I describe sometimes. But describing isn’t always good. Explaining doesn’t always convey meaning.
They say that the best way to communicate is to fit your message to your medium.
Use face-to-face communication for personal and sensitive issues; SMS for quick updates; email for business purposes; phone calls to settle minor details; etcetera. What comes to my mind suddenly is… stories and poems.
If stories and poems are also forms of communication, what kind of communication are they best suited for? It’s an interesting question to ponder, because stories and poems both convey emotion. They aim to make the reader **feel **what the author wants to say.
But art is not only limited to words on paper. Art is also pictures on paper. And I think that’s where I can truly understand the purpose of both these literary forms.
Stories are painted, poems are sketched
Paint the stories, sketch the poems
Stories are deep descriptive writings. They aim to draw the reader into a world where many imaginary things are described for them; the colour of the clothes, the smell of cookies wafting from the kitchen, the slippery feel of the bathroom tiles.
But poems! Poems only sketch. They give the barest hints to the reader of what is going on. They give echoes of shadows. But from within these lines, they tell you how those echoes feel against your skin. They sketch the faintest outlines for your mind, but with those faint lines, you can still see a face, even with the lack of detail.
Where stories paint the picture vividly, throwing in greens and hues of red, poems merely use charcoal and sometimes give the better feel, for al the lack of colour.
So I read stories often, but the way to know an author’s heart is to read his poems. For it’s hard to sketch emotion unless you’ve felt it before.
Less is more
And that’s really the story. Less is more. If you can minimize what you say and make it as short as possible (but no shorter!) then you’ll be able to give the maximum impact.
Because even if you can describe something perfectly, no one will listen if it takes you 800 pages to do so.
So, in a poem, you don’t write every detail. When you speak, don’t say every word. Write only the feelings that need to be there, no matter what nonsensical words are used. Say only the words that are important, and nuance the rest with your body language.
A “hmmm” could be contempt or acceptance, but only if you say it like you mean it. And when you have less words to say what you mean, you HAVE to think on every word to make sure that you really do mean it. And you HAVE to say every word like you mean it.
It would be a radical world. A world where people thought before they spoke (because such few words are spoken). A world where you had to listen when others spoke (because poems almost never make sense). A world where you couldn’t get angry straight away because you weren’t really sure what they meant the first time and you had to think their words over first to make sure you understood what they said (because the meaning is not in the words, but in the emotion).
Listen: without it speaking is useless
And herein the problem lies. We’ve forgotten that to communicate better, we don’t need to talk to each other. We need to talk with each other. And even that sentence doesn’t express it correctly. because talking with someone requires a very important part of a 2-way communication. Listening. Rather than talking with each other, we need to listen to each other.
I joined debate and first thought that I would learn to speak to people better and learn how to persuade them with my words. I soon realized that I could only convince them if they were listening to me in the first place. By the end of it, I realized that debate was a lot more about listening than it was about speaking. In fact, I only spoke about 8 minutes for every hour that I had to listen!
So, with such little time speaking, I had to learn to sketch. To set out, in a few quick words, a rough idea of what was going on.
And when I only sketched, I found that I finished so much faster. And I could spend time listening instead to other people’s words, their paintings. And I found that they told the most amazing stories.
I hope that perhaps more people will spend less time painting the elaborate fantasies of their own life. Sketch your own life in charcoal, then when you’re done early, spend that time looking at other people’s paintings. I’ll tell you now, they’re very interesting to look at.