Strangers do it. Neighbors do it. Friends do it. We all do it.
Talk about the weather.
Now, write about it.
Write about how weather affects you.
What is your favorite type of weather?
Does weather play a small or large role in your life? How? Why?
Write about weather.
Me? I like rain, as long as I don’t have to be out in it.
Photo: View from my front porch on a lovely rainy day.
Today’s writing prompt is inspired by Poetic Medicine by John Fox, Infusing our poems with what nature teaches us:
A forest fire is awesome and frightening but clears the forest floor for new growth.
Metaphors and poetic images of earth can often express such feelings better than plain descriptive words, which seem to crack under the pressure of deep feeling. Feelings of grief might bring to mind images of winter’s coldness. Pablo Neruda crystalizes a wintry grief image:
Yes: seed germs, and grief, and everything that throbs
frightened in the crackling January light
will ripen, will burn, as the fruit burned ripe.
The insights we gain by observing nature, and the poems we make which include these insights, help us cope with our rage, grief and pain.
The poetry of earth offers us a chance to experience something more about life than our self-definition and ordinary language usually permit. Like the forest after the fire, this something more is full of new growth and unknown potential.
Writing Prompt: Choose an aspect of the natural world which you feel has something to teach you. It could be an animal, plant, or mineral. What specific quality does it express that speaks to you about your own life?
Or write about an experience in nature that had a profound effect on you.
Paint a word picture about anything you want, perhaps something that happened over the weekend, or during this past week.
Or, paint a word picture of what you look like to others.
Or write about what you experienced (saw, heard, felt, sensed) during a walk.
Write about your garden. Or a community garden. Or a public garden.
Just Write!
Write about a scar. Could be a scar you have. A scar you have seen. A scar on Mother Earth. Could be an emotional scar.
Write about a scar from someone else’s point of view . . . someone who caused the accident, caused the scar, was bewitched or repelled by the scar.
Or write from the point of view of the scar.
Excerpt from Poetic Medicine, by John Fox, “Giving Yourself Permission to be Wild and Magnificent”
Earth offers us powerful images and metaphors with which to tell our stories. Rather than thinking of the earth’s resources as commodities like oil and wood . . . consider the more intangible qualities which nature offers us, such as beauty and spectacle, turmoil and order, mystery and predictability.
A sense of beauty – wild and terrible or lovely and breathtaking – can be healing.
Infusing your writing with earth imagery will help reveal your unique voice and imagination. The stories of earth – and our stories – are interwoven, constantly changing in the cyclic process of birth, growth and death. A language for expressing these deep changes in your life can be found by tuning to the language of the earth.
Poem-making
and the natural world give you permission to be wild and magnificent. Your poetic musings of connection with the earth can take you beyond conventional ways of looking at yourself.
We are often so busy conforming to traditional notions of success that we miss this joyful opportunity to cut loose and feel our lives – to express our highest potential and explore our true legacy.
Prompt: Using inspiration from the natural world present an outrageous, yet honest, picture of yourself . . . or paint a word picture about anything you want, perhaps something that happened over the weekend, or during this past week.
When you read the next ditty, read “d-o-e-s” as in female deer.
Mairzy Doats
Mares eat oats and does eat oats
and little lambs eat ivy
a kid will eat ivy, too
wouldn’t you?
Say it fast and it becomes:
Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey
A kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you?
Link to what this sounds like.
I think of this rhyme when I think of pacing – paying attention to the cadence and rhythm of writing.
How and when to increase the pace when writing.
Paraphrased from Make A Scene by Jordan Rosenfeld:
By pacing your scenes well and choosing the proper length for each scene, you can control the kinds of emotional effects your scenes have, leaving the reader with the feeling of having taken a satisfying journey.
Pace should match the emotional content of your scene. First scenes should get going with an emotional bang—start big or dramatic, ratchet up the suspense or lay in the fear, since you’re capturing the reader here.
Your first scene is like a cold pool—the reader needs to dive in and get moving fast, or he’ll be too cold to stay in the water for very long. In other scene types, you’ll have more leeway with pacing. In the first scene, however, a quick pace—with more action and less reflection or exposition—will be a better sell.
Dramatic scenes – Start slow, speed up pace to match emotional intensity, slow down for reflection.
Speed up pace: Strip away exposition, use dialogue, quick action, and hot emotional content to build intensity.
When and how to slow the pace
After a lot of action or intense dialogue give the reader time to digest what happened.
Use description, narration, details and interior monologues to slow the pace.
When a character is contemplative, time slows down.
During these contemplative scenes you can weave in details. Be specific and descriptive. Give your character something to observe or something to do, more than hair twirling.
Your turn: Do a freewrite about pacing.
Here’s mine, thinking about Mairzy Doats. This was a quickly written spontaneous type of writing, just for fun.
Go too fast and we get frantic and hear garble versus calm, steady breaths and an even, gentle flow.
Calm is water caressing rocks, dark green moss going with the flow.
No rough and tumble white water rapids. No gurgling over brooks, no water cascading over boulders.
Rather, when we slow our writing, we achieve a calm, quiet, graceful feeling.
Pace yourself. Eat watermelon slowly. Savor the juices.
Pace yourself.
Write fast let you lose that thought.
To slow down, think about the poppy scene in Wizard of Oz. Slower, slower, snail’s pace slow.
Meditate. Ommmmmmm.
To pick up the pace, think caffeine and the energy of a toddler/child, always on the go. Child knows no pacing. Always running, talking, doing.
Challenge self: No such thing as Writer’s Block. Just keep writing.
More on pacing: Find the right pace by Adair Lara: Prompt #70
If your life was surrounded by a frame, what would the edges look like?
Sharp, soft, curvy, plain, straight?
Brightly colored, small, large?
Dull, deep, shallow?
Stand out?
Plain, simple, fancy?
Blend in?
Fierce?
Protective?
Describe what the edges of your life’s frame would look like.
Does your frame help you or hinder you?
What kind of edge does your life hold?
Write about a frame that borders your life.
Your fictional characters should be as different from one another as the real people in your life. One way to show differences is in their voices.
Years ago, returning home from Aqua Zumba, I drove past Hermann Sons Hall and remembered the German woman who managed the building as if it were her immaculate residence. On our early morning walks, my husband and I watched as she polished door knobs, washed windows, and replaced gravel in the driveway. Her mission was to keep “her” building spotless. You didn’t want to cross her.
How does a writer establish “voice” for characters?
If your character is a stoic German woman who manages a building as if it were her pristine cottage, picture what she looks like. Short hair, stern features, sensible shoes, tailored clothing. Then you can imagine what she sounds like: sharp, clipped sentences, uses precise words sparingly.
Contrast that with a Mother Goose type: round in looks, ample lap for children to sit on, laugh lines forming parenthesis around her mouth, her eyes crinkle with merriment. She might talk softly or slow. You can hear the smile in her sugary voice.
Write a scene showing two characters’ personalities using dialogue.
For more on writing about character: Three-dimensional characters . . . Prompt #444 on The Write Spot Blog.
You have probably heard about the importance of knowing your fictional characters so well that you know what he/she had for breakfast. Readers don’t need to know this, but the writer does.
You don’t need to include everything you know about your characters in your story, but as the writer/creator, you need to know a huge amount of information about the people (and animals) who populate your story.
The challenge is to create memorable characters rather than one-dimensional characters. Your fictional characters are like actors in a scene.
Some fictional characters seem shallow while others seem richer. The difference could be that the writer knows the characters/actors so well, that the dialogue and the details fit the character.
Your fictional actor may want to step out of character and exhibit new behavior. This is fine, as long as it’s credible. Your job as writer is to drop convincing clues so when the character does an about face, the reader believes it. You can still have twists and turns that are surprising for the reader, but everything needs to be consistent with what the character would or could do.
Examples:
Is your character a loving husband who shows his affection with gentle actions towards his wife? If yes, then it would be out character for him to leave her stranded at a party. There would need to be a reason for his out-of-character behavior. Maybe he found out she isn’t who he thought she was.
If your character shuffles in worn-out bedroom slippers, listens to the radio from 4:30 pm to 6 pm in her favorite armchair while knitting, then goes to bed at 7:30 pm, it would be strange for her to dress up in Spanx and a tight red dress to go bar hopping. She could do this, but you would have to set up the scene so it’s believable.
If you portray your characters as authentic, then when your characters drive off a cliff in a convertible, the reader believes they would really do this. Yes, I’m thinking about Thelma and Louise.
Want to practice?
Write three scenes.
Show your character in an ordinary scene . . . something they usually do, their routine, their habits.
Write a scene with details about what might make that character go over the edge, a “last-straw” type of thing, a friend or a relative did something one too many times. Or the character receives news that spins his/her life in a new direction.
Write the final scene showing the character exhibiting new behavior.
In “The Art of Fiction,” John Gardener describes “the fictional dream.” This is when the author has described a scene so viscerally, the reader can see, feel, hear, taste, or smell what’s going on in the scene. Sensory detail is important in writing, but how to achieve it?
Practice!
Try this:
Study an object for ten minutes. It can be something you are wearing, an item on your desk or on a kitchen shelf. It can be something you use every day or a special item put away to keep it safe. You can describe the glass flower decoration above.
Notice the details of the object — the shape and texture. Explore the pieces that make up the whole. Hold or touch the item. Notice the texture, the heft. How does it feel? Does it have a smell? Look at the object from all angles.
After ten minutes, write a description of the item so thorough that a reader can imagine, see, feel, smell this object.
Next, if appropriate, write about a memory associated with this object.
That’s it. This is great practice for writing details that enrich your stories with visceral elements.