The transparency of language

George Orwell suggested that prose/essay style should be transparent - the less we notice it the better. With poetry, the language is more like stained glass than a clear window. The stained glass can be more interesting than what's beyond.

Sometimes in Book Groups people get frustrated by the comments about language - they want to focus on the characters and their emotions, not syntax. It's a fair enough approach - though we can't know about the characters unless we read the words first, we might not miss much by "seeing through" the words in the first instance. That approach doesn't work well with novels like "Finnegans Wake". That's an extreme case, though even with more mainstream novels it may not be ideal - 'Grief is the thing with feathers' merits careful reading, and a review of an Alan Hollingsworth novel said that you could read it just for the language.

I was wondering about how other arts manage in this regard.

• If you watch Macbeth, you'd certainly comment on the acting. If you watch a new play, you're more likely to comment on the plot and characters
• Looking at a Van Gogh, you're likely to comment on the brushwork and how it contributes to the effect. A Vermeer doesn't provoke such comments.
• If you've been to film school, you might watch a film with more awareness of camera angles and background music than the general public does. One person might say "Didn't you notice how lonely Sue was?" and another reply "Didn't you notice how the Sue character was always framed alone, even in a crowd?"

In Poetic Opacity (How to Paint Things with Words - Jesse Prinz and Eric Mandelbaum, 2014) the authors take the painting/writing analogy further, listing some ways that a poem might be opaque - "flowery, obscure, metaphorical, rich with allusion, ambiguous in narrative voice, and constructed in metric schemes that depart away from ordinary linguistic usage". They point out how technical writing can have a different type of obscurity, and that "Aesthetic opacity stems from our conventions for individuating artworks. As Goodman (1968) observes, every form of art comes with implicit norms for tolerable variation."

I think I tolerate more opacity in prose than most readers do. That's partly because of the "Macbeth" point above - I've read so many books that not many are "new", so I'm interested in how the familiar theme is re-interpreted. I read more "Van Gogh" style novels than Vermeer ones. And I certainly have a "film student" approach to reading a book.

Floods and trickles

Some people (I've seen them at workshops) seem to be bursting with ideas. When they need to write a sentence, they can choose from a selection that comes to mind. Others (I'm one of them) are lucky if they have any ideas at all. I may need to wait for days, collecting each trickle whether it's a raindrop or a tear.

My notebooks are full of little jottings that I look through when there's a gap in a draft that needs filling. Every so often I can fit 2 jottings together and start a new piece, joining the dots up with new lines, building some momentum up.

This approach has consequences -

• Each idea of mine is precious. I don't want to waste it. I'm likely to use it even where it doesn't quite belong.
• My pieces will be more fractured, the elements created over several weeks prior to assembly.
• My pieces will lack freshness, spontaneity. They're likely to be overwritten.
• I'm usually working on several pieces simultaneously, adding the odd line here and there until a piece feels close to completion. I focus on that piece until it's finished then return to the drafts.
• Given the effort that goes into each piece, the final product is likely to be viable (a third of the poems I complete are published)
• I'm not going to write novels.

I think my creativity is not unconstrained - it's more like that of an engineer subject to the laws of physics than of an artist. Working within constraints has never troubled me. Indeed, pushing against contraints gives me dynamism - if you're stuck in a cell, you might as well explore all of it.

Of course my lack of ideas is a consequence of premature filtering, and there are workshops to deal with that. At a recent one I went to the tutor said don't worry about clichés because they can be edited out in a rewrite. I'll try to use that approach more often.