Go In Closer: the art of narrowing focus

Capturing detail on the page

Move into close detail – of both inner and outer experience – on the page.

You’ll slow down time.

You’ll direct and hold the reader’s attention.

You’ll keep them feeling an emotion until it is passed through by a bigger version of themselves and they arrive satisfied at the other side.

I used to believe ‘one writes in order to feel’ and that readers read for the same reason. Although this quote is attributed to the extraordinary poet activist Muriel Rukeyser, it’s a pervasive belief. I don’t believe it anymore.

In fact, we read or write (or do anything else at all for that matter) to discharge energy from the nervous system and to relax – for a return to organismic equilibrium. Spiritually speaking, we do it in order to move through feeling to connection and a sense of our tiny self dissolving into something bigger.

Don’t be afraid to play God in order to get people to God.

Be a film camera in close-up… 

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Image courtesy of Wild Words photographer Peter Reid.