After reading The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson, I continue to wonder how talented writers are so clear in the moment. I wonder if, in some cases, they actually have their pen and paper or typewriter with them on hand, and plop it out right in the middle of the bar while everyone is drinking. Or else, they must remember it, or make it up completely after the fact, only loosely based on memory.
For me, it has been easier to sit in the moment, and let it pour in through my senses, without risk of forgetting what it is I am writing about, because it is still there pouring in. The situations that Thompson write about: dancing in the streets, driving drunk, making love on the beach—would all make it very difficult to write concurrently.
The difficulty with this, for me at least, is to make the moment seem real. Whereas when you are in it—writing about it as you see, touch, and hear—then it is not so difficult, because it is real, right there in front of your face. If you were to mess it up, it would be like the failure of a realist painter—the landscape is right there, and it is your own fault if you can’t get it down clearly.
But with writing from memory, it is completely different. Because what you think you remember, is really only a picture of a picture, and so on as time passes.
The underlying truth that causes this problem is the “cohesion” of a moment. How you are feeling affects the way you describe things, and what you are seeing and hearing affects how you feel. It all has to make sense together in a way that is intuitive and comes to one naturally, but is very difficult to piece together after the fact. Like putting together the puzzle pieces of a Frankenstein—putting the pieces together isn’t the hard part. The hard part is giving life to the Frankenstein.