pat esden

location: my writing cave

mood: contemplative

music: El Dorado by Agua Clara

I feel pretty uncomfortable making my first post, so I’m going to skip over all the boring preliminaries and go right to what’s been rattling around in my brain lately.

Have you ever thought about how you use light in your writing?

I was under the false impression that I was doing an effective job by showing shafts of sunlight flooding into a room, the feel of warmth on a character’s shoulders . . . but it wasn’t until I went to a show of Gregory Crewdson’s work at the Williams College Museum of Art that it struck me how how much deeper the emotion level of my writing could become simply by using light to a better advantage.

For those of you not familiar with Crewdson his visual art is amazing. The art show compared him to Edward Hooper, but personally I find Crewdson much deeper.  Looking at his work, I was first struck by the story on the surface: familiarity and distance, darkness and light. Then his careful use of light plunged me into a desire to understand what lay below the surface. His art has a theatrical feel of ordinary situations seething with unspoken emotion.

Granted, it’ll take visualization and plenty of forethought to unobtrusively work light into my writing, but if light is such a major tool for the visual artist, then why not use it to its full benefit in my writing? Instead of showing mood or tone with a dim room or bright morning, how about written images of people in a room separated by light, an upturned face jaundiced by  a candle’s flicker, a mother’s hands caught in the light of an opening oven door . . . geesh Crewdson’s done weirded my brain.

I could go on forever letting my mind drift and never get back to my novel.  And I can’t leave my characters trapped in the between-realm forever—or perhaps I should.