Tag Archives: words appealing to the senses

1 June 2010

Slippery When Wet

By thefallenmonkey

Just returned from a long bank holiday weekend camping in Devon with some pleasant drives and strolls through Somerset and the Cotswolds as well.  The English countryside with its rolling patchwork of greens and yellows and occasional puffs of white sheep and dairy cows—all accessorized in dense hedges or stony walls and cottages—is certainly an isle of inspiration for a writer.  Be they grasses or cobbles underfoot, the paths one treads here are a return to the natural state and the fundamentals on which we build our lives and stories.

The last writing prompt I followed involved fire; today’s regards that other element that seemed to so dominate my camping trip, whether it surged onto the coastal sands or pattered against our tent in the night.  I speak, of course, of water.

The Prompt:

Page 31 of Room to Write asks us to “write about water: tap water, ocean water, rain water, any water or experience or dream of water that has both wet and whetted [our] imagination.”   Well, I’ve written about my water dreams already, so I’ll try not to be too redundant here…

Response:

WATER.  It multiplies the Mogwai or signals an approaching T-Rex, melts the Wicked Witch or freezes Leonardo to Kate Winslet.  It helps kids slip-n-slide and makes T-shirt contests more interesting.  It conforms to the shape of its container and yields both its clarity and taste to the color and flavor of what enters it; yet I would not call it submissive.  No, it fills the container’s inner space to empty it of air and weigh it down, and it dilutes the efficacy of what it absorbs, dissipating it in its solvency whenever it can play this advantage.  It carves canyons and fjords in its liquid and solid states, eroding away in its slow, subtle way of feigning innocence.  Water cleanses away the toxins, rinses the filth; it quenches our thirst and hydrates our cells.  It cools or it scalds, it cleans or it floods; it can keep us afloat with its density or yank us down with its current, hold us up on a wave or crush us under a whitecap.  It ebbs, it flows, it dips, it swells.  It can flush out mortal life or baptize into one everlasting.  In its glassy calm, its surface can reflect our being and the wonder of the skies as it refracts the perceptions that penetrate deeper.  Water contains mystery in its depths, holding it beyond the reach of light, and yet what it sprays forth to glitter in the sun can somehow reveal all the answers.

Reflection:

Water has always fascinated me…as a little girl, I wanted to be a mermaid, and as an adult, I found a new way of communing with it when I learned to sail (the capsizing drill in 50-degree Fahrenheit Lake Michigan being one bonding session I could have done without…it was less fun the second time around when the main sail came down on top of me and trapped me underwater—not to fear!  I was an apt pupil and remembered my survival strategy :)).

Anyways, I find I often allude to water in my writing as analogous to emotions and circumstances, playing on the ways it can be a subduing or overwhelming force, an annoyance like a leaking faucet, or perhaps a current that sweeps my characters along the tributaries that lead into their destinies.  It’s a recurring motif, for example, from the very first to the very last sentence of a short story I once wrote in which the narrator is literally unable to drink from a water fountain, which parallels her deeper “thirst” as she comes of age:

“Here she had the smartest guy in my physics club falling all over himself to impress her, saturating her ego with his deluge of compliments, but she gets all haughty and tense, as though struggling to ignore the persistent drip of water torture.

Girls like her just rinse and spit. They’ll spit out a mouthful and have the nerve to complain that they’re thirsty.”

I also can’t help but think of this element at the pen-tips of the pros, such as the way Stephen Crane wields water in his short story, “The Open Boat”:

“None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks. Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea. These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a problem in small-boat navigation.”

No matter how light or heavy the content of a story, there seems to be an abyss of options for describing water or using it metaphorically, especially as it shares the complex dualities of fire that I’ve discussed previously.  In this way, it is a tap that could never run dry, so to speak.

So I’m curious—what are examples of water imagery that you have found effective, either in your own or others’ writing?

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7 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Descriptive Language, Figurative Language, Freewriting, Sensory Detail, Writing Prompts

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.

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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

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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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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