Then there's the matter of
authenticity, of creating something real out of nothing. You might
begin composing in your head, listening to voices and playing with
spaces, manipulating them or letting them manipulate you and push you
in a particular direction.
You envision a situation, then put
characters into it and watch them react. You record their reactions.
Where are they located in relation to one another? Are they standing,
sitting, lying down? Are they happy, sad, somewhere in between?
You ask questions and keep asking. What
paintings are on the walls and where did they come from? Whose photos
are on the refrigerator and why? The key is to discover the essence
of these people and the places they inhabit.
Sometimes you might leave this world
for a while and return to it later. And when you examine it all
again, everything seems off—maybe by a little, maybe a lot—and so
you keep looking, keep digging until you figure out the truth.
What you originally believed or
understood about this place might have changed in your absence. Maybe
you misinterpreted a piece of the physical geography or a person's
reaction or the reason for that person's reaction.
This is hardly cause for panic, of
course, as we go through the real world constantly misinterpreting
people and things that surround us. The trick is to gather more
information, separate the proverbial wheat from the equally
proverbial chaff, and make new judgments based on what is hopefully a
more complete picture.
What if you don't end up with a more
complete picture? Well, then you repeat the entire process for as
long as it takes to get things right. How long might that be? Ideally
it would be within the span of a human lifetime, but who knows. It
could be never.
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