BUILDING BLOCKS
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF CREATIVE WRITING Sound
Learn how to make music with your writing, as author and tutor Ian Ayris explores the sound of the spaces between words
We finished the last issue completing our look at the Building Block of Character.
And then we heard a sound . . .
A beat throbbing.
A rhythm pounding.
From nowhere and from everywhere.
A melody floating softly, hovering above it all.
We search among the Building Blocks and cannot find the source of these sounds. We realise it is not the Building Blocks generating this noise. The pounding rhythm is coming from the ground beneath our feet and the melody is in the very air we breathe.
Now, this is very important. Our need to categorise, to subdivide things into their constituent parts, to discover the Building Blocks of everything, is such an insidious part of the human condition, we often overlook the most important things: the things that are not the Building Blocks. Those things that cannot be categorised. Those things we glimpse fleetingly from the corner of our eye, that slip between our fingers – the ghosts of the ghost of a feeling. The glue that holds it all together. These things are easily dismissed because we cannot hold them in our hands or before our eyes long enough to categorise them. And yet, without them, all else has no meaning.
In his book Walden, Henry Thoreau says:
‘Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East – to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them – who were above such trifling.’