The Thought Beneath the Thought
The Thought Beneath the Thought
There’s this funny thing that happens
when you write. You make a choice for
something small - a color, a town name, a certain kind of house or car - with
no conscious idea of why, except that it felt right. Later, you realize it wasn’t only right, it
was exactly right.
I just had that experience with my
newest novel, The Green Memory of Fear,
fifth in a series of books featuring a woman named Jaguar Addams, an empath and
telepath who works in a future criminal justice system where she rehabs
criminals by making them face the fears that drove them to their crimes.
I was talking about the book to a woman
I know, explaining the plot when she asked, “And why did you choose the color
green?”
That stopped me cold. When I was
writing, I never considered blue, or yellow. It was always green, though I
didn’t have a clue why. In fact, green
isn’t just in the title of this novel, it also runs through the series,
rampantly. Jaguar has green eyes. She often wears sage green clothing, a color
associated with empaths.
But I never chose that
consciously. It just felt right.
Since writers
are often called on to explain themselves, I knew I’d better give it some
thought, and I did. Green, I realized, is a complex color. It’s used to represent jealousy, or
sickliness. But it also reminds us of
the constant renewal of life, the re-greening of the earth after the cold
somnolence of winter. It’s the color of fertility and fecundity, growth and
life.
Suddenly, it
made sense. The novel takes Jaguar from
her oldest fear to her newest love. And
Jaguar is a woman who walks between death and life on a regular basis - someone
who risks her life to save others, but is ready to kill when necessary. Someone who loves rarely, but
completely.
In his book Blink, Malcom Gladwell writes about the
power of knowing without knowing, the part of our brain that quickly decides
what’s right, and how truth is often found through intuition instead of
logic. We do so through years of
observation and reflection on our own experience and the experience of
others. Then, through years of reading,
and writing, of letting words fall out of our hands oddly, and rejoicing in the
oddness we create.
Over time we
learn to hone and then trust our intuition in even small matters such as color,
making ourselves open to the thought beneath the thought.
***
Barbara Chepaitis is author of eight published novels and two nonfiction
books. Her most recent novel is The
Green Memory of Fear, fifth book in the ‘fear’ series featuring Jaguar
Addams. She is also director of the
fiction writing program at Western College of Colorado’s Master’s program in
creative writing.
Thanks again for a great post, best of luck with the books and continued success with your writing career. Readers love you.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate that a great deal!
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