c/o Joan Didion 1934-2021: "Let Me Tell You What I Mean"

"All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dyingfall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what's going on in the picture. Nota bone:

It tells you.

You don't tell it."

 INDIVIDUAL

|

 INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC   

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

|

GROUP

"Let me show you what I mean by pictures in the mind. I began “Play It as It Lays” just as I have begun each of my novels, with no notion of “character” or “plot” or even “incident.” I had only two pictures in my mind, more about which later, and a technical intention, which was to write a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all. About the pictures: the first was of white space. Empty space."...

My source: BBC Radio 4

Let Me Tell You What I Mean: A New Collection of Essays by Joan Didion

---

Episode 4

Book cover: goodreads.com

Text source:
New York Times archive - Why I Write, By Joan Didion, Dec. 5, 1976.
https://www.nytimes.com/1976/12/05/archives/why-i-write-why-i-write.html

Previously on W2tQ: Book: "The Empty Space"