Mirror Writing

Writing this month’s post for More Than Writers felt like a Lenten task indeed. We have put ourselves under rather a self-denying  ordinance: all subjects other than that of writing to be set aside. Everything in life that is exciting and interesting, everything that piques one’s curiosity, sets one’s adrenaline rushing, or makes one want to yell — barred, unless it comes between pen and paper or finger and keyboard.

Someone once jested ‘They say that life is the thing, but I prefer books’. This is amusing in a superficial way. But really, Life is the thing, life in all its fulness and awfulness, together with all thought about life, engaging or repellent, that too is the thing. Books, then, what are they really? Simply mirrors to life and to thought. And writing is holding the mirror up. A mirror is, after all, a rather dull object. Just a piece of glass with some sort of reflective backing. It’s what the mirror reflects that we are all interested in, readers and writers alike.

And yet, we as an association have decided effectively to limit our discussions to talking about our mirrors. Well, I suppose that different kinds and contexts of mirrors might act as metaphors for different genres of writing. Smoke and mirrors: mystery writing. Through the looking-glass: fantasy. Hall of mirrors: Aga sagas? Even Through a glass darkly: theology, perhaps? But I’m not sure this whimsy has much more mileage in it than that.

More promising, maybe, is considering the condition of your mirror. Old mirrors develop strange splodges and distortions under the glass. A style that is stale, recycling expressions used many times before, can be like that; it’s tedious to read. A mirror can actually be cracked or crazed, of course. Writing can be crazed too: wandering, inconsequential, confusing, and ultimately frustrating. A mirror can be dusty, so that what you see in it is not very sharp; and in the same way, one can write a fluffy obfuscatory style. And — somewhat unpleasantly — your bathroom mirror can gradually collect little flecks of toothpaste propelled on to it when you brush your teeth. In a similar way, your writing can be bespattered with off-putting personal mannerisms: it needs a clean-up.

There is a superstition that smashing a mirror brings seven — or is it thirteen? — years’ bad luck. Can we draw from this the observation that it is a bad idea for a society to bar the holding up of a mirror to reality, even if the mirror is only a blog post?