The perfect story
Following up on the last post, I thought of another handy analogy about writing.
Every once and a while, a writer sits down to write a story and it writes itself. It’s like you’re just taking dictation. My last story was like this. Writers, myself especially, seem to always long for that effortless story and get disappointed when it of course doesn’t work.
We have a similar legend in photography: the perfect negative. A negative so well made in the camera that it requires no skill to print at all. You just run the paper through the chemicals or press File/Print, and the image comes out with all the light & dark bits adding emphasis exactly where you wanted. No burning or dodging or other darkroom tricks. Your desire visually transcribed.
The difference is that photographers joke about it whereas writers stress about it. Many photographers know that the perfect negative is a gift of chance, not will. As a writer, I often forget this.
I think this is why I like cross-training art.
