Monthly Archives: January 2012

20 Ways to Make It Better–Way #9

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#9 — Create Fresh Images

Giraffe by Hans Hillewaert

Clichés happen. It’s our brain’s way of being efficient. Ask for a nice day and your brain will serve up sunshine, blue sky, maybe some trees, a few flowers. Ask for a policeman, a parade, a politician? (OK, maybe in this season of madness, don’t ask for a politician.) Whatever you ask for, your brain is quick to fill in the blanks with the old, the tired, the familiar, the usual.

Part of the work of writing, and a whole lot of the fun, is in finding and conveying fresh images. Imagine looking at the world through a new pair of glasses, maybe some that are a little out of focus. Or in 3-D. Imagine being a little kid again and seeing a giraffe for the first time. Imagine learning the meaning of a new word and using it in a new way, or making up a new word that conveys exactly the image you’ve created. “Certain images create private little excitements in the mind,” said E.L. Doctorow.

“Squint,” Naomi Epel advised us in her kit, The Observation Deck. “Look at the world through a mirror.” “Roll up a piece of paper and create a pirate’s looking glass.”

Gaze out windows for long periods of time, stare into treetops, slow down! Follow a little kid around and ask her questions about what she sees, how things work, or just listen to her. Kids make metaphor like I eat M&Ms (unconsciously, by the mouthful). In her book, PoemCrazy, Susan Wooldridge quotes her son, Daniel, with a series of his, “It yooks yike” metaphors. And I love what Robin Simmons is doing on her blog, Bountiful Healing, with visual images sometimes evoked by prompts from A Writer’s Book of Days. On his blog, Chuckography, photographer Chuck Boyd (the father of my children), continues to surprise me with his fresh photographic images.

Image/imagination. Keep those words together in your mind so that when you open the “fresh image” file, your imagination comes automatically and permanently attached.

What’s the freshest image you observed today? The freshest image you created?

 

20 Ways to Make It Better — Way # 8

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#8—Embrace language

Language is more than words. It is music and rhythm, sound, and rhyme, texture and layers. Language is art and graffiti, attitude and place, geography and history. Language is family and what you heard at the kitchen table and on the back porch and hollered up from the stairs on a Saturday morning. Language is what you do with words and it is the silence between the words.

“Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no name,” said Toni Morrison.

Savor it. Roll vowels around in your mouth and hold consonants between your teeth. Place metaphors beneath your tongue.

Go for the figurative. Be poetic. Find the fresh way to describe something. Use at least one surprising word in every sentence. Read poetry beneath a full moon, in your car while you’re stuck in traffic, to your pillow before you go to sleep. Say words out loud because you love the sound of them. Keep a bowl of words on your writing table. Snack food.

Write 25 words for rain, 15 for wind, 33 for love and 6 for the way new grass feels under your bare feet. Write 11 words for feet.

Weed out clichés and word packages. What’s a cliché? My teacher told me, “If you’ve heard it, read it, or used it before… it’s cliché.” What’s a word package? A phrase that’s too familiar, too overused, not exactly a cliché, but close enough to to call family. Make it fresher.

Study authors you love to read and whose language resonates with you. Copy passages into your notebook so you sense the physicality of their language. When you come upon phrases that make you catch your breath, write them down. Use them as prompts for your writing practice.

Use the language of your fears, give voice to your terrors, call them up in the night and name them. Do this too with your joys and your pleasures. Write in the language of your prayers.

“Language is the only homeland,” said Czeslaw Milosz.

Know this: You will spend your whole writing life creating the language with which to tell your stories.

When was the last time language stopped you in your tracks? Whose use of language do you admire?

(A Writer’s Book of Days has more to say about words and language.)

20 Ways to Make It Better — Way #7

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Be specific. Write in concrete, not in clouds.

Last post we talked about going deeper and suggested one way to go deeper is to be specific. When you write, write the names of things. Rather than bird, write sparrow or starling; instead of tree, write eucalyptus or willow. Give colors their shades: tomato, brick, blood, and sounds their tones: high-pitched, squeal, honk. It’s not just a house, it’s a Spanish bungalow. We’re not eating cupcakes, we’re eating Ho Ho’s.

Hemingway said, “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.” The Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Chinook off the Pacific. Billy’s Lunch Counter. Giving places their names honors them and brings a sense of verisimilitude to your writing. You become an authority.

Another way to be specific is to use the concrete, not the abstract. The abstract—dinner was delicious—leaves the reader to guess what delicious is. She has to take a break from your story to go into her own mental files to find “delicious,” which bumps her out of your story for just that long. Then what she comes up with might not be what you meant at all. The concrete—we had seared albacore with a hot Chinese dipping sauce—tells what delicious is, at least for you or the character you’re writing about. Specificity helps the reader use their imagination. How much more colorful and rich to imagine a plate with the dark lines of the grill seared across the white skin of the albacore, beside it, the small dish of Chinese dipping sauce.

Abstract words always ask for judgment—delightful, thrilling, disgusting, ugly, lovely, tremendous, and so forth–all need the reader’s interpretation. (And is anyone besides me over the word amazing?) Concrete words say what is.

Note: Make sure the specific details you choose are true and right for the piece. Take care not to bloom your azaleas in the fall or pop up your toast before Herbert Hoover was elected.

Specificity is generosity, someone said. Be a generous writer.

Homework assignment: Write 17 shades of blue, give me nine kinds of cake. Describe something “beautiful.”