Dawn has rosy fingers after all...

Back when I was very, very young (barely 18) and very impressionable. I took 18 months worth of writing workshops all with the same professor. These workshops consisted of us all tearing apart a different victim's work while the professor went on and on about how:

1) There was absolutely nothing new any of us could do, everything had already been done and been done better than we could ever do it

and

2) Every word we wrote was wrong. The words were not perfect, only perfect words would do and if they weren't perfect we had to keep working them until they were. This was futile because they never could be perfect but we had to keep trying anyway.

We all wrote crap. None of us was any good and we never would be. Needless to say these workshops did not help me develop my voice as a writer. What they did was leave me with huge knots of anxiety. Even after I quit the classes the imprint of them stayed with me. With time I actually developed a paralyzing fear of writing. I couldn't even write an email without second guessing and revising it 15 times. Write my resume? Forget it. Communicating in words at all became so awkward I couldn't even talk without stuttering, stammering and tripping over everything I said. The words weren't good enough. What business did I have using them?

During the months of these torture sessions, when the teacher found a bit of writing particularly distasteful he would roll his eyes and sneeringly refer to "dawn's rosy finger", a phrase apparently used by some poor student some years before that was, to the professor, an example of the worst thing anyone ever brought into his class. Dawn's rosy finger was a phrase that surpassed "dark and stormy night" in terms of awful. It was, apparently, even worse than the Vogons.

I never got the 'rosy finger' distinction. He was too busy complaining about the rhythm of my words. Apparently, I had/have a bad habit of writing things that have an accidental meter to them. "Poetic" he'd say with a sneer. Apparently this was not good. This was not me carrying on the traditions of the epics of Ancient Greece, or possibly me tapping into the cultural memory of the Irish bards; it was a bad habit I needed to fix. How I didn't know, but according to everyone he was THE writing teacher. No one knew better. If he said it, it was law. He was never wrong.

So I didn't dare argue. Of course my way was wrong, it wasn't THE way...his way. I didn't dare say I liked the phrase "dawn's rosy finger." I loved watching sunrises, still do, (something he apparently avoided at all costs) and to me it seemed like the most natural phrase in the world, the perfect description of those first hooks of pink light that come over the horizon. I just kept it to myself, and worked very very hard to make a non-poetic, non-lyrical paragraph a perfect 5 sentences long without using a single "to be" verb. All while trying to avoid the dreaded "dawn's rosy finger."

Force the words, but don't let them sound forced. Cut it down to a bare minimum, but flesh it out completely. Don't use dialog, but don't write all in narrative. Keep one point of view, but let us get inside every character. Avoid cliches, but match the reader's expectations. Don't try to have new ideas, but don't use old ones either. If you can't hack it, tough. Millions of people think they can write and they're all wrong. What's so different about you?

Good question. Apparently what was so different about me is best explained by Robert Heinlein. Some people just have to write. You can't stop us. No matter how ugly, how painful the process, we have to put words on paper, or on screen, or scribbled on the back of matchbook covers. The disease is incurable. All you can do is make the patient comfortable and patiently bear the creative fits. So I had to write, and had to write they words came to me. I could not do otherwise. I was a very disappointing failure.

Fine if I was to be a failure, so be it. I would write my way, for the sake of the stories, and be happily mediocre. Right for him was not right for me, and it was my pen.

But it's funny how things work out sometimes. I came across a reference to Eos, the Greek goddess of dawn the other day. Greek mythology is a hobby of mine and I know most of the major deities fairly well, but this was the first time I'd heard of Eos.

I looked her up briefly, and found this on
Wikipedia.

As the dawn goddess, Eos with "rosy fingers" opened the gates of heaven^[2] so that Helios could ride his chariot across the sky every day. In Homer (Iliad viii.1; xxiv.695), her saffron-colored robe is embroidered or woven with flowers (Odyssey vi:48 etc); rosy-fingered and with golden arms, she is pictured on Attic vases as a supernaturally beautiful woman, crowned with a tiara or diadem and with the large white-feathered wings of a bird.

So dawn really does have rosy fingers. This unknown novice writer, more than a decade ago now, had stumbled onto the classic description of dawn; the imprint of the culture that shaped the western world. And the petty self-appointed god of the written word was wrong.

Ms. Betty