(no subject)

Winter fatigue has set in. My fatigue dream today was trying to work out that particular quality a special writer has. For Rudyard Kipling it's a folklike clarity, as if his ballads have seeped into his prose, tingeing it with memories and metre. His places and times aren't mine, but they are so evocative that every word I read makes me wish they were.

This is the first time I have ever recognised a writer developing that special edge. I am watching Maxine McArthur. Her writing gives me a feeling of thin wire stretched taut, even in draft form. I had assumed that this was because the books she writes are the sort that have natural tension in their plot. It isn't. Even in the first draft of a short story her writing has that fine-wire feel.

My cold-season hibernation will be spent exploring these qualities in other writers, I think. I don't know if it will grow my writing, but it will certainly grow my reading.

I'd love to have help. I'd love to know what qualities other people see in the books they find special.