I came across this fantastic short film at Go Into The Story (embedded below). It is called This Is Water and it provides visuals for an extract of David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College.
Foster Wallace was speaking about the way that people should engage with life and with the world, but that applies well to writing too. The fish in DFW’s tale don’t see water because water just is, it’s a given. Our default mode is to remake the world according to our prejudices and our assumptions. But we don’t remake the world by choice, since to do that is to think and to intend, and our default mode is passive. We swim in a lazy soup of assumption, a kind of Daily Mail of the mind. We do not engage.
Choose to look differently, Foster Wallace says. Learn how to think. Learn what to pay attention to. Look for what is hidden in plain sight.
It seems to me this applies as much to the words we write as the world we see. Except that when we write we have a dual focus. We must look differently, and we must show differently. We want to make people recognise something, but also to find that surprising. We are mimicking — making a thing that is the same, but also transforming, making it strange.
Maybe one way we can do that is by showing the things that are not our story, or the things that are almost but not quite our story. Finding the detail that isn’t the moment, but speaks to it. The pattern on a plate, or the feel of a cuff, the stickiness of a leatherette car seat on a hot day in 1976, the first drop of rain and the air smelling of metal. These things are meaningless. They are incidental. They are not, in the main, symbols or MacGuffins. But as a writer you chose them. Out of all the things in the world of your characters these are the things that matter.
So these things have to be somewhat meaningless, or your writing is literal, on the nose. They have to have meaning too, or you’re merely babbling. They have to be both of these things at once. And somewhere in this contradiction, hopefully, the water becomes apparent.
Here is the film
Audio of the full speech is also available at YouTube.
