Doing this liberates your writing, thus allowing you access to the realm of the combined consciousness, the shared magical. But we can choose to remove the unnecessary ties and worldly weight. Too often writers look to include every detail in their stories, and it bogs them down. As he averred, writing is a search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living. We today can learn much from CalvinoРІР‚в„ўs love of buoyancy. And so he began to remove the weight from his writing, and in doing so gained a lightness which in time produced masterworks like Invisible Cities and If on a WinterРІР‚в„ўs Night a Traveller, writings that speak to the universe, that speak across place and time. A gulf grew: Calvino wanted his writing to be deft, nimble, light, but the world around proved to be increasingly heavy and material. Before long, he grew weary of such realism, finding it increasingly difficult to synchronise his instinctive impulse to write with the frantic spectacle of his surroundings. In his youth, Calvino wrote tangible, considered stories, fictions rooted to the ground with references to the political and social backdrop of his own 1940s Italy РІР‚вЂњ stories about soldiers on trains, factory workers, bachelors. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.РІР‚Сњ РІР‚СљРІР‚В¦my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. The following revised memos, which are bits of Calvino that IРІР‚в„ўve sliced and diced, bits that IРІР‚в„ўve twisted and mushed together with my own words. IРІР‚в„ўd just read Italo CalvinoРІР‚в„ўs Six Memos for the Next Millennium for the first time and thought, РІР‚Вfuck me, this is important stuffРІР‚в„ў and then, РІР‚ВI want to tell other writers and readers about thisРІР‚в„ў.

The impulse for this essay struck hazily, one of those ideas that snuck in between pillow and sleep, or after too many coffees. РІР‚вЂњ Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium РІР‚СљIn an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.РІР‚Сњ

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