and with him, a unique voice. but his words remain.
there’s something about reading Garcia Marquez that frees me.
i took a creative writing class at U of C that was beyond hell, but i studied Garcia Marquez’ CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD, a novella. it’s a story told in reverse. here are the opening lines:
On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He’d dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit. “He was always dreaming about trees,” Placida Linero, his mother, told me twenty-seven years later, recalling the details of that distressing Monday. “The week before he dreamed he was alone in a tinfoil airplane and flying through the almond trees without bumping into anything,” she said to me. She had a well-earned reputation as an accurate interpreter of other’s dreams, provided they were told to her before eating, but she hadn’t noticed any ominous augury in those two dreams of her son’s, or in the other dreams of trees he’d described to her on the mornings preceding his death.
the story is told from 30+ first-person POVs and it’s fascinating. in an assignment i painted a picture of the site where Santiago Nasar is found dead and then reflected the canvas into a mirror that was segmented into 30+ sections. this had the effect of showing how each person had only a glimpse of the victim, each from a different perspective.
this was the first time i had painted a picture in approximately 20 years. i don’t know what it is about magical realism that gets my creativity fired up. i think it’s the improbability. it frees me. probably because i threw the picture into the garbage when i was done. this was a liberating thing.
voice is key to writing. it’s like a fishing line between the fisherwoman and her catch. when a fish is caught, the line is taut. i’m dragged into Garcia Marquez’ stories.
what do you read that frees you?