seen him yang a gopher from the ground and steal its life in one shake. Then he was done. His hunter’s instinct took him that far and no farther. We walked away from the cooling prey.
The thrill is in the chase–cars, squirrels, stories. Go after it, your whole body trembling, alert. Get what you can on the page without imagining there’s any true victory. The victory is in the act itself, of looking, of chasing, your pen rapid and eager across the page.
A Practical Alphabet for Writers: Find all the letters so far at https://bookwritingworld.com/blogs/