Tag Archives: creative writing

21 March 2010

Walking the Talk

By thefallenmonkey

My previous post addressed beginnings of stories/novels, yet before I get to endings, it is worthwhile to comment on the dialogue that might not only span all the in-between but, in fact, could very well be our means of beginning and ending if utilized effectively.  Yet again, I am drawing from the specific advice proffered at the writing conference I attended last weekend (sponsored by the organization Room to Write), lessons we may have learned time and again through various sources, but that I found particularly insightful when distilled during this focused workshop.

To begin with, dialogue is essential to a successful novel because it:

– teaches us about characters and what they might be feeling the second they open their mouths through tone, accent, dialect, and word choice.

– conveys information

– moves the story forward and quickens its pace

– gives immediacy/brings readers in by appealing to senses of sight and sound

– creates white space, which gives us a chance to visually “breathe”

To maintain this significant impact of dialogue, we must therefore keep the following in mind:

– When using dialogue to convey information that we do not through narration, keep the information provided brief.  Otherwise, it may come across as more than would be natural in a conversation.

– Voices engaged in dialogue need to be distinguished from one another—

* Test this distinction by reading dialogue out loud.

* Consider overdoing sense of voice (e.g., through dialect or word choice), as you can always go back and take it away.  Spelling phonetically or using curse words to add color to a character’s voice can be effective in distinguishing him/her, yet it can also be distracting from what they’re actually saying.

* With this previous point in mind, be aware that while dialogue more closely resembles natural speech, even in the best of books it is not exactly the same as we would really talk…and that’s okay.  Again, it may be due to avoiding distractions in exact pronunciation or errors in grammatical syntax (we don’t obey convention 100% when we talk vs. write).  Yet I also feel it may relate to the artistry of language that we might infuse through our characters’ speech—think of the TV series Mad Men…those characters certainly do not speak like ordinary people, but there is something clean and lyrical in everything they say that is a joy to listen to and truly raises the program to a higher plane of thought and reflection.

* Not every line of dialogue needs to be tagged.  This is more easily done, though, when only 2 characters are involved and it’s easier for the reader to track who is speaking the alternating lines.

* Regarding tags, you are better off using plain and simple “said.”  Also, avoid adverbs—whatever description you could provide of how a character says something should already come across through the dialogue itself.

– Incorporate the “business” that goes with the dialogue. (In the excerpt we read from Ian Rankin’s Let it Bleed, for example, one character prepared a cup of coffee for the other as they conversed.)  In doing so, you will:

* help the reader “see” the scene by bringing in movement and showing versus telling through the characters’ actions

* reinforce the reality of the situation, make it more authentic to real life

So, talking of talking, I’ll stop my yammering on this topic.  It is a critical one, though, to writing an effective, engaging, and believable piece, so bear these pointers in mind while also just having fun with bringing your characters to life when you grant them the gift of individual voice.

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Dialogue, Musings on Writing, Novel

19 March 2010

In the Beginning, There Was the Blank Page…

By thefallenmonkey

…or, these days, the blank computer screen.  Every true writer’s mind has a story just dying to get out of it, yet this doesn’t necessarily make getting started any easier.  Following up directly on my previous post regarding the writing conference I attended last weekend (sponsored by the organization Room to Write), one of the topics we addressed was beginnings, which cannot be more critical to a story, particularly if you want to get it published.

First of all, as far as how you begin to write each day, the key is:  1) ensuring that you do write every day, even if just a few sentences; and, 2) the authors leading the conference particularly advised us to write first thing in the morning.  That is when our heads can be freshest and leave us feeling for the rest of the day that we’ve already accomplished something massive (so you don’t have to feel guilty taking that nap 🙂 ).  While I wish I could discipline myself to haul my keester out of bed earlier than the minimum allowable time for getting ready for work, I have to admit I have my most significant rush of ideas in the morning as I shower, as though I’m massaging them out of me noggin as I shampoo my hair.  I always hate that I have to leave for work soon after then, just when I’m in the groove and risk losing the momentum by the time I return home drained from the daily toil.

As far as the actual beginning of our story or novel, we must note that the first chapter (indeed, first page) is the “imprint of the entire book.” The sense of place and voice established in that first page predicts the rest of the book.  My tutors also stressed the impact of including a sense of smell right from the getgo, as it creates a lingering impression unlike the other senses (and is unfortunately one of the most underutilized, as I’ve mentioned before in my “Smell No Evil” post).

With regard to place, we were advised to give places names, even if it’s a fake name to anonymize an actual place.  In this way, a place, if prevalent enough to the story, can become a character in itself.  Closely related in terms of setting, the time period in which our story takes place should be implied well enough to give a clear sense, yet we don’t have to preach to the reader when exactly it is.

With regard to the sample of best-selling novels we read in preparation for the course, we evaluated the following common denominators that we noted across each of their beginnings:

– Drama or sense of impending danger

– Character (be it the main character’s name or an archetype to be represented throughout)

– Setting (again, the sense of time and place)

– Conflict (at least a sense of the issue at the crux of the story)

– “Filmic”—i.e., achieves ready visualization and engagement through drama and descriptive language

Finally, we may have a strong temptation to overly explain some aspect of the story right out the gate, be it the character, setting, conflict, etc.  To avoid this, we need to give our reader credit and exercise restraint—we can always introduce this information in a creative way later on.

I do believe I am at the end of discussing beginnings, so meet me here next time for a few words on dialogue.

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Character, Conflict, Musings on Writing, Novel, Setting

18 March 2010

POVs of the Published

By thefallenmonkey

Since I’m relatively out of commission this week as I’m visiting Stateside and busy mixin’-n-minglin’ with all my loved ones (not to mention that my dear hosts, my parents, have an excruciatingly slow dial-up connection to contend with), the rest of my posts in the upcoming days are admittedly pre-scheduled snippets of what I learned from my Room to Write writing conference last weekend.   To follow up on my previous post, I’d like to expound a little more on a few of the quotations uttered during that workshop that I identified of value in their simple truths:

“80% of the meaning of a novel comes from the reader and 20% from the writer.”

Anyone who writes knows that even fiction is autobiographical in some way.  Writers are the originators of their stories and draw from their life experiences and personal frames of reference to structure and weave these tales, yet it is inevitable that different readers will pull different meaning away from even the same text.

This is something I stressed to my high school students constantly when we approached a new story or novel—my favorite task to assign to them would be maintaining margin notes (provided they, and not the library, were the owners of their books!).  These would be basic symbols that they could quickly transcribe with pencil in hand as they read so that they would not have to interrupt their reading too much—e.g., a “!” for something that surprised them, a “?” for something that confused them or prompted a topic for discussion, or a “*” for a line that resonated with them in some way, be it its content, beauty in phrasing, or some other aspect rendering it significant to them.  In doing this, the outcome is often the same—while there may be some passages that elicit a common reaction from all of them (as the author surely intended), there were always those that garnered different attention, whether spurring both like and dislike or perhaps overlooked entirely by some while having heartfelt impact on others.

That is where the reader’s life experience and personal frame of reference forms unique interpretations, as when a spectator in an art gallery looks upon an abstract painting or scultpure and sees in it the infinite wisdom of millenia of human history whereas the person next to him/her snorts at it with irreverence and comments that a child could have achieved the same result.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say, and so is meaning.  We need to give our readers credit that they can fill any gaps we leave and not bind and chain them to a narrow view through our lens alone.

“Writers taste life twice–once when they live it, once when they write it.”

I just thought this was such a lovely sentiment as it conveys the sweet gift of life writers truly can enjoy…it’s almost like a form of immortality, getting to multiply one’s life experience in this way.  Of course, when writing fiction, we are not necessarily chronicling the factual details of our lives, but we certainly draw from the essence of what we live through to fuel our stories with authenticity and heart—and, yes, the wee tidbits that really do happen to us that we can incorporate are not only special ways of documenting those moments for posterity, but likewise add a genuine touch of reality to what could otherwise entail too much suspension of belief…not to mention that sometimes crazy things happen to us that one simply could not make up!

On revision:  “Kill your darlings–if you love it, delete it.”

I found this advice so interesting in its irony.  One would think that you should leave something in because you love it, but what I infer from this statement is a warning against being blinded by favoritism to what may not be suitable for a particular story.  I have heard this uttered by other published authors as well as they related times when they wrote a scene that they thought was so powerful and well-written, yet had to concede it did not further/enhance their plot in necessary ways.

It isn’t about destroying a scene or passage entirely, but, rather, removing it from one particular text with the hope that it will possibly offer better relevance to another work that you write.  I catch myself all too often wanting to put something in a story for the sake of squeezing it in somewhere because I think it’s such a marvelous observation or insight—and that may be true, but if it comes across as forced, it is really belittling the rest of what I’ve written and probably not optimizing its own efficacy.  So there you have it…we be warned.

On research:  “Write, don’t research.”

This quotation was of particular relief to me.  While one of my favorite genres to read is historical fiction, for example, I am not ambitious enough at this stage to undertake writing it myself because the research involved seems so intensive.  As a lifelong learner, I think it’s a fun and enriching aspect of writing, however, and certainly do carry out a degree of research for my own projects.  Yet in doing so, I’ve been paranoid that a lot of it does tend to be online, as if I’m taking the lazy route.  It’s terribly convenient to be able spelunk the web to verify a fact on the very same screen as the work in progress, though I’ve often second-guessed whether this is the professional way to approach it.

Well, I learned from my lovely mentors that the internet should indeed be valued as a legitimate resource provided you are using discretion in which websites you consult—Wikipedia, for example, is the notorious taboo online reference to avoid (and, naturally, it’s always the first cyber stop my students would make, much to my chagrin).  Qualify your sources for their credibility:  verify the author/institution that sponsors it, and cross-reference its claim against other sources.  Sites like Wikipedia allow any average schmo to post information without checks in place for validity, so it should be a no-go zone for your research of any purpose.

I do consult print books the old-fashioned way to verify bits and pieces of historical information, which reassures me that I’m not approaching this totally amateurly…and yet, what’s at the heart of the above quotation is that we should first and foremost write our story rather than pressure ourselves with the research from the getgo.  This isn’t to say we can blatantly disregard fact and rewrite our own histories, but simply that if we get too caught up in researching the details, we might inhibit our writing and the depth of feeling that could infuse it through our imaginations.  We were told that if we close our eyes and imagine the experience of what we want to research, we might surprise ourselves with how our accurate our imaginations are.

One example given to a fellow aspiring author related to a scene on a sailboat tha she is writing.  She was advised to just conjure in her mind what it would feel like to be on that boat, how the motion and the air and the spit of water might feel.  Just in doing this, she can create a more authentic experience than merely cataloguing the parts of the boat and sailing terms.  Certainly, checking her facts as far as what technical aspects she may reference is important, but this is not something she’d need to prioritize initially.  Rather, she should write the scene, then research and correct for the details as necessary retroactively.

So that’s my two cents on the UK authors’ two pence offered at the writing workshop.  Hopefully it offers useful nuggets of guidance for your own writing.  Coming up in my next three blog posts will be further advice provided on beginnings, endings, and dialogue.  Cheers!

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15 March 2010

Fresh Air, Fresh Faces, Fresh Ideas

By thefallenmonkey

Ahhh…as I expel the diesel-perfumed air that I inhaled all day today in London, my mental lungs proceed to gulp in the intoxicating purity of the breezes breathed in this past weekend in the Northeast England countryside.  I mentioned in my previous post that I was venturing out of the city for a writing-focused retreat sponsored by the organization Room to Write.  I truly don’t think that I can duly convey what the experience came to mean to me and will not attempt to do so–rather, I will hold that close to my heart and simply say that I had the privilege of being brought into the fold of some of the loveliest, most accomplished, talented, yet modest and genuinely good-natured  folks with whom I could have ever interacted.  Sipping tea with them in the conservatory of a Victorian country estate amidst an endless supply of sandwiches, scones, and fruit on a day colored by blue skies, green gardens, and brown deer was sheer heaven…it’s so me (in my dreams), and I could have pinched myself.  Hopefully my Midwest American accent was not as piercing on their ears as the sun was in our eyes 🙂

As I tuck that sweet and shimmering memory in my breast pocket, I shall tend to some matters of business.  I promised that I’d share some valuable advice learned over the weekend, and I’m a lady of my word.  As I’m heading Stateside in the morning for a week—and consequently going to subject myself to 7 days of my parents’ torturously slow dial-up internet connection that I truly think would run faster if a hamster generated it by running in its wheel—I’ll break it up into smaller bits written in advance, but to be scheduled to post across subsequent days.  Fair enough?

All right then, I’d like to start simply with some gems of quotations that I picked up.  I will repeat them as direct quotations here, though most are probably just my close paraphrases of the actual content, and I apologize in advance to the plagiarism gods for not specifically citing their speaker of origin (as the facilitators may have been quoting from elsewhere in at least a couple cases) .  Whatever…you’ll get the point, capiche?

“80% of the meaning of a novel comes from the reader and 20% from the writer.”

“Writers taste life twice–once when they live it, once when they write it.”

On revision:  “Kill your darlings–if you love it, delete it.”

On research:  “Write, don’t research.”

I will follow up in a later post with a bit of elaboration on these…I have an early flight and had better catch some sleep.  In the meantime, keep writing!

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12 March 2010

OMG-ing my fool head off

By thefallenmonkey

First of all, I’m immensely amused at the fact that my last entry was on “discipline,” and it’s taken me days to get my bum in gear to write another post!

Yeesh…the week got busy on me as I try to wrap things up before heading back to the States (FYI, I’m a Chicago gal currently living in London) for a visit with family and friends, a time during which I expect to be out of commission for writing/working overall.  In any case, the reason I am OMG-ing relates to a previous post in which I expressed my excitement over getting one of my letters published in a book collection.  That, in turn, inspired me to enter a short story contest that so happened to extend its deadline, so I could still give it a go.  The general theme to address was “The Wedding.”  So, folks, the results are already in, and….*drumroll*…I won first place!  Adrenaline surged through my veins, and I thought my heart would leap out of my chest…I’m just gobsmacked and so appreciative of those darling judges who have humored an amateur writer and will be making a dream come true in publishing my work.  It’s my very first time being published for my fiction, and I’m going to continue working hard to ensure it won’t be my last.  I already feel so grateful for this blog, as these little exercises that I might spend 5-10 minutes on here and there have been enough to get my ideas flowing and discipline me to write creatively on a more consistent basis.  This week’s performance, however, not being a stellar example…

In my defense, I’ve had a lot of reading and note-taking to conduct in preparation for a weekend writing conference that I’m departing for tonight.  I honestly learned of it by accident because of this blog–because I follow Bonni Goldberg’s writing prompts in her book Room to Write, I had Googled the title to grab a link for one of my earlier posts weeks ago, and in doing so stumbled upon a UK organization of same namethat holds bi-annual conferences at a country estate-turned-hotel up in Northern England.  This just looks way too up my alley, so I signed on and am getting giddy to hop on that train out of the city.  In any case, this March workshop addresses reading as writers–I think we all know that the more we read, the better we can write by virtue of interacting with examples of good writing or evaluating what we don’t like about what we read.  We were assigned to read three novels of rather disparate styles (The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman, and Let it Bleed by Ian Rankin) and take note of three things we learned about writing from each, so I’m looking forward to this sort of book club taken to the next level in analyzing these texts in relation to our own writing projects.  Hoping to obtain some very solid advice on how I might approach concluding the last quarter of my work-in-progress…I will most definitely report back here on any pearls of wisdom shared.

In any case, hopefully it will not be another 20+ years before I enter another writing contest–no, seriously!  I had just talked about my last one (in grade school, mind you) in my blog post, “The Impact of Words.”  Imagine my relief that the outcome this time round was the same 🙂

In closing, I’m going to indulge my relative anonymity here with what I consider to be the first professional review of my written work, taken as an excerpt from the Fact, Fiction, and Folly blog.  Why?  Because I think I still just can’t believe it and am utterly humbled by the kind words shared, and need to remember them to keep my self-expectations high:

The writing is well done, the story keeps you reading and turning pages (on the screen, ha!). It pulled me right in, with super fast pacing, so there’s never one single moment of ‘boring’ or ‘description’ that isn’t necessary. No word is wasted, no emotion spared. We get to shift POVs in an expert way from several different players in the scene of one wedding – and being ‘inside’ their heads, sort of the way a voice-over on television would be while all the guests are watching the wedding. It felt conspiratorial. It felt like we were eavesdropping on their private moments. It was simply fantastic.

The story title is “Four Somethings and a Sixpence,” and will appear in Accentuate Services’ Elements of Love anthology due for release this November.  They have already published two previous anthologies, Elements of the Soul and Elements of Time, and coming out soon are Elements of Dimension and Rendezvous.  All right, then, cheers for now—I’ve got a train to catch!

11 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Short Story

6 March 2010

Ode to a Night-in-Jail (not really, but it could’ve been close)

By thefallenmonkey

I’m on a roll with other writing today, but so as not to entirely neglect the blog this weekend, I thought I’d post a wee little short-short story that I found in my computer files.  It’s a true story, actually, that I wrote about my brother for his birthday, and it chronicles one crazy night we and our other two brothers had in the Windy City.

Context: ‘Keo Dog’ is a nickname his buddies gave him back in high school, and the setting is none other than the legendary Wiener Circle.


KEO DOG, with relish and a side of cheese fries

It was a brisk April day, an overcast day, a Windy City, too-cold-to-even-really-want-to-speak-at-the-Cubs-game day.  But who really needs to speak at a Cubs game anyway, other than to heckle the home team?  One man, at least, did speak.  This was a man who was never at a loss for words.  And he spoke of wondrous things indeed.  He spoke of a remote dwelling that burned fiery reds and yellows into the monochromatic greyness of our arctic environment.  He spoke of the abundance of culinary delights to be found there, and of the distinctive language the indigenous peoples uttered there by night.  Our frozen eyes teared up at the thought of this urban oasis; it can’t be real, we thought. Believe, he told us.

In fact, throughout the entire duration of the day, he continued to speak of this local legend, how it was no legend, for he had been there, he had seen it, and, most significantly, he had heard it. When the time is right, he promised us, I will show you.  Our southbound pilgrimage brought us progressively deeper into the realm of inebriation, dulling our senses and warming our extremities; but his focus remained keen, and his belly burned for one thing only.  For a moment my confidence in him faltered as he slipped into a margarita-induced coma TWICE while engaged in conversation with me, but I realize now that, as he nodded off into oblivion, slumping ever so slowly forward toward the tabletop, he was only reawakening within himself the vision of the dream to come but a few more blocks southward. It’s the greatest, he said, You’ve got to experience it yourself, he said.

His demeanor became all the more energized and self-assured as he continually described the surreal and foul obscenities that flew in the wind of the wee hours there…Everyone does it, he said, Even the venue elder and those in his employ; in fact, you may not even obtain what you seek there unless you join in the custom. While there was one innocent doubter among the group and another who appeared more preoccupied with parking-meter hurtles and leaving assorted personal possessions strewn about the city, this man stayed his course, and, oh yes, his goal would reach fruition.  As the warm light blanketed our faces and beckoned us inside, we heard the filthy vulgarities abound, and the man’s eyes glowed like smoldering coals as he cackled with wicked delight at the offensive display.

This was it—the threshold of hell, and far too late to turn back to the refuge of Clark Street.  With a confident stride, he stepped to the counter, paused a moment to consider the luminescent options of temptation hovering before him, and, as we huddled in eager, almost nervous anticipation of what crude, ritualistic phrases would spew forth from his throat in the tongue of the after-hours natives…his lips parted…and…in a meek, gentle voice, he sweetly articulated:

i’ll have a char dog, please??


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4 March 2010

Touch No Evil

By thefallenmonkey

The Prompt:

In wrapping up this series of writing exercises on sensory detail, today’s challenge (page 18, Room to Write) is to write through texture.  Again, we have 3 different approaches we can take on this:

1.  List textures;

2.  Describe the textures of a person, place, or thing;

3.  Reflect on how the textures help us find understanding.

I think I’m going to interweave #2 and 3 for this one, at least at the outset and just go wherever that takes me.

Response:

To lull myself to sleep at night, I often rub my fingers along the edges of my pillow case; it’s a habit I’ve had since childhood, one that I developed as a substitute for massage (I was very used to nightly back rubs from my mom).  So when I repeat this ritual as an adult, the tickling sensation of that thin fabric whispers kisses on my fingertips to assure me everything will be okay.  On the occasional night when I’m really sunken into a mode of regression, I’ll lay there in bed snugglng my panda bear, a gift from my parents when I was five.  Holding her close, I’ll run a thumb over the course, pebbly fur, matted down and hardened from decades of hugging.  Now and then I’ll still find a soft spot, a silken smooth patch that was not prone to friction and reminds me of the fluffy fuzz that once went up my nose and tickled my nostril hairs (and sometimes caused that sharp, almost stinging, muscle-constricting anticipation of a sneeze) when I sniffed the bear to find my own scent.  I run a finger over the rugged, scratched surface of its eye wondering when I would’ve let my guard down to have ever let harm come to there.  I feel how flattened and condensed the stuffing has become, the reason why this panda had actually grown an inch once on the family growth chart.  I roll onto my stomach and worry that the weight of my arm is putting the panda into a strangle hold as I feel its unyielding lump beneath, and as I turn my head the opposite way, the slippery straightness of my fine strands of hair slide across my cheek in feathery protection.  I nestle my face into the moon-cooled part of the pillow that I hadn’t yet laid on and sense its soft, suede-like fibers brush against my skin, which, newly cleansed and burning from an invigorating sandy scrub, prickles a bit at the thin fuzziness just skimming its surface, almost velvety after multiple washings.  I feel the thick raised bands of its pattern press into my cheek to stamp its existence into my damp epidermis.  Awareness of the tepid, downy pressure  of my breath upon the back of my hand distracts me from sleep, so I move my arm outwards, outstretched until it bumps dully into the warm life-force emanating from my husband’s back.  In short, vertical sweeps, my hand rubs up and down against his t-shirt, which has become flimsier and less abrasive to the touch after continuous wear has relaxed its threads.  Through the fabric, my fingers feel a twinkling of bristles as tiny needles of hair penetrate through.  Sensing a shift of the mattress below me with a tug of the sheet above me, I realize I’m waking him when not meaning to and so withdraw my hand to the top of the duvet and let it sink into cloudy puffiness as a brief escape of air from between the feathers huffs around either side of my wrist.  I lose concentration of the regulation of my breathing as, limb by limb, my body numbs against these textures and my mind delivers me into anesthetized dreams.

Reflection:

Huh.  So I didn’t really know where I was going when I started out.  At first I thought I might be listing different textures that have come to have meaning in my life and then reflect on that, yet when the pillowcase and panda that both connote safety and reassurance to me (in representing childhood nostalgia) also both coincide with bedtime, I found myself just running with that image in my mind.

I didn’t realize it until the very end how much the sense of touch comes into play at that time of night when it’s quieter and darker, and, therefore, sounds and sights are more subtle.  Touch logically comes to the forefront, then, as we try to situate ourselves in comfort conducive to fading from consciousness.   A challenge was searching for different adjectives to describe what basically boils down to a bunch of different fabrics–the textures within a bed are not all that dynamic, so I kept wanting to describe things as “soft” all the time.  On rereading, I notice how I used a visual word (“twinkling”) to describe a sensation of touch, and while that may be cheating, I don’t know, it works for me because there’s a sort of motion and sound that go with that word that lets me understand how it would touch against my fingers.  I don’t even know if what I just said makes sense, but I am realizing that the boundaries between the categories of sensory words can be crossed time to time, as the different senses so often work together to elicit a shared sensation, so that leaves us open to all the more creativity in how we spin our language into the thread of a story line.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Descriptive Language, Sensory Detail, Writing Elements, Writing Prompts

21 February 2010

Taste No Evil

By thefallenmonkey

The Prompt:

The title gives it away, no?  Continuing to explore the senses through our writing, today’s prompt (page 16 of Room to Write) is about describing what surrounds us through our sense of taste.

Response:

Just took a sip of water, which tasted of cool, filtered nothing until leaving a plastic aftertaste at the tip of my tongue.  If I licked this crystal water goblet, it might taste of my bland lip balm caked at its rim.  If I ran my tongue along the smooth glassy surface of this desk, it might taste of bitter dust with a hint of metallic at the edges.  If I stuffed my sock monkey that sits on the desk into my mouth, its dry fibers might have a dried oatmeal, shredded wheat quality, much like the linen-covered journal resting beside it, though the latter might have an added hint of salt or chemical from its black dye.  The napkin in front of my keyboard would dissolve on my tongue almost too quickly to detect an unexpected sweetness of bran.  As I gaze through a pane of glass at the potted plants on the window sill, I imagine snapping into their thick, rubbery leaves to yield a moist burst of lettuce and aloe, crisp and awakening on the tongue and almost slightly acidic like citrus fruit.  As I further pretend to mash my face down into the soil, I taste the gritty mineral-rich dirt and strain in trying to swallow down the rusted-penny tinged taste of dried and brittle clay.  Looking further on to the leafless branches across the road, I sink my teeth in and snap off a twig to savor its dirt-peppered smoky oakiness that slides into the somewhat salted juices of my saliva (the taste-buds of which are still saturated with the essence of chili pepper and coconut curry) as I gnaw on its end.

Reflection:

And I think that’s where I’ll conclude, as I’ve developed a weird hunch that a lot of things within my field of vision right now might end up tasting alike—though definitely not like chicken, as everything else seems to :). I wanted to resist reflecting on any of the meals I had today to avoid describing actual food that would make sense being in my mouth, though that potency of my literal taste clearly began to influence my imagined ones.  What a challenge, though!  This was a real effort in concentration, clearing my mind of everything but that object and dissecting it for its “ingredients” so that when I vividly envisioned rolling it around on my tongue those flavors would come forth…even then, however, when I really felt I had locked in my mind what it would taste like, the tricky part was to articulate that in words.  As I mentioned in my previous post, taste and smell are what I find to be  the most difficult to convey as sensory details in writing, so, again, I find this will be a useful exercise to return to with frequency.

Hmm…a world in which you could taste everything?  What might that be like…

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19 February 2010

Smell No Evil

By thefallenmonkey

The Prompt:

My next series of posts will be pertaining to our senses, and, today, page 15 of Room to Write kicks us off with our sense of SMELL.  In describing smells, we can list significant smells or try to describe a person or place strictly using sense of smell:

Response:

There was an air freshener my mother used to keep in one of the bathrooms that always made me think of my grandmother’s winter home in Cape Coral, Florida.  Even though I hadn’t been there since the age of 5, any time I used the loo as a teenager I was transported back to this place that I could barely recall visually.  In attempting to describe this smell, it was pungent (in a good way), spiking through the nostrils with a sort of juicy, fruity, ocean breezy scent that makes me think of blue.  I also still hold onto shampoo samples from my first trip to Cabo San Lucas a few years ago (yes, I’ve saved the toiletries that long), as all I have to do is sniff to get that same teleportation to a calmer, tranquil retreat.  It smells most dominantly of sage mixed with aloe and a well-rounded fruitiness that I could cup my tongue around, though it isn’t tart like the air freshener scent–there’s something more arid about it like the dry winds breathed out by the Pacific across the sand and carried green brittle scents of cacti.  It’s a scent that makes me see a cloudless blue sky from the vantage of floating on my back in the waters of an azure-tiled pooled.  As a kid I would love to step into my parents’ garage on a humid summer day and deeply inhale the fragrance of gasoline (healthy habit, I know), which gave me the same satisfaction as the scents of freshly-cut wood and wood stain still can when I enter a home improvement or furniture store.  An odor on the cusp of this category, but that walks a finer line between love and hate with me is that of fresh paint.  No, in fact, the jury is in on that one after all; I don’t like it for its way of teasing me at first that it’s wood stain then goes in for the sting of sour headache-inducing toxicity.  To alleviate it, I open my windows to the moist air that can smell of snowy chills and soil and the must of dried leaves, exhaust, and the occasional coriander.  I like the smell of entering the bathroom after my husband has already showered so I can take in the herbal, apple-y, musky mixture of assorted toiletries, undermined only by the now-and-then stink of mossy mildew, like grub-infested mud.  As I remove my clothing to take my own shower, I may catch a whiff of paprika and salted alfredo.  I’ve never been one to be able to distinguish between the components of a glass of wine’s bouquet, so perhaps my olfactory sense is, in fact, weak, but I’ll say this:  one scent I cannot handle is breath.  The mildewy rot of halitosis goes without saying; I’m talking even the slightest essence of chicken or pepper or garlic, the stale, chemical scent of consumed alcohol, or the milder yet gag-inducing average scent, like milk steamed with the stifling closeness of humidity…whatever it is, I’m not having it in my face.  I’ve never understood the possibility of poets’ descriptions of “sweet breath” in their odes of love, and “baby’s breath” always creeped me out as a flower’s name.  Breath is what stinks up a bedroom like dirty feet and clammy armpits when one falls asleep with one’s mouth open without having brushed one’s teeth.  Contained odor of other people’s bodies on airplanes, trains, buses, what have you, is another sensitivity for me.  I addressed my own stench above after a day’s activity and a night’s rest, but the ground-in cumin smell that practically solidifies in the air as its own entity when a human has not been washed for days, if not weeks, is an olfactory oppression, and I would be mortified if my smell was enough to infuse a room merely because I occupy it.  There is nothing scent-sational in that.

Reflection:

This activity brought me warm, soothing memories in the opening as I recalled the scents that give me pleasure, but I see how I gradually gravitated toward the more unpleasant of life’s odors and thereby yanked myself from tranquility into the judgmental crankiness of an old codger!

Like I said above, I never regarded myself as one to have the most keen sense of smell, but I realize now I’m much more sensitive in this aspect than I would’ve given much pause to realize.  It seems when people write (including myself), the first descriptions to jump to are the visual ones.  Even looking at what I wrote above, I couldn’t resist reverting to visuals.  I noticed this all the time with my high school students, and we used to workshop on revising their stories to try to incorporate all five of the senses to better immerse the reader into their storyworlds.  It’s this descriptive language that brings words on the page to life because it appeals to our living faculties and makes us feel as though we’re using them when we read, smelling what the characters smell, touching what they do, etc.

From my experience, smell and taste tend to me the least incorporated descriptors (if not most challenging), so this is a worthwhile exercise to come back to time and again.  Whenever we write a new passage and revisit it to revise, we must ask ourselves if there is anything in that passage that lends itself to scent.  If not, or if it wouldn’t add much value as a superfluous, distracting detail, then we shouldn’t force it.  But if it could enhance the scene as a more realistic sensory experience, then we should certainly try.

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2 February 2010

Character Sketch (Part I)

By thefallenmonkey


The Prompt:

Page 11 of Room to Write gives us some practice in developing character description.  Certainly, in creating our characters, they are not necessarily people  that we know in real life.  We might incorporate aspects of real people into our envisioning of them, but the remainder may lie sheerly in our imagination.  To ensure that we are offering the proper level of description to these characters, then, today we are to have a go at describing someone we already know–either closely or arm’s-length–with whom we have regular contact.

This will be an exercise in discovering what it is we actually notice about people first.  I’m sure you’ve taken a personality quiz at some point that profiles you based on what you notice first when you look at someone (e.g., eyes, teeth, hair, etc.), and this will be similar, just taking it to another descriptive level.  In identifying what it is that we automatically look to in a person, we will identify what it is that we automatically describe in a character.

Chances are, we’re limiting our characters in some way.  So, after I write this, I’m going to reflect on not only what I did write about but also what I didn’t.

Response:

His eyes are blue, though I still sometimes question if they’re at all green…must depend on the lighting or what he’s wearing.  It isn’t a crystal, cold, icy blue, but a muted, soft one that I’d feel comfortable dipping a toe in, then submerging into fully.  They’re kind eyes that don’t penetrate with menace or even cloud over in sorrow, but they surely twinkle when he’s happy.  They’re eyes that I can see looking exactly the same, with the same good humor, when looking out of a far more aged face.  His face now, though, is young, though showing the lines of maturity, of laughing, of squinting in the rays of the sun or the gleaming fresh powder of a snowy mountain.  His skin is sensitive to dryness in the air and wind-burn when rushing down the slopes or bouncing along the pavement.  It will redden then flake, so he moisturizes it often.  Left to its own devices in the absence of the natural elements, it is fair skin to go with his fair hair and fluffy fair eyebrows.  His blond is more sandy, darker in the winter months when shielded from the sun’s bleaching effects, and becoming increasingly peppered with grey on the sides, which is giving him that handsome, distinguished presence that befalls all lucky men who retain their hair and physique, the fellows like Cary Grant and Sean Connery who only get better with age like a fine wine.  He’s a man who can wear a beard and not look unkempt; the whiskers grow in dark and give a tanned shadow to his fair skin and protect it from the irritation of the daily shave, though it is only on holiday when he’ll let it grow this way.  Otherwise, he’s the clean-shaven type, keeping his hair trimmed close to his neck in the back and parted neatly at the top, though in casual circumstances will lightly gel it into a more naturally tousled look.  Even when casual, however, he’ll wear a buttoned shirt and leather loafers, with denims or khakis in between.  He’ll smarten up a day of air travel with a wool blazer, and every day at the office sets that bar high with his well-tailored suits and the rainbow’s spectrum of Charles Tyrwhitt shirts accented with cufflinks and ties of unexpected patterns and hues.  His answer to the proverbial male-profiling question is undisputedly “boxers,” and his socks have found new voice through multi-colored stripes.  He’s a man who does not need his wife to dress him in the morning.

Reflection:

Okay, so that’s my first pass on describing a real, living, breathing human being in my life.  What are the things I noticed first in my mind’s eye?

Face/Head:

– Eyes (from their color to how they reflect the temperament behind them)

– Skin (its physical description, including external influences that portray one of the man’s favorite hobbies–skiing, running, and, apparently, moisturizing)

– Hair (primarily physical description, which to extent reflects personality)

Body:

– Clothing (again, physical description that may reveal underlying personality)

So what didn’t I describe, then, that I could have?

– what his smile looks like

– body physique

– the way his body moves

– what his voice sounds like

– how he smells

– what he feels like

– nervous habits

– ANY habits–the way he behaves in different circumstances

– sense of humor and other personality traits

See anything that I’m missing?  Please list in your comments if so.  More importantly, give this a try yourself!

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