Text

At the start of last semester's English 365 class, we did a brainstorm with the topic in mind being... arguments, or something akin to that. One of the words that came up, was text - and then its denominations: textual, texting, texts, txts. I recall also that the word textile was thrown up, which made any piece of writing, any text, seem much more like something woven, something nimble hands spun together into a material, composed of word strings called lines in clusters called sentences and paragraphs.

In a 1 minute 56 second video from Youtube of Oprah interviewing author Ayana Mathis, who I had never heard of, some writerly teachings of hers are revealed. She mentions, as her third thing she learned, that whenever a character does something, there should be five reasons for that action's occurrence, whether it happens for dramatic effect, or to display a characteristic, or to force another character to act in some way, or to highlight a societal impact, or to foreshadow some future event.

That got me thinking. Ever since I had started thinking about writing and how to write, the question of how one gets from the blank sheet to the text stumped me. With all the connections within the text, between characters, setting, theme, I didn't understand how authors could put it all together that way. In my attempts, I wrote something off the top of my head, and had trouble moving from action to action because each time I did, I wasn't really connecting one to the other - not within the story, but also not within my mind either. At the end of the text I had written, there would have been a single thread of yarn that would run from event to event: chronology, usually. Later, I would learn to link the end to the beginning so as to form some sort of symmetry or circularity, thus giving my text some dimension. But when I looked to other, finished texts, I noted that there were many many more threads between happenings. The topology of a published text was much more than just a single road, but a whole map of connections, with subways, bridges and tunnels.

That comment by Ayana Mathis made me click that writing a text, it is not final to just imagine all the actions happening one after the other, with a cause and effect relationship, and that's it. Once the spine of the plot skeleton is lain, the assembly then happens with the smaller bones, to link as many of the bones with each other as possible - to the story's weight and demand, of course. Each event then carries more significance, and the story becomes woven. I shouldn't call anything I've written before a text, then, because what this weaving implies is revision and revisiting, something I had avoided doing because I didn't know what to look at, or was lazy, or entropy prevented me, or I simply wasn't ready.

I decided I need maturity before I can write. I believe that, among other potential things, maturity, experience, will give me the ability to see more connections between happenings - not just cause and effect - in such a way that I may replicate those connections within a story.

This "5 reasons for a happening" rule, Ayana Mathis said is difficult to uphold, that she herself only can get to 3. I venture that some of those reasons can be implicit within the story, but in the author's mind, they ought to be clear. This gives me the perhaps romantic notion that I could organise and plan a story much more, before I write it (instead of writing off whims and never touching it again) or after I wrote a version, so as then to geographise it, and sewing threads to threads, form a text.

There is a richness of experience in engaging with a text that is really woven together; there is satisfaction in trying to notice the links that the author attempted to establish. In television, it happens through visual means, through the linking of angles, constume, lighting, scenography, dialogue - all elements that are woven, thought out, before the final production is available.

I just finished watching the first season of Mad Men, and am enjoying reading A Game of Thrones. I notice how moods and characters and things and emotions are tied, often for subtle effects, but the tyings are very frequent and add up to a general feeling, the affect. When I zoom out, leave the book or the television behind, and recall, I am left with that affect - the epicosity of A Game of Thrones, the moral smearings coloured by 1960s shades of Mad Men.

The text, the beautiful text, is a crisscross and a crisscross and a crisscross.