Continuing on with my previousposts 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:
The title gives it away, no? Continuing to explore the senses through our writing, today’s prompt (page 16 ofRoom 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…
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.
It’s been a few days since I’ve tended to the blog, not because I continued to sink into the despair I was feeling when I wrote my last entry, but quite the contrary. I’ve been inspired! One little tangible gratification that came my way since I last posted was an unexpected email regarding a contest submission I’d entered last year…I took the lack of response as a rejection, but no, I was selected for an anthology of letters. So, not a nod toward my creative writing yet, but I take this as encouragement in my writing in general. I have always been told that I write a nice note… 🙂
Anyways, riding on that positive bit-o-momentum, I’ve been writing a new short story over the last couple days to enter into a fiction contest. Making decent progress on that so far, but presently taking a break by shifting gears over here in the blog so that I can refresh and dive back into my story.
The Prompt:
Page 14 of Room to Write asks us to revisit a previous “diving” (freewriting) session and pluck out a phrase, passage, or metaphor/simile that we ourselves still don’t fully understand. Goldberg is operating on the belief that sometimes our writing is ahead of us—no, not that we’re psychic, but that we’re “tapping into a stream where imagination and intuition meet.” What may initially sound like nonsense might contain a nugget of truth and understanding that further writing can help unlock and deepen. To do this, we should roll this passage around on our tongue and practice any or all of the following strategies: a) apply it in dialogue; b) list associations with it; c) create an acrostic using a key word from it; d) draw it; and/or e) verbalize it out loud using variations in tone, pitch, or accent
On revisiting a previous freewrite, then, I’m torn between these two passages (the most peculiar parts to me are highlighted):
1. “playing at children’s games mild lost to tea and egg pie and muddle gunk and tomfoolery wizened but not wise enough”
2. “I catch my breath and try to inhale the purity calmness gaseous extremity that I can believe in the cool quake calmness of din and then I reach the apex of snow and glide and glisten along my way the sunny fresh extremes of hilltops glossed in icing and glint and free falling to a furry escape“
Response:
To address #1, I believe I meant that the benign naivety of childhood gives way to an adulthood confined by more rigidly self-imposed rules of living, like proper afternoon teas or other modes of conduct that are considered refined but may be even more nonsensical foolishness (i.e., “muddle gunk and tomfoolery“) than the ways children approach life through their innocent, natural perspectives—adults kidding themselves that they’ve learned through years of experience yet still have so much more to understand. “Muddle gunk” sounds like something very inspired by e.e. cummings, a way of making up one’s own words that somehow capture an idea through their sounds. On re-reading the passage, “egg pie” really sounded strange to me at first, but now that I conceptualize it more, there’s nothing odd about it at all; it’s just a more silly, casual-sounding (indeed, more childlike) way of saying “quiche.”
As for #2, as I repeat “cool quake calmness” aloud, the alliteration of the hard ‘c’ sound instantly clacks against the roof of my mouth, creating a crisp, clean connotation (look, I did it again!) that suits the image I presume I was trying to create at the time. How “calmness” can coexist with a “quake” or “din” is confusing, though, so let’s see if I can work it out. I associate the last two words with the two senses of touching and hearing, “quake” being a violent shaking or shuddering like an earthquake beneath one’s feet and “din” being a ruckus, a commotion of sound (for some reason I hear someone clanging on a pan with a spoon, perhaps simply because “din” first makes me think of “dinner” by virtue of its spelling, not meaning). It could be that the tremors and cacophony somehow respectively meld into a steady vibration and white noise, within the hum of which one actually can drown out distraction and disturbance to find peace.
As to why I would describe the escape from all the clamor as “furry,” I’ll use that for my acrostic:
Friction-free
Underbelly
Refreshing
Relief
Yielding
It seems I meant that it would be a soft landing that would only bring tickling, warming, soothing relief as it breaks the fall from the more putrid, rotting, artificially-created existence described earlier in the freewritten piece.
Reflection:
This was a useful exercise for revisiting my own words. It’s wild to think that we can write things that we don’t ourselves even understand at the time–even more so that we can extract meaning from it eventually, and something that actually does make sense! It’s a testament to the power of writing and how it helps us to unearth truths and propel us forward into the realization of them.
Today is one of those days when I feel discouraged to write, even if simply in response to a basic prompt as practice. What I should be doing is working on my project or at least expanding on my previous blog post with the level of characterization detail I had omitted the first time around. But I don’t seem to be, do I? It’s not standard writer’s block, though…my ideas for my project are there and swarming around and ready to be written…yet there’s this paralysis in me noggin induced by insecurity in the face of all that’s been written by all the writers out there.
Why does this happen? I throw the question out there because I know I am not alone in this. How do I know?
Well, before I answer that question, I think what first triggered all this today was reading Waiter Rant on the bus home from work. This should be a non-threat book in that it’s a nonfiction account of a guy’s experience waiting tables, something I should be able to read without comparing it to my own writing style and content (which has become a nasty occurrence whenever I read novels). The author is a good writer, though; he’s not just ranting and chronicling like it’s Dear Diary and he just wants to catalog humorous facts—he actually has a flair for descriptive and figurative language that illuminates the people and incidents involved to a very engaging degree, and he structures it effectively. And then suddenly it does become relevant content when he’s recalling a conversation with a fellow waiter who comments on his talent for writing, as evidenced by his blog of same name, the very one that eventually became the book due to its massive popularity.
Which reminds me of the close-to-zero viewership of my own blog, which then makes me question why anyone would ever want to read it . Nor my stories or ongoing book project. But it’s all fairly new and more for me anyway, so since when do I even care, right? Right.
With that assurance, I then come home tonight and happen to stumble on other blogs that truly reduce me to clearance at 8 cents per dozen. The cyber-smorgasbord of blogs to be had addressing the same content as both my professional and personal blogs is intimidating—all the creative talent scattered far and wide sowing their seeds so quickly and with such frequency and making it seem effortless. I automatically feel inferior again…
Seriously, it’s one of those days that feels like everything keeps coming back to reflection on the art of writing, but not in the empowering way.
And that was just today’s insecurity blast. At other times it comes on that occasion when my otherwise delightful immersing of self in a bookshop–a moment that is one of hand-clapping and salivating wonderment over all the literary possibilities my fingertips might fondle on those bookshelves–becomes instead like a swift slap in the face by every hardcover and paperback to be had there, taunting me from their holier-than-thou pedestals as if to say, “We made it up here. You’re still down there, and your writing is still just in your My Documents folder on a Mac.” (Yes, the books are quite bitchy when I’m in this frame of mind) Or I read the book jacket of a best-selling author’s latest novel and freak out that it follows a similar theme in a similar environment to the tale that I’m presently weaving, making me feel stupidly unoriginal and, even worse, like I’m crafting a version that could only be sub-par to this writer who has already had her first book adapted to a major motion picture.
It’s like looking at everyone else’s success as it accentuates my singular failure, and there is nothing more detrimental to the process of writing than letting that creep in and seize hold of your grey matter and squish it between its fingers.
So to get back to my earlier question of how I know I’m not alone in this—and, more importantly, that it’s okay—just as I’m revisiting Twitter tonight and esteem-crushingly marveling at everyone else’s links to genius, I came across this little pearl tweeted by Electric Literature, a blog post by Maud Newton. Posting this just yesterday, what she addresses is exactly what I’m talking about above—the crippling insecurity one feels as compared to their favorite writers. Oh gaawwd, I don’t even dare tread that path…it’s bad enough that I’ve come to measure myself against amateur bloggers…so needless to say, it’s very encouraging to see how this is a pervasive issue for writers, among both the published and the aspiring.
So I read this and I still manage to feel paralyzed, first looking at my writing project to see–if I’m not inclined to create new stuff–if I can at least read through what I did write over the weekend and revise it. Not feelin’ it. So then I click out of Word and onto this blog to either embellish on the character sketch of a real person that I initiated a few days ago or sketch myself as a character, as the next page of Room to Write directs. Yet, again…nothin’. With reluctance I then turn to the following page to just get the 3-Strikes-I’m-Out over with so I can shut down the computer and sulk behind a book to just leave it to the professionals and what they’ve already written when…aha.
Yes, I say to you that, lo and behold, page 13 is an A-Haaaa!! sort of serendipitous moment for me.
I am an avid observer of coincidence who becomes increasingly convinced by the day that there is, in fact, no such thing…so imagine my inner gasp when I see that page 13 of Room to Write involves confronting our CRITICAL INNER VOICE. As Bonni Goldberg says here, “A critical inner voice taunts you as you create. […] The best that most of us can do is acknowledge it and keep writing anyway.” Folks, I will delve into this today as an exercise/exorcism: exercising my creative confidence as I exorcise the demon of doubt from my psyche.
The Prompt:
Page 13 of Room to Write, then, asks us to convert our inner critic into a character. Consider its gender, appearance, smell, and favorite writers (if it doesn’t think that we‘re good, who is?).
Response:
My inner voice is female. At the risk of stereotyping (for the record, I’m a female, so reserve the right to generalize my kind based in my own observances of self), I say this because she has bitchy tendencies to coincide with her vulnerable questioning of me. She needs me to be secure, support her, and in this need comes a desperation and doubt that I can. So, instead of inspiring me, she tears me down, tries to hurt me to make her seem stronger, smarter. Classic insecure female, in my opinion. Next, she’ll be asking me if I think her ass looks fat in those jeans. Well, it does. She is pale and sweaty and pimply with puss oozing out and her posture is horrendously arched. She quivers like a nervous over-bred lap dog and would jump at her own shadow if she ever did dare step into the light. She yanks on my sleeves to pull my hands away from the keyboard and dangles carrot-shaped published works within my vision but outside of my reach to reinforce that which I cannot have. She is bug-eyed in Coke-bottle thick glasses, deteriorating my sight with her own myopia. Her mousy brown, thinning, yet wiry tresses with the texture of pubic hair strike like foot-long lightening away from her head, and I can smell the swampy sourness of her body odor when overactive glands from overactive pessimism spit out their secretions to moisten her dirtied linen blouse. Her preoccupation with bullying me absorbs her time away from tending to herself, though when she does indulge herself with her books (storing up on intellectual ammo to pierce and puncture me with later), among them are Fitzgerald, Dickens, Austen, Hemingway, Rowling, Niffenegger, Maguire.
Reflection:
Ick. Nasty little broad, isn’t she? Well, that felt good. This feels better. I just described someone I loathe and would never aspire to be, so why should I be so concerned about what this chick would think of me? She clearly has more problems of her own. So step off, ya floozy, and leave me be with my writing.
With that activity and brief reflection complete, I’d like to close this post with 2 points of inspiration that Maud Newton’s blog directed me to. First, in the post itself, she gives a precious word of advice—basically, keep a crappy novel that you’ve read nearby, always, so just when you’re feeling down, you can skim through it and remember how crappy that book is that still managed to get published. Second, her post provides a link to an LA Times article, which in turn quotes Ted Solotaroff from his essay, “Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years”:
“Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer’s main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer’s main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger.”
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Inner Critical Voice.
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!
On page 10 of Room to Write, Bonni Goldberg informs us that, whether we’re intending to explicitly address it or not, our views on “destiny” inevitably come through in our writing. I suppose on now considering this, it does seem avoiding it would be nearly impossible, as such a perspective would be firmly rooted in our worldview and how we approach setting our life goals. Whether our belief in destiny is definitive or something we’re exploring, our characters will ultimately portray that belief or exploration themselves, even if to the contrary as our little Devil’s Advocates. As a matter of fact, in one of the more recent chapters I’ve written, my protagonist does outright discuss her views on destiny with another character, so perhaps I was destined to get this writing prompt so soon thereafter, to help me revisit and develop that concept further.
The Prompt:
As for what today’s prompt does indeed ask us to do, we have two choices:
1) Write about “destiny” for two pages; or,
2) Write a dialogue between characters from one or more of our pieces discussing their respective beliefs in destiny.
I’m opting for numero deux. However, my spin on it is going to be as such–in homage to the recent passing of JD Salinger, my character will be speaking to none other than Catcher in the Rye‘sown Holden Caulfield. I’m also going to conceal my character’s actual name for demented reasons known only to me. Let’s call her, “Margaret” for now.
Response:
Seated on parallel wooden benches in the echoing open hall of a grand urban train station, Margaret is no longer able to ignore the penetrating glare narrowly skimming her shoulder, fired from a bench directly in front of her. Normally, she would retreat into the safe cavern of her shyness around strangers or move seats altogether, but she senses something troubled in this young man’s gaze akin to her own melancholy. He doesn’t appear threatening; he is quite clean-cut and looking smart in a well-tailored overcoat. It is only the red hunting hat that he dons that signals a mild alarm that something about him might be off.
Overwhelmed in fearful curiosity as to what his attention may be directed to at her side, Margaret summons the confidence to speak.
“Are you all right?”
Perhaps the ear flaps of his hunting cap muffle the sound from reaching his notice.
“Are you okay?”
The young man’s eyes dart up with a start as he recognizes he’s being addressed.
“Sorry?”
“Sorry, I know I’m being random, but I was just wondering if there’s something near me that’s bothering you. Hopefully, it’s not me.”
“How’d you be bothering me just sitting there?” he notes, trying to affect a blank expression, though unable to conceal an innocent bewilderment.
“I don’t know.” Margaret reddens, feeling silly that she brought this all upon herself. “I guess I might remind of you someone you don’t like.” That sounds logical enough, she thinks.
Becoming conscious of his hat, Holden takes his turn to flush, and as he slides it back genteelly off his short, unexpectedly graying hair with his left hand, he extends his right over the back-rest to invite Margaret to shake it.
“Holden. Nice to meet you.”
He’s a gentleman; and soft skin. “Margaret.”
“Sorry if I creeped you out and all. It’s nothing to do with you. I’m not a madman or anything, I was only looking at the graffiti.” He gestures to a word carved in the wood a mere couple inches from her right arm. “It’s nothing to do with you.”
Margaret interprets this repetition as a polite way of telling her to butt out. “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”
Picking up on her embarrassment, Holden replies, “No, don’t worry, I don’t think you’re being nosy or anything. I shouldn’ta been looking like I was staring at you and all. I mean, I don’t mean to be rude.”
Seeking to get past this mutual awkwardness, Margaret rotates her head and leans forward to better read the carving. “Destino,” she reads aloud. Huh.
“Means ‘destiny,’ I guess.” When Margaret doesn’t speak, Holden nervously rambles on. “You know, I hate graffiti. I hate messing up stuff that’s supposed to look nice. Just the idea that some phony would sit there and have a goddam knife to pull out and slice into this nice varnished wood that’s here for everybody else too depresses the hell outta me.” On observing her furrowing brow: “Pardon me, ma’am. Excuse my language.”
Conscious of her expression, Margaret tries to shake it off flippantly. “Oh! No, no. Not at all. Takes a lot to offend me, trust me. I was just thinking about what you said. I totally understand.”
Encouraged, Holden continues. “It’s just that I see this stuff everywhere, and it depresses me, if you want to know the truth. I saw a goddam ‘F*** you’ written on a wall in my little sister’s school, for Chrissake. I hate that. It’s lousy to write something like that in a kid’s school.”
Margaret grins inwardly at Holden’s critical cursing about cursing, and she finds her interest piqued by this complex youth approximately half her age. It seems he might be game for waxing philosophical for a brief while, at least to kill time.
“Well, I’m not a fan of graffiti either, but you have to admit this is a nicer form of it. I mean, maybe the person wasn’t ‘phony’ at all, but seriously contemplating what that word means. Maybe they were celebrating that their destiny had just been fulfilled, or praying so.”
“Believing in destiny is phony. There isn’t any such thing, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a goddam phony bastard himself.”
“You’re quite cynical for your age! I take it you see yourself as the master of your own fate, then?”
“I don’t think I’m the master of anything. We’re all stuck falling through this phony world, laughing at jokes we don’t even think are funny and taking an exam or doing work that we’re brainwashed to believe is important and stuff, and for what? Money? Reputation? Pay a dime to dance with a pretty girl? None of it adds up to a pile of beans when all’s said and done. We work ourselves to the bone to end up dead, and then what? We can’t take it with us. No, I’m no master of anything.” Just then, Holden looks off into a realm of thought invisible to Margaret and quiets to almost a whisper. “I’d like to be. I think I could be. If I could just catch those crazy kids when they came falling. I could be the master of that. I really think I could.”
Trying her best at interpretation without being too invasive, Margaret asks, “You’d like to help those that can’t help themselves. The ones that Destiny hasn’t been kind to?”
“I know it sounds crazy, like I’m some sort of madman and maybe I am, but I can’t stop thinking about those kids.” He raises his red hat back to his head as though unconsciously and pulls it over his ears snugly. “Goddam graffiti.”
Though she has no clue what kids he’s talking about nor where they’re falling from or why, empathetic soul that she is, Margaret attempts to soothe Holden by relating the best way she can. “I feel that way, too, sometimes. That life can be random, and we just have to keeping rolling with the current with our heads above water as best we can. But overall I think that flow might still be taking us somewhere, with or without our consent. Or not. I feel for others’ disillusionment, too, and would like to think someone would be there to catch me if I fell.”
She doesn’t expect it when Holden looks her directly in the eye just then.
“Too late,” he shakes his head. “But don’t worry, because it’s too late for me too.”
Margaret is perplexed at the seeming sage quality in this kid. “How so?”
“We’ve grown up. We can’t ride the carousel anymore.”
Margaret lowers her eyes. “I don’t think we should give up on ourselves just yet. I’m not giving up on me, anyways. I think Fate has something in store for me yet.”
“So you think you can still do anything about it?”
“Yeah. Well, I’d like to think so. I mean, I dobelieve in free will. More than just tossing my hands up to the skies and saying, ‘Ah well. So be it.'”
“You’d sounded more like you believed in destiny before.” Holden is looking at her skeptically now, sizing up her capacity for phoniness.
“I do. I guess I’ve just always figured we still operate ‘freely’ within that larger structure already put in place—by God, or whatever you might or apparently might not believe in. What I’m trying to say is that I personally think we have an ultimate destiny, even if the paths we take to get there and the experiences along the way are for the most part controlled by us. There might be those ‘little events’ planted here and there for a purpose, then, like occasional guideposts or guardrails to keep us on track.”
Peering at her stoically from beneath his cap, Holden does not look convinced.
Margaret presses on with the proverbial college-try. “I remember reading somewhere, in someone’s blog, that that was their theory on deja-vu, that what we see that feels so familiar are actually signs that we’re on target…like on some level we’ve already lived out our destiny, and what we see as deja-vu is the playback, in brief clips, to show us that what we’re doing, at that exact point in time, is exactly what we’re supposed to be doing and where.”
“I don’t know what a ‘blog’ is, but that’s an interesting thought. It really is, no kidding. I get those sometimes, too, those deja-vus, but I don’t tell anybody about them or anything because those Pencey crooks’d think I was a damn sissy and knock my lights out. They really would. But still, I get them. The deja-vus, I mean. I figure they only mean that I’m crazy and all. Like my brain is on the fritz.”
“I don’t know if we’ll ever really know what they are, but I think it’s safe to say they’re not a sign of insanity. Whatever those ‘Pencey crooks’ say, it happens to everyone, even them, whoever they are.”
“They don’t matter anymore. Never did, really. You’ll probably think I’m crazy for saying this and all, but it’s my kid sister that’s got everything figured out, if you really want to know the truth.” Holden instantly appears to glow from within at the mention. “That kid kills me, she really does. You would like her. I mean, it’s not like she’s perfect or anything, but she’s really likable. Old Phoebe’s the real deal.”
Margaret smiles kindly at the sibling sentimentality. “So, do you think Phoebe would believe in anything like Destiny? Does she not need you to catch her?”
The corners of his mouth turn down a perceptible degree. “No. She doesn’t need me for anything at all. All I do is let her down, but I don’t know what I’d do without her, though, that’s for sure. That kid’s pretty much got it figured out, she really does. She’s not going to need to rely on Destiny or anything because she’ll make her own. She’ll grab the goddam reins of that carousel horse and get it to race around the other way. I really think she could do it, too. If she wanted to and all.”
“Holden, if you can believe that of anyone, you can’t be a total fatalist. Surely you can believe it of yourself, then.”
Holden eyes Margaret up and down, only just then noticing that she’s an attractive woman. He always did like them older, but this time he isn’t feeling sexy about it. He isn’t quite sure what he’s feeling, except that it’s the same sensation that dissipates through him when he is hanging out with his sister.
“Old Phoebe,” he says, pretending to ignore Margaret’s insight. “She kills me. She really does. If I could stuff it all and put it behind a pane of glass, I’d do it. I would. That’s the problem with Destiny, you know. She moves life forward, closer to being older and supposedly wiser and all that crap. No, we’re all just tumbling through space, even Old Phoebe. Some’ll get a softer landing than others, is all.”
Holden does not so much as jolt a fraction of a millimeter when the loud speaker unexpectedly blares its announcement of a train ready to depart its platform. Margaret, conversely, is thrown from the jumbling and intersecting thoughts coursing through her mind in the wake of Holden’s words, the speaker’s static-y proclamation slicing through her reflection with familiarity.
“Oh my God.” She leaps to standing. “My train. Holden, I have to go.”
Margaret knows she needs to flee with hyper-speed to make her train, yet the morose energy surrounding Holden is compelling.
Holden, young gentleman that he is, likewise rises onto his feet and removes his hat with a modest bow. “Ma’am.”
“Margaret.”
“Margaret. Meeting you just now has been sort of like–“
“Destiny. I know. Holden?”
He extends his right hand out for her to shake. She makes a motion to meet it when the loud speaker bombards them again. Distracted from thought, she operates on instinct and embraces him firmly. On reluctantly disconnecting, she sways back and, on pivoting on her heel toward the direction of her platform, she rewinds the movement only to seize the red hat out of Holden’s hand. Reshaping it with her fist, she finds solace in the body heat it has retained. She briefly brings it to her lips to offer a fond peck–closing her eyes to inhale its fibers simultaneously–before affixing it back on Holden’s head.
On resuming her pivot, she turns her head counter to the spin to ask again, “Holden?”
“Yeah.”
“Catch me. If you can.”
Holden, the warmth of his hunting hat trickling down to consume his entire being, sucks at his lower lip for a second.
“I’ll try. I really will.”
He offers Margaret a quasi-salute behind her back as he watches her meld into the masses that carry her like a current toward her next destination.
Reflection:
* sigh *
Rest in peace, Mr. Salinger.
Find peace in unrest, Holden. (And you, too, “Margaret”)
Room to Writepage 9 is yet another freewriting activity, this time launching from the word “game.” If you’re writing this by hand, you’re supposed to fill 3 pages before stopping. The idea, once again, is to unleash whatever comes to mind without thinking about it–writing needs to be messy sometimes. In the trash might be some treasure to incorporate into your writing projects, but if there isn’t, no need to feel guilty in just discarding it. Goldberg likens it to the necessity of mixing clay before being able to mold it into a sculpture. Okay, then, time to find what comes out of the ol’ grey matter tonight.
Response:
GAME game on you have a problem with this? bring it bring it on sucka I am so sick and loathing of people who play these petty games don’t leave things be lose all sense of perspective and just lose themselves in nonsense the rotten recesses of their own minds and feeding nothing to those who need it most giving not but taking all and dumbly standing by to let others pass without lifting a finger to help in the endeavor and they watch and they jeer and they crumble in their own self-loathing they forget the rules they impose on themselves but hold others strictly accountable and whatever happened to the happy connotation of game child’s games they were fun once but it’s acceptable when children not adults playing at children’s games mild lost to tea and egg pie and muddle gunk and tomfoolery wizened but not wise enough they bore me tore me ripped me off and can now f*** off for all I care the consequences may be harsh but I can withstand I can withstand I speak boldly but pray I can can really hold up to this torment this swallow this this this junk that they may expose me to and I try to hold my head above the the cesspool not inhaling its chunky funk and drowning from it stabbing my brain with it it’s dead dead sinking fallen swollen hardened whitened flaking and saturated and wallowing on its own at the bottom but I will rise I must rise I must stay above and do so by not being so lofty the helium I pump into my ego my conceit my superiority my arrogance will not be what lifts me in the end but be the iron ball bearing in my waist coat pocket that pulls me down the gravity of the situation that levels where I ought to be and nothing more. floating atop the refuse of others’ garbage and spew and not being able to lift from it for I contribute to it my face down in spongy stench and adrift with secretions of my own fallacy i drift wade I stroke I preen I try to stay clean try to stay dry until I reach the island before me just a few strokes further yet with every splash comes another wave to send me back further from where I started the fish nibble at my toes and I catch my breath and try to inhale the purity calmness gaseous extremity that I can believe in the cool quake calmness of din and then I reach the apex of snow and glide and glisten along my way the sunny fresh extremes of hilltops glossed in icing and glint and free falling to a furry escape.
Reflection:
I don’t know if my onscreen attempt would have reached 3 pages or not, but what I do know is that my brain physically hurts now that I stopped. I’m very tired, for one, but another reason is the simple fact that freewriting is like bench-pressing for your mind. It’s a way to keep it bulked up and toned at the same time as setting it free. This time I actually typed with my eyes closed, going back afterwards only to correct for spelling. I found that visuals came to me more clearly that way, even if I couldn’t pause to think through how to describe them well enough. I can’t say I can find anything to salvage from what I spewed above, but it was worth the attempt. It’s all about “showing up on the page,” as Goldberg says.
*jabbing fists up into sky repeatedly in excitement* Yeehaw, kids, today we get to have some silly, gross fun. You may have noticed that I skipped over page 5 of Room to Write–I did so intentionally not because I discount the value in that exercise, but, rather, because it is one best undertaken on one’s own on an actual sheet of paper. You see, my dear friends, page 5 was about writing an entire page of “junk”–utter feces that you know is bad and write because you know it’s bad. In this way, you can reflect on how much knowledge you do indeed have on good writing, as you have to know what’s good in order to know what’s bad. Make sense? The cathartic moment of that drill is to then rip out that sheet of paper, crumple it, and toss it in the rubbish bin. Ah, we’ll all have to try that one…sounds orgasmic.
The Prompt:
All right, so to finally get around to today’s exercise, then: SNOT. Yup. Write a full page about snot is what Goldberg profoundly asks us to do. When finished, reflect on how you felt before, during, and after writing. Consider if there’s anything worthy that could be included in one of your writing projects and/or brainstorm other possibly offensive topics that you could tackle. This is like sweet karma for my dual-mucus reference in our first freewriting activity 🙂
Response:
SNOT. Pick it, lick it, flick it at someone you hate, or store it under the table top. Yeah, you go ahead and pretend that your fingertip never happens to wander to your nostril, hesitating at the threshold in trepidation of the darkness within, then penetrates through only to delight in the tickling of the hairs lining the nasal cavity as the fingernail goes spelunking in search of gummy treasure. It whistles as it works, and, when it hits paydirt, shovels up a hearty scoop, greedily trying to carry back to the light more than it can muster. It attempts to go back and pick up what falls behind, only to lose another sizable clump of slippery sponge, and as it feverishly attempts to recover that latest bit, it sheds even more. Time out. The fingertip calls it. It exits momentarily to give its epidermis breath and reassess the situation. Cupped within the nail is a miniscule glob of goo with a nose hair projecting out of it–that’s worth something, at least. Wiping the semi-precious cargo onto the quilted square of two-ply toilet paper, the search party ventures back in, regretting that there’s not enough room in that cave to bring reinforcements. The fingernail drills deeper and deeper, its strategy being to plow the remnants of what it previously left behind further up the passage until they congeal into one super gob that it can hopefully hook itself under and up and scrape back along the upper lining in dragging it back to the open air. The risk it runs is severely high, however: it is possible, just possible, that the nail will in fact shove too far and, not having the grip it thought it did, end up tossing the booger into the narrower recesses of the sinus, where not finger nor fingernail can ever pass. Beads form upon the fingernail as it contemplates this scenario, shortly before it curses itself in having the thought, as now it needs to fear self-fulfilling prophecy, and as it thinks very hard with whatever equivalent of grey matter a fingernail might have to think with in trying not to think pessimistically, it comes to and…doh! The Super Gob is gone. Tucked into the nether reaches of the nasal passage as unwillingly anticipated. Defeated, and not a little sullen, the fingernail allows itself to be dragged out by one pissy finger for a royal berating back at camp. Meanwhile, the gob nests where it thinks it’s safe for the time being. It causes discomfort to the nose and giggles at its being the source of a high-pitched whistling every time its human host tries to breath. It sits there contentedly, feeling victorious and stronger than ever in its new super-fun super-size, until….being without a nose, it cannot distinguish in particular that the stinging it feels also smells of mint, eucalyptus, a dash of clove, perhaps? It only knows that it BURNS, and its super-fun super-size doesn’t seem so formidable any longer. Indeed, it’s losing its goo to a mucus-slide, as its sides go from gelatinous to slippery liquid oozing back down towards the light. It tingles and elongates and slides down through the shining, tickling hairs, amassing in a puddle inside the soft, powdery fibers of a tissue. Coughing and hacking as if it had a throat with mucus inside to cough and hack up, the liquefied snot reconvenes with the rest of its original self (spotting others it recognizes fallen into the same paper wad—“Grandma? Uncle? Is this Heaven?” it asks). Before yielding to a final defeat as it tears away at a piece of the white tissue to wave in surrender, its eyes, if it had eyes, fall on the key to its demise. Shaking a fist as though to curse the gods (and as though it had a fist), “Olbas!” it cries…”Olbas!”
Reflection:
Yowzah. Okay. Um, to reflect on that, then. Well, before writing, I was very excited about the topic, as it gave a chance to make up a lot of nonsense while still being able to be descriptive of something real that I have quite a bit of experience with (oh come on, like you don’t, too). After the series of reflections that the previous prompts asked for, this was the first delving into fiction.
While writing this, I found it coming to me almost unsettlingly easily, making me think along the entire way, “Wait, I think I know exactly what that would look/feel like,” and then question, “Why in the hell do I know that?!” As I saw the bodily components become “characters” in their own rights, the debate was then how realistic to maintain the “tale”…are the nail and the finger a single unit, or separate entities? If those or the nose and the snot themselves are, in fact, characters, then to what extent do I anthropomorhize them, for being body parts in and of themselves, can they have body parts of their own to enable them to see, feel, smell, etc? How to maintain consistency, and to what extent must consistency be maintained when it is approached as fictitious?
After writing, I felt rather relieved because it was a challenge trying to come up with different descriptors for something so disgusting, and I had been feeling embarrassed about how gross I was getting while at the same time reveling in the freedom of it. I felt satisfied with the closure I gave, as Olbas Oil has been a true beacon unto this sinus-sufferer this winter season. It felt like sweet redemption.
So, if I had to contemplate other social taboos that may be worth exploration in my writing, the first things that come to mind are: poo, sweat, dandruff, eye crust, ear wax, pubic hair, semen, yeast infections, menstruation, belly button lint, toe jam, scabs, drool, belching, farting, and diarrhea. Have at it, if you dare…
Page 4 of Room to Write asks us to describe the first incident in which we were affected profoundly by words. In describing this, we should address what led up to the encounter, our physical reaction to it, and anything else that was happening simultaneously. We’re free to fill in the gaps with fiction, if we please, and perhaps construct it as a poem. I’m going for prose, but you do what you will.
Response/Reflection:
I can’t swear that it was the first time words ever profoundly affected me, just that it’s the earliest memory that my pea-brain can pinpoint right now. It’s arguable, after all, that I was first profoundly affected when I first learned how to read, but I don’t recall there ever being a “Eureka!” swell of emotion then; it’s more so the appreciation that I can attach to it now in retrospect. I think of the metallic-spined Golden Books that kicked off my reading career, and my red paperback of The Story of Ferdinandthat certainly made its place in my heart–but, again, a meaning established in my adult years when I so needed to hear truths put simply in my ever-increasingly complicated world. And I wish I could remember the first orally articulated words that may have moved me, but I think it would have to be when I myself took on the challenge of words, the composition of them in forms of my own choosing if not creation, that stands out as most pivotal to the writing life I’ve embarked on since.
I think it was fourth grade when I submitted my first “book” into the running for my elementary school’s Young Authors Contest. It was an anthology, actually, a collection of poetry that I carefully entitled, Poems of Modern Style. I suppose I classified them as “modern” based on the youthful and pop cultural content they covered (the ’80s punk aesthetic being a component) as well as the fact that I did, with the exception of a few haikus, create my own poetic structures to follow. It’s difficult to recall what exactly led up to these choices; I can only assume I chose the poetic medium because I couldn’t think of a plot around which to develop a decent story of any length (not to mention I’d probably noted the failure of my previous year’s prose piece, something about a lost bunny or puppy trying to find its way home. The dialogue was painfully monotonous; I clearly knew nothing of dialogue tags at age 7). So I suppose I had a range of miscellaneous ideas floating through my head that did not necessarily follow a cohesive theme, yet could adequately be dumped under that catch-all descriptor of “modern.”
The poetic form gave me the freedom to explore all these ideas in flowing form or fragmented sketches. Yes, I was 8 years old and an avid Shel Silverstein reader that was of the school of thought that all poems had to rhyme, so constrained myself in this respect, but it was rules like rhyming or the number of syllables measured in those haikus that really did prompt me to stretch and squish and swap words to comply with those forms without sacrificing meaning. That would be, then, when I caught the first glimmer of understanding how word-rich the English language is, that there are so many degrees of meaning even among synonyms that we are at liberty to play around with all sorts of words in trying to find the specific ones that truly convey what we’re seeking to say, whether in isolation or combination. Poetry forced me to think more deliberately, weigh each word’s worth more when there were so few alloted to a line and so few lines beyond that. Sure, I certainly remember cranking a couple of those out, feeling satisfied enough on the first try and ready to move on, but there were others that taught me the value of revision and being a discerning reader of my own writing. I further recall that I had drawn illustrations to accompany each poem, demonstrating that interplay between word and image and how they create meaning in synergy…or maybe it was also because I loved to draw and thought it made the pages pretty. (It did.) I painstakingly copied the final versions down onto construction paper of alternating rainbow colors and bound it all together to submit for the judging.
This process acquainted me with the eye-strain and sore hand muscles that accompany writing, but also with how these symptoms of pain were salved by the flutter in my stomach that signaled both the thrill of creative achievement and the anxiety over what others may think once I placed my baby in their arms. And even the agony of anxiety was utterly diminished when they announced the results: I was a finalist. I didn’t end up winning, but I had made the top four, and that was the first external recognition I’d received of my words that wasn’t just a grade on an essay. Perhaps I shouldn’t have relied on outside reinforcement, but it was the validating boost this shy girl needed to affirm that what I’d worked so hard on and genuinely enjoyed all by myself was something of merit that others could enjoy too. In the short-term, it inspired me to tackle an illustrated “novella” as a sixth-grader two years later for that same contest (I won, even got to go “on tour” reading select chapters in different classrooms) and cemented a love affair with words that will stay with me for a lifetime.
The Fallen Monkey 