The Ada Community library branch closest to me is a couple miles away on Lake Hazel Road. But another branch is a couple miles north of it on Victory Road. Recently I visited that branch to look for new books and movie DVDs. I also looked on the shelves for books about public speaking, whose call number is 808.51. Just to the left under 808.02 I found an interesting 1999 paperback book by Eric Maisel titled Deep Writing: 7 Principles that bring ideas to life. There is a brief article by Heather Grove at Errant Dreams on June 20, 2006 about it titled “Deep Writing: 7 Principles that bring ideas to life,” Eric Maisel. I skimmed through the book, and was intrigued by the following section on pages 124 to 128:
“FUNNY MIRRORS
I recommend the following special way of evaluating your work. It can feel strange at first, because it involves a process that is intuitive and impressionistic, but once you master it you can learn what you need to know about your writing in almost an instant. I call this process funny mirrors.
Imagine that you’ve taken your work to a surrealist amusement park, and you discover a funhouse there. You go inside and encounter a long corridor lined with mirrors on both sides. On one side are mirrors with names: the mirror of the adjective, the mirror of the original idea, the mirror of the living thing, and so on. On the other side are mirrors that have a place on them for you to inscribe your own names: the mirror of Editor Jane, the mirror of the German-American reader, the mirror of the subplot, and so on.
When you hold up your work to one of these mirrors, you see only and exactly what that mirror reflects. In the first mirror you might encounter a talking head, in the second an image or a scene, in the third a phrase written out in script. Sometimes nothing will appear, a nothing full of information, as when you hold up your work to the marketplace mirror and the mirror can find nothing in your work with commercial appeal. Sometimes there are question marks, exclamation points, or strange squiggles in need of deciphering. This is a surrealistic funhouse, after all, and sometimes what you see will need interpreting.
The following are the named mirrors:
The Mirror of the Adjective
When you hold your work up to this mirror, you get back a single word: dark, confused, rushed, sentimental, stiff, clever, simplistic, elegant, unflinching, detached, depressing, deep, commercial. This is the mirror’s understanding – that is, your intuitive understanding – of your work’s current state, summed up in a single word.
The Mirror of the Original Idea
Your piece of writing started somewhere, with a feeling, an image, an idea. This mirror will reflect back to you insights about whether and to what extent the work is still harboring that original idea and is still guided by it. You might see a tiny dot: all that remains of your original idea. You might see an abstract painting: the idea gone wild, fragmented and mutated in the writing.
The Mirror of the Living Thing
In this mirror you get a sense of your work’s organic growth: whether it is growing tall and spidery, short and squat, spare and anemic. It may have nothing of the original idea left in it, but may still be a healthy, thriving organism, growing with its own fine logic.
The Mirror of Alternatives
In this mirror you get a snapshot of how your work might look if written differently. This mirror is invaluable: you get to see powerful alternatives that might have eluded your vision because of
your focus on the work-as-it-is. Each time you hold up the work you see another alternative: how the book might look if narrated omnisciently, or if Sally told the story instead of Harry, or if Sally’s best friend did the telling.
The Mirror of Shape and Form
Every piece of writing has its own shape, its own architecture. In this mirror you might see reflected a skyscraper with the top fifty stories separated from the bottom fifty by a jarring gap of open air. Your book may be missing the middle chapter that connects the first half with the second. You might see a Calder mobile, which reminds you that the twittering bird chapter early on needs balancing with a meditation on the lightness of being.
The Mirror of the Ideal Reader
In this mirror a face appears and chats with you. He or she is serious, respectful, intimate, and understands your intentions but also has his or her own ideas about what is or isn’t working. If you hold your work up a second time, a different ideal reader may appear, one with a different history and different tastes but one still absolutely on your side and interested in seeing your work succeed.
Here are ten more mirrors:
The Mirror of the Typical Reader
The Mirror of Narrative Flow
The Mirror of Rhetorical Power
The Mirror of Intention
The Mirror of Voice
The Marketplace Mirror
The Mirror of Mystery
The Mirror of Grandeur
The Mirror of Truth
The Mirror of Goodness
Can you imagine how each of these mirrors works? What do you see reflected in each of them?
When you want to know something in addition to the information available in the named mirrors, walk down the other side of the corridor. There stand the mirrors waiting to be named by you. You might hold your work up to a mirror you call Mary and get a short, important answer about whether Mary is an effective character or a distraction. You might hold your work up to a mirror you call Dialogue and learn that your character John is making boring speeches and that Howard is barely grunting. You might hold the work up to a mirror you call Ending and learn whether your whisper of an ending is necessary, a problem, or both.
When you’re working with an editor, then naturally you will want to add an Editor mirror to your funhouse array. When you hold your work up to this mirror you get to hear your editor’s thoughts about the book. Editor Jane appears and says, ‘Darn it boy, didn’t we discuss this? I wanted much more action and much less philosophizing!’ With this mirror you foretell editorial objections and nip problems in the bud by engaging in dialogue with your intuition. This mirror alone is worth the price of admission.
Visit this funhouse when you want to evaluate your work. Use exactly as many mirrors as you need. Invent the ones that will help you the most, creating custom-tailored mirrors that answer your most pressing questions. Have you written several short stories and wonder if they amount to a collection? Invent a mirror. Is your self-help book helpful enough? Invent a mirror. See what there is to be seen.”
The mirrors at Science City in Calcutta came from Wikimedia Commons.
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