The Write Spot Blog by Marlene Cullen

Tag: J.T. Bushnell

  • The neurological impact of sensory detail.

    Stories should be aimed not at our heads but at our hearts.

    “And this is where things get interesting, because description actually allows access to our hearts in a neurophysical way.”

    I have wondered why reading something with sensory detail leaves more of an impression than writing that doesn’t have sensory detail.

    According to studies, “when we read about an odor, it engages the exact same part of the brain as actually smelling it, and those parts of the brain reside in the lower region, alongside our emotional centers. . . When you write using smells, or images, or sensations, you’re actually gaining access to the emotional area of the brain, and this is why stories can take such precise aim at the heart.

    Words like lavender, cinnamon, and soap, for example, elicit a response not only from the language processing areas of our brain, but also those devoted to dealing with smells. The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.”

    Excerpted from “The Heart and the Eye: How Description Can Access Emotion,” by J. T. Bushnell, Jan/Feb 2013. Poets & Writers Magazine

    J. T. Bushnell applies neurophysics to effective writing, shedding light on how strong description gains access to the emotional area of the brain.

  • Concrete Details

    J.T. Bushnell wrote, “I once burst into tears during a Tobias Wolff reading . . . as Wolff intoned the final passages from ‘Bullet in the Brain,’ I broke the silence of the packed auditorium with a gasp, a sob.”

    Bushnell goes on to explain his strong emotional reaction.

    “It was the final scene that set me off.”

    This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game.

    “Half a page later, the story ends with the passage that brought me to a fever pitch.”

    For now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the field, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt.

    “These passages by themselves seem innocuous enough. Each offers a series of descriptions, nothing more. But the conclusion I’ve come to over the years is that the description is exactly what produced my reaction.

    By description I mean the concrete, the things we can observe with our five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. I do not mean simple adjectives. I do not mean descriptions such as ‘The weather was glorious.’ Glory is an abstraction. The glorious is useless because it can’t show us anything concrete.

    It can’t show a white-hot sun perched overhead, or a sky so hard and blue that a fly ball might shatter it. It can’t show a pitcher’s shadow puddled under his cleats, or heat rising from the ground in shimmering corrugation. It can’t produce the smell of hot aluminum bleachers. It can’t let you taste the sweat on your lip when you go too long between slugs of cold beer. Only concrete description can do that.

    As novelist Richard Bausch advises,  . . .  a good story is about experience, not concepts and certainly not abstractions. . . . get rid of all those places where you are commenting on things, and let the things stand for themselves. Be clear about the details that can be felt on the skin and in the nerves.”

    Excerpted from “The Heart and the Eye, How Description Can Access Emotion” by J.T. Bushnell, Jan/Feb 2013 Poets & Writers