(1) Response to Thomas's Image Junkyard #3 (Week Two)

Thomas,

First and foremost, for a newbie you’re rockin’ it, already. I’m extremely impressed—keep it up, man. You obviously have an ear for sonic language, sensitive to your surroundings. That, alone, takes special talent and, often times, several (intensive) creative-writing workshops.

For one thing, if you were considering poetry, I would challenge you to really push yourself, your language—when it comes to imagery—into the realm of show. That is, are your images capable of being captured on film or would a director have a difficult time capturing these scenes on camera/video? Also, try to constantly remain conscious of poesy and prosy language vs. the poetic. ‘Prosy’ is rather self-explanatory: language that is representative of prose, that caters more to the stylistic of prose; however, ‘poesy’ tends, typically, to be overly sentimental and artificial writing—cliché and a little too colloquially heavy-handed.

On another brief note: try to resist Latinate words; they tend, more often than not, to be too syllable heavy and flowery (which leads to the poesy). Rather, seek out the Germanic. These words will not only provide your drafts with more uncanny and odd pairings of language/imagery, but also give the draft more power. The draft, interesting, will, in turn, put pressure on itself, its images, and those reading it—creating all sorts of weird and fascinating dynamics.

Good work. I’d like to read your workshop piece, too (if you don’t mind, that is).