Live Afresh

Our job as writers is to enable our reader or listener to feel they take a journey - that they walk not only in the shoes of, but in the body of, the narrator or character of our story or poem.

Their ‘Aha!’ moment - that elusive and profound instant in which they arrive at their journey’s destination, are satisfied and somehow become more than themselves - is also the writer’s moment of liberation.

How do we take them there?

To unlock that space, we find ways of describing situations afresh. We want to truly observe rather than default into cliché - those standard descriptive templates.

Many techniques in our writers’ toolkit can support us with that: use of the senses, clear following of point of view, connection to emotion, use of strong verbs, and form on the page (in the case of poetry).

It can help, as we begin to describe something - whether imagined, remembered or observed - to think of ourselves as a young child, or alternatively as an alien arriving from another planet, knowing it for the very first time.

Let’s take the experience of having a bath. If you were sinking into the misty warmth of a steaming tub for the first time, how would it look, smell, taste and sound? What would you feel in your body? Put your metaphorical finger on words that convey, in concrete terms, any sense of weight or relaxation or heat. Question every theory and assumption you hold about how it will be and arrive afresh at the experience. Dive deeper and deeper: find a place where everything is in movement and you and the reader are in play in that.

You might now like to undertake a mini word experiment and write for a few minutes on the subject of ‘taking a bath’. When you’ve done that, here’s a beautiful description of that very thing by Amy Lowell.

The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is a smell of tulips and narcissus in the air.

The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.

Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is almost too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright day. I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots. The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps by the window, and there is a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air.

Such movement, colour, sensuality and connection to the subject!

In the online group last month, talking about evocative moments, we looked at Sylvia Plath’s masterpiece Ariel…

This is the first half of the featured article from the Wild Words Newsletter for June 2023. Subscribe on the homepage.