Tag Archives: Room to Write

23 March 2010

The Beginning of the End

By thefallenmonkey

To conclude my brief series of posts relating back to valuable lessons reinforced by last weekend’s Room to Write writing conference, how fitting will it be to end with endings.

I shall be brief.

Basically, a couple things were emphasized:

First, not all loose ends need to be tied up in a pretty, perfect bow; for the central conflict, yes, but other conclusions might be better left to the reader’s imagination—think Rhett Butler walking out on Scarlett O’Hara.  Do they  eventually get back together?  Your romantic optimism/pessimism will determine that, but Margaret Mitchell didn’t need to in order to effectively give her epic saga adequate closure.

Second, the ending of a story/novel should connect back to everything significant about the beginning.  The successful novels that we reviewed all shared in this aspect—they related back to character, setting, and conflict in creative ways, providing a sense of balance and resolution to our story’s main conflict.

In this way, the beginning and end stand together as “book ends” with all that good stuff in between, and as our climax tops out and falls toward denouement, we should keep that falling action brief—end it with a “flick,” as author Wendy Robertson put it succinctly with a visual flick of her wrist.  And as author Avril Joy stressed to me during some one-to-one consultation time, if I’m rising toward the climax of my novel (which I presently am), I should resolve it in a matter of a few pages or a chapter and not drag the ending out further than that.

I’m going to execute that advice in not dragging the ending to this post out…on that note, cheers, and keep writing!

5 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Conflict, Denouement (Resolution), Musings on Writing, Novel

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!

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Musings on Writing, Novel

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!

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Monkey Miscellany, Musings on Writing, Novel

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

8 March 2010

The Art of Discipline

By thefallenmonkey

On page 19 of Room to Write, Bonni Goldberg pauses to reflect on the importance of discipline in writing.  Her personal mantra when the going gets difficult is:

“Writers write, writers write…”

It all goes back to her emphasis on “showing up on the page” and curbing our tendencies to procrastinate or wait for inspiration to hit us.

The Prompt:

In light of the above, Goldberg asks us to write about discipline in one of 3 ways:

1.  Begin a poem or essay on what understanding you’ve reached on what it means to be disciplined, what you accept about it or what you reject;

2.  Track one of your existing characters as he/she copes with some element of discipline; or,

3.  Relate a past event that involved discipline in your life.

Going with Door #1 today…

Response:

Discipline is..

dedication and details

a dreaded dungeon

of dankness that congests my chest and blurs my eyes

resistance

like trying to run along the ocean floor.

But discipline is also

drizzling drops

of decadent delicacy

embedding structure within passion

to convert it to a sugared treat.

Reading the results

the rejuvenating reward;

whereas

idling for inspiration

the idiocy that is

waiting for words to come to you

rather than working to walk amongst them again.

The daily dollop, then,

the routine regimen,

the waking willingness

to expend effort and enjoy the effervescent energy

of Creation.

Reflection:

I can’t say I had any deliberate reason for the particular consonants and vowels I repeated in this other than they were the ones that started a lot of the words that were coming to mind with regard to the topic .  And I actually think I automatically latched onto to alliteration as a device to give me discipline, to set boundaries in which I could creatively explore.

Ironically, I’m not disciplined enough right now to spend more time on this or even take a second pass on what I just dashed off to revise or expand.  Ah well.  In truth, I think even just that brief time reflecting on it was validating, as that’s the point–if we perceive our goals as laborious tasks immense in proportion, of course we’re going to hit a psychological road-block; we’re just setting ourselves up for it.  The approach that seems widely recommended across writers is to chisel bit by bit off that boulder.  It may not feel like much at the time, but the aggregate results over the span of days will be noticeable if we discipline ourselves to set and accomplish reasonable daily goals.  If I’ve learned anything from my professional experience, it’s that goal-setting needs to focus on feasible, measurable results.

For me lately, on days when I’m not writing for my project, I’m making sure I’m at least writing a new blog post to stay warmed up.  And as for when I am working on my extended piece, sometimes I just roll with it, but other times I might set a word count–in yesterday’s case, 2,000.  It started out slow, requiring much discipline, but once I got into it, I tapped into a torrent of new ideas and ways that they could tie back to the old, and before I knew it, I had written almost 2,500 words by the time I reached a good time to stop for a break.  And even if I can at least add a few sentences of maybe a 100 or so words, I can feel the same level of satisfaction, even if I end up deleting it the next day.  Simply because I know I tried.  I worked at it, and I showed up on the page today.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Genres, Poetry, Writing Elements, Writing Prompts

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

2 March 2010

Hear No Evil

By thefallenmonkey

The Prompt:

Continuing on with my previous posts related to the senses, today’s writing prompt (page 17 of Room to Write) delves into sound.  Writers benefit from being good listeners, so Bonni Goldberg asks us to comment on what we hear in any one of 3 ways:

1.   Listing  sounds we love or hate;

2.  Describing the sounds we hear around us now; or,

3.  Developing a dialogue that employs purposeful rhythm in accentuating the subject and tone of the conversation.

I think I’m going to dapple in the first two for now, though I’d like to challenge myself with the third sometime soon and will update this when I do so.

Response:

1.  Sounds I love: the melodic vocals of the song birds that wake me and sing me lullabies in the summer.  The crisp Pffftt when someone opens a can of soda.  A genuine belly laugh gurgled from a niece or nephew.  The satisfying crackle of a fire, or cereal just submerged in milk.  The fluid ripples of a harp.  The melancholy of piano music.  The tap-tapping of corpulent rain drops on the rooftop.  A tongue clicking…once.  The ting of wind chimes and crystal.  Ocean waves and the way their foam sizzles through the pebbles.  Sounds I hate: TV commercials that blare louder than the shows they invade.  The dull thuds of neighbors existing above and around me in apartment buildings.  Car alarms.  Phones and classroom bells ringing.  Cheesy R&B vocals and the ootz-ootz-ootz of dance club music.  Buzzers.  Car horns.  The creaking of my desk chair.  Human voices babbling too loudly on public transportation.  Belches, and the laughter that follows them.

2.  What I hear now: Echoes of children’s voices undulate on the air as it carries their afternoon playtime imaginings across the square.  The steady pulse of a car or building alarm cuts through persistently with a piercing beep that makes my left eardrum throb and contract.  The hum and buzz of street traffic ebbs and flows with the Doppler Effect as cars and lorries approach and flee, the road too stop-and-go to allow continuous whirring and vrooming to meld into the whooshing roar of a waterfall that could let me remotely imagine I am amidst and one with nature.  The upstairs neighbors return with thumping and scuffling on carpeted stairs and a child’s commentary on the school day before jangling keys swing and collide as one of their own unlocks the door with a heavy click muted by friction.  The thumping continues overhead, plodding about more swiftly with a child finding freedom back in her home quarters and is soon accompanied by scuffs and skids and creaks.  All the while, I hear the clacking of the keyboard keys beneath my fingers as they yield and either stomp out letters in quick succession like the notes of a piano concerto (clicking and space-barring to a waltz, perhaps) or pause with the dreaded silence of a writer’s hesitation…a silence that is not quiet, but containing the overlapping tracks of sound previously described; a silence that a writer fortunately does not always hear when seeking out the soundscape of her storyworld.

Reflection:

As I attempt to quiet all the sounds and voices, real and imagined, swarming in my mind so that I can concentrate on reading for a while, I’ll close with this little tribute to onomatopoeia:

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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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