![]() This relative lack of choice is relaxing. And a river, once you’ve done the initial map gazing, on the floor, at home, will only ever take you to the sea, to its source or up a tributary. As an exercise in “mindfulness”, perhaps or put another way – “being there”. This might sound like a conceit but I think its more to do with the desire to experience life without a filter, through the senses, with as little coming between me and where I’m going to as possible. But not the reality of folding paper into squares in varying weathers. I have never been particularly fond of maps – the idea of them, yes. I was drawn to the idea of following a river from the sea to its source in the summer of 2009, in part to give my nine-year-old daughter Evie and I a holiday project. Salmon try to jump to the top of the Could Weir, Selkirk, during their journey up the Tweed River. This sensation, of being held, or rocked, can be so hypnotic and so very fulfilling, that – once experienced – it can easily lead one to spend a vast amount of time both in, and near, water. I know – as Jenny Diski knew before me, when she found herself lulled by the motion of the ship that carried her to Antarctica, that it is possible to have an awareness of water’s “amniotic qualities”, not as a Romantic notion or as a metaphor for the virtues of swimming and so on, but as a very real comfort, marrow-deep, and cellular. Having said that, I have been comforted by water all my life. I am an enthusiastic amateur, and my knowledge of waterways is almost entirely heuristic. And I can’t pretend to be an expert on rivers. I could not have anticipated what I would learn about the human heart – my own, and other people’s. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for when I first set out certainly not what I eventually found. I never noticed the writing angle when I watched it in the past.W hen I first began to write The Fish Ladder, it was because of a hard-to-describe feeling that I should be travelling upstream, and also that I should be documenting the journey. This is my second Brad Pitt 1990s movie rec (he plays Norman’s younger brother, Paul) in as many weeks but this one is worthy of a re-watch. Going through the process of writing matters a lot because that’s how you improve. The writing itself matters very little when you’re trying to become a better writer. (2) The process of writing is more important than the finished product. I like to think his father made Norman throw away his paper at the end of this scene because he was trying to teach him how to write not what to write. And being a Scot…believed that the art of writing lay in thrift.” People are busy, or at the very least claim to be, so get to the point in whatever you’re writing. I love this quote from the scene: “He taught nothing but reading and writing. The goal should be to make your point using as many or few words as are necessary. (1) Brevity is important. Looking back on it now it’s ridiculous how many teachers forced me and my fellow classmates to write papers a certain page length when I was in school. This one immediately spoke to me because it provided two valuable writing lessons: His father marks it up once more and says, “Again, half as long.”įollowing a final round of edits, his father looks over the finished product and says, “Good, now throw it away.” Norman goes back to work, cuts the length of the paper in half and turns it in for further review. His father marks it up with a red pen and simply says, “Half as long.” Norman is at his desk hard at work writing a paper which he then turns into his father for review. I’m not even a fisher myself but the fishing scenes in the movie are wonderful.Įarly in the story, young Norman (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt of Angels in the Outfield and 500 Days of Summer fame) is shown writing and then re-writing a paper and having his minister father (played by Tom Skerritt) look it over for him. ![]() I recently re-watched and it aged beautifully as a movie about family, writing, fishing, and nature. The movie A River Runs Through It is based on a semi-autobiographical book by the same title by Norman Maclean (the voice Redford was playing). I’ve seen numerous forms of the quote, “I write to find out what I think” and that’s been one of the unintended outcomes of writing for me over the years. This is a wonderful lesson on the art of writing and how sometimes you don’t actually understand a subject until you go through the writing process. Only then will you understand what happened and why.” Then he said, “Someday, when you’re ready…you might tell our family story. Long ago, when I was a young man, my father said to me… In the opening scene in A River Runs Through It, narrator 1 Robert Redford remarks: Writing Lessons From A River Runs Through It
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