“I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on.”
– Rita Dove
Hi Word Architects:
When I sit down to write, I have to start with something concrete: my father’s voice, the last time I ate fruit cake, the memory of my sister’s face in a window. If I start too large, with broad topics like love or war or truth, I quickly get lost and have nothing real to say. I have theories and ideas, but I cannot touch them.
What can you taste, feel and touch? What do you hear when you listen at your front door? Did the wind on your street smell different after September 11th? What does the character you’re writing about hear when she closes her eyes? Does she taste the creep of time as she walks through her parents’ apartment? What do you see when you look out through her eyes?
When you get that close, it says it all.
Nita(creeping along)Sweeney
(c) 2003 by Nita Sweeney
