In A Pirate Looks at Fifty, Jimmy Buffett is standing at the historic fortified wall in Cartagena, Colombia. Don’t rush through this passage; savor it and let it soak into you.
Lost Words from Hole in the Pants Pocket of García Márquez
What I am feeling at the wall is the relationship of Cartagena to my songline. Gabriel García Márquez worked in Cartagena as a reporter in the forties. I have read just about everything he’s written. There are times when you get lost in one of his passages, and when you finish, you go, “Where in the hell did he come up with that?” As we stroll atop the walls toward our dinner, I can sense that I’m in the land of magical realism. A guitar melody carries through the narrow streets and echoes off the ancient ramparts. The balmy breeze coming off the Caribbean is warm and salty and carries a perfume of night-blooming jasmine with an underlying aroma of garlic being sautéed in olive oil. Somewhere this night, fine meals will be served and a beautiful Creole woman with a gardenia in her hair will be made love to by the guitar player under a mosquito net and a slowly turning ceiling fan. I don’t know how, but I just know it.
I stop for a last moment at the top of the stairs heading down to the restaurant. I pick a dark angle through the line of streetlights and headlights along Avenida Santander and block out the sound of horns and mufflers from weekend traffic whizzing by. I eventually find an unobstructed slight line out to the western edge of the Caribbean Sea, where the last faint slice of orange sky clings to the horizon. Above me, I see the stars popping out. Venus first, and then back over the city toward Laguna de San Lazaro, my old friend Orion’s Belt. The descriptions in the books that had aroused my curiosity about coming to this place can’t compare with what I am experiencing now. I have not a clue as to where García Márquez found some of his inspirations. I feel his shadow. I would like to think that the words and sentences I jot down have been spilled like coins from a hole in his pocket and have come to rest in the hidden cracks between the ancient carvings, waiting to be found and put back on the page. As I descend the stairs I find myself muttering the words to one of my favorite lyrical hook lines: “All in all, I’m just another brick in the wall.”
When I read a passage like that, I shake my head because I know I couldn’t write that. Such lush description requires some color of the soul that I don’t have. All I can do is admire it in the same way I’d stand before a painting in a museum, knowing I could never paint like that.
I’m a paradox. I certainly notice a lot around me. In fact, many (maybe most) of these fiction inspiration posts are prompting you to notice the things that are hidden in almost everything, and I wouldn’t ask you to do anything I wouldn’t do. I stop and smell the flowers. I’m the only one who actually looks at the pictures hanging on the walls in the hundreds of hotel rooms I’ve been in. I’m the one who’s always looking around, and yet when I write I put in very little description, and certainly not the level of art Buffett imbued into that passage.
Part of that is a conscious choice. I hardly even use modifiers for my dialogue, so a lot of times I’ll write a wall of dialogue without giving any clues as to how you’re supposed to read it. (Here’s a perfect example of what I often do.) It’s because I trust you to read it without having to have it explained to you. It worked for Hemingway: the clarity and crispness of his prose, especially in his use of dialogue, went a long way in covering up for his less-than-impressive imagination.
In fact, almost the only time I include passages even approaching Buffett’s are at the opening of a chapter. It’s not that I don’t know how to do it, it’s that I just don’t. But when I do, those are often the paragraphs I like most. When I was asked to show the passage that I’m most proud of in all my writing, this was my answer, and it’s pure chapter-opening description as two characters are driving through Tuba City, AZ:
They drove down the streets made of yellow-orange, made more yellow still by the streetlights, some of which still worked. Every piece of pavement was covered in dust, every bus stop, every traffic light was covered in it, an alien-looking fine powder that was the residue of a million dreams and a thousand treaties ground into a manifest nothingness, destined to lie in a restless peace. The only thing that wasn’t covered in the dulled color was the trees, which were spared the blanket of rusting fire by living elsewhere. Anywhere else.
What I want you to do is to think about your own weaknesses in writing. What is it you wish you did better? What do you think you’re really good at? And, just as importantly, is your weakness really a weakness? As I said, I use very little description, but most of the reviews I get about my writing is that it’s fast-moving and snappy. If you think you overdo it on description, maybe someone else out there (like me) would read it and love its lushness.
Have a good Halloween weekend!
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