[A poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom….
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.
—Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes”
With the first day of winter only three days away, it seems appropriate to drop some frost.
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader” is something I’ve thought, but never actually heard said. I have actually brought myself to tears when writing. I don’t try to stop it because I know that if the reader gets 10% of the impact when they read it (and, really, that’s a pretty good percentage), it will tug at them too. Often those moments take forever to write; well, not forever, but much, much longer to get onto the page. Sometimes an hour or two or more. And the odd thing is that when I read that same part later, it looks so small because it’s usually only a paragraph or maybe two that took all that time and spilled all those tears.
Sometimes it takes even more than an hour or two. I know a scene is going to have a big impact on the story if I put off writing it day after day because I’m having a hard time facing it. It’s frustrating at times, but it’s also a useful indicator. Right now, I’ve known the climax of the book I’m working on for a month. I know exactly when, how, and where it’s going to happen. It’s the moment when the main character realizes he’s fallen in love with the other main character, and it’s complicated and emotionally charged not just because of that, but because along with that realization he crosses lines he’d set for himself. And I think that if it were easy to write, it would be easy to read, and that page (it’s only a page) absolutely is not supposed to be easy to read. Their romance is a messy, French New Wave kind of romance, not a dime store novel or mass-produced romcom kind, so instead of it being a happy, lovey-dovey moment, it’s a surrender to inevitability and a defeat by a force stronger than his will.
When I first encountered the tears quotation, I was in class. It was tossed off as part of a discussion without attribution, the way old adages usually are. A couple of hours later, without searching or even trying, I came across “The Figure a Poem Makes.” What a pleasant zap of synchronicity.
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