"Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain."Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Only the hand that erases can write the true thing"
Meister Eckhart
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Be Plain!
"Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Everything, not only works of imagination, should be written in very plain language. But one has to be careful. Writing can unfortunatly become too plain and will then be boring. This makes the listener or reader fall asleep. There has to be always a challenge, something that teases the reader/listener pushing him beyond his habitual points of view. Like a dish that needs some salt, every text needs some mystery or a surprise, something unheard-of or at least an enigmatic point of view which pushes to enlarge one's horizon.
ReplyDeleteAll this depends either from the moment when we are writing and from our personal needs. Meister Eckhart desired very much to get rid of what he felt as ballast. He was searching for disentanglement in the same moment when Dante was exercising involvement trying to do exactly the opposite: building with the material, that Eckhart felt as ballast, a medieval cathedral.