Guest Post: Why Go to the Museum?  by Theodora Goss  Theodora
GossIt seems a silly question. We go to the museum to look at
art, to learn about it, to gain pleasure from it. But I think
going to the museum is particularly important for writers. It’s
part of a writer’s training, in a sense, to experience as much
as possible and to store what is experienced away, not as though
doing research, but storing it in the mind so that what is most
important is retained. The sheen on a particular piece of glass,
for example. Because we create a sense of reality by describing
our fantasies as though they were real, and in order to do that
we need to draw from what is real, from our experiences. That’s
why monsters are hybrids: we always draw from and recombine
reality, and so our fantastical creatures are recombinations.
But in order to do that, in order to describe our fantasies as
precisely as possible, we need to have experienced reality
widely and fully, and to (this is where it’s not like research)
have incorporate