Ognuno di noi aspiranti scrittori, quando solleva lo sguardo, non può fare a meno di soffermarsi sull'immagine di un altro scrittore. Le ombre che proietta possono essere lunghe, possono fare paura, ma forse lo sono perché la luce è forte e bella da vedere.
E queste luci, senza ombra di dubbio, guardano a loro volta ad altre luci.
Volevo condividere con chi mi segue - con alta probabilità un aspirante scrittore e amante del fantasy - cosa succede quando una delle mie luci (Brandon Sanderson) guarda a una delle sue. Il risultato è un'interessante riflessione su quello che dovrebbe fare il fantasy in quanto letteratura di fantasia.
“ Robert Jordan taught me how to describe a cup of water.
It seems a simple task. We all know what water looks like, feels like in our mouth. Water is ubiquitous. Describing a cup of water feels a little like doing a still life painting. As a child I used to wonder: Why do people spend so much time painting bowls of fruit, when they could be painting dragons? Why learn to describe a cup of water, when the story is about cool magic and (well) dragons?
It’s a thing I had trouble with as a teenage writer—I’d try to rush through the “boring” parts to get to the interesting parts, instead of learning how to make the boring parts into the interesting parts. And a cup of water is vital to this. Robert Jordan showed me that a cup of water can be a cultural dividing line–the difference between someone who grew up between two rivers, and someone who’d never seen a river before a few weeks ago. A cup of water can be an offhand show of wealth, in the shape of an ornamented cup. It can be a mark of traveling hard, with nothing better to drink. It can be a symbol of better times, when you had something clean and pure. A cup of water isn’t just a cup of water, it’s a means of expressing character. Because stories aren’t about cups of water, or even magic and dragons. They’re about the people painted, illuminated, and changed by magic and dragons. ”