Impulse

Following up on the last post, I thought of another handy anal­ogy about writing.

Every once and a while, a writer sits down to write a story and it writes itself. It’s like you’re just tak­ing dic­ta­tion. My last story was like this. Writers, myself espe­cially, seem to always long for that effort­less story and get dis­ap­pointed when it of course doesn’t work.
We have a sim­i­lar leg­end in pho­tog­ra­phy: the per­fect neg­a­tive. A neg­a­tive so well made in the cam­era that it requires no skill to print at all. You just run the paper through the chem­i­cals or press File/Print, and the image comes out with all the light & dark bits adding empha­sis exactly where you wanted. No burn­ing or dodg­ing or other dark­room tricks. Your desire visu­ally tran­scribed.
The dif­fer­ence is that pho­tog­ra­phers joke about it whereas writ­ers stress about it. Many pho­tog­ra­phers know that the per­fect neg­a­tive is a gift of chance, not will. As a writer, I often for­get this.
I think this is why I like cross-training art.

Related posts:

1. The last dark­room in America
2. What makes a story?
3. The per­fect office
4. Leaving a lit­tle ink in the well
5. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 1