by Theresa Garee | Sep 24, 2020 | Blog
Everything Actual is an Advantage
Sensory detail grounds writing. In memoir, detail forms the shape of a lived experience. In a novel, the choice of which details to leave in and which to leave out shape the story as much or sometimes more than the plot.
One story set in New Orleans might feature an ornate Garden District house with a painted porch. Flamingo pink roses spill from baskets. Plum morning glory climbs a lattice frame. Mid-morning, an elderly woman patiently trims blossoms, gathering them into a bouquet.
A different story might portray the dark night of the French Quarter. At 2am, on a Sunday, an elderly woman in a shiny purple lycra bodysuit slithers out of a hotel room into the street. She passes a man in tattered clothes who can barely stand long enough to piss against the stone hotel foundation.
Same city. Two very different stories.
Better yet, combine them in the same story.
Show the contrast, the underbelly. And don’t assume the underbelly is the French Quarter. Choose the details of what goes on behind the doors of one of the fancy painted houses.
Show it all.
As novelist Toni Morrison said, “Everything actual is an advantage.” Put the light against the dark to see the full perspective.
For more writing wisdom, please check out You Should Be Writing, the writing journal from Mango Publishing by Brenda Knight and Nita Sweeney.
by Theresa Garee | Apr 3, 2020 | Blog, Write Now Columbus Essay Archives
Guilt in the Time of COVID19 – Write Now Columbus – April 2020
A friend recently admitted to feeling guilty that she wasn’t writing during what is, for her, a sudden slow time. I could relate.
The second week my husband was in the hospital, after they closed the doors to visitors and implemented social distancing across the country, I thought I might use the suddenly empty days to tidy my office, you know, the one that looks like a bomb went off in it.
But there’s this thing behind my ears. Silent, distracting, like a computer program hogging all the RAM. I can’t see it or hear it, but it’s there, draining my focus. I’d wager many of you feel it too.
Instead of sorting stacks of paper, I moved my laptop into the living room and surfed social media, waiting for his calls and texts. I went into my office to get my sunglasses so I could walk the pupperina, closed the door, and barely opened it for seven days.
I shared this with my friend and told her I refused to feel guilty for not learning a new language or writing a book during this time.
Guilt serves no one.
Instead of trying to write, I’m gathering the sensory details I will forget when I once again have the energy to write. The green rubber gloves with the little nibs on the fingers which, now that Ed is home, I wear to apply Lidocaine cream to his aching back. The whir of the nutrition pump and the slightly sickening vanilla protein shake smell of the liquid food. Stuffed bears or bear cutouts in some of the neighbors’ windows, including our own, so the children can go on a “bear hunt.” Feeling surprised at how much I miss hugs.
I admire people who can work under these conditions and worship the medical professionals and other essential workers out on the front lines. I urge everyone else to just keep their kids alive and try not to scream at that zoom call coworker who turns off his video, but fails to mute his microphone so the entire team hears his toilet flush.
We are all doing our best.
And now, repeat after me:
Wash your hands.
Don’t touch your face.
Stay home.
Set the guilt aside and do your part to save someone’s life.
by Theresa Garee | Jan 4, 2017 | Blog
“Caress the detail, the divine detail.” – Vladimir Nabokov
I’m not much for New Year’s resolutions, but I do take a personal inventory when the calendar flips to the next year. This year when reviewing my writing skills, I looked back over the rules of writing practice as set forth in Writing Down the Bones. Specifically (pun intended) Natalie Goldberg’s admonition to “be specific.”
A few of the beta readers who reviewed Twenty-Six Point Freaking Two noticed that my entries about running were full of sensory detail while other parts of the book lacked it. So my revision process has included finding those places where I drifted into vagueness. “Be specific” grounds us in the here and now. While we may be writing about something that has already happened, we should not record just what we think about it, but features and particulars to help the reader experience it as we have.
Yet I don’t want it bogged down in description. Like everything, this requires balance. Narration helps move the story forward. But it must be grounded in the here and now, the place where we want the reader to be. Nineteenth century England? We need to feel the china teacup in our hands and taste the first sip of hot tea. Running along the Olentangy Trail? We need to smell the musty woods and hear the Olentangy River sloshing along beside us as we move through damp air.
As the author, I need to feel this myself. If I don’t, I can’t communicate it to the reader. And that requires me to slow down and remember the details myself. Only then can I put them on the page.
by Theresa Garee | Jul 4, 2013 | Blog
“Life is one big transition.” – Willie Stargell
As a writer, when I read and listen to books on CD, I do so from a different vantage point than someone who does not write. Part of me reads for the story, but another part, the writer part, searches for technique. “How did the author do that?” I ask as the narrative moves forward.
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
, the book I’m currently listening to on CD, tells of author Cheryl Strayed’s adventure hiking the Pacific Crest Trail as a way to get over her mother’s death and her recent divorce. As the story unfolds, I’m struck by the ease with which she weaves different time periods together. Transitions always interest me. They are not easy even though authors like Strayed make them look deceptively so. “How does Strayed do this?” I ask as I listen. I’ve observed her success at using the following two methods.
The first technique involves the way she moves into flashback. When Strayed wants to move the reader back in time, she uses, from the past she is about to reveal, something that resonates with the present time of the book. For example, early in the book Strayed checked into a hotel near the Mohave desert to spend the night before setting out on her hike. She unpacked some of her newly purchased backpacking equipment:
I reached into one of the plastic bags and pulled out an orange whistle, whose packaging proclaimed it to be “the world’s loudest.” I ripped it open and held the whistle up by its yellow lanyard, then put it around my neck, as if I were a coach. . . .
Would I need it? I wondered meekly, bleakly, flopping down on the bed. It was well past dinnertime, but I was too anxious to feel hungry, my aloneness an uncomfortable thunk that filled my gut.
“You finally got what you wanted,” Paul (her now ex-husband) had said when we bade each other goodbye in Minneapolis ten days before.
“What’s that?” I’d asked.
“To be alone,” he replied, and smiled, though I could only nod uncertainly.
It had been what I wanted, but alone wasn’t quite it.
With this transition, Strayed begins to detail the unraveling of her marriage. Her feeling of aloneness in the motel and her ex-husband’s use of the word “alone” make the connection between the two periods of time.
Strayed uses a second technique to bring the reader out of a flashback and onto the trail with her again. She does this by grounding the transition in detail in order to bring her readers back into the story. Strayed handles this beautifully in the prologue. There she explains how she accidentally knocked one of her heavy, expensive hiking boots over a cliff while standing on a crest on the trail. Then, in a sort of summary, she turns back in time to explain how she came to be hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in the first place, taking the reader to events that happened years before. When she’s done with this summary and ready to bring her reader back to her lost boot on the trail, she uses sensory detail to plant the reader back in the present moment:
I looked down at the trees below me, the tall tops of them waving gently in the hot breeze. They could keep my boots, I thought, gazing across the great green expanse. I’d chosen to rest in this place because of the view.
In that instant the reader is back behind Strayed’s eyes seeing the Pacific Crest Trail as she does in the moments after she lost her boot. She has moved eloquently through time.
These are only two of the many techniques available to move through time. Strayed uses these and others well. I hope to emulate them in my work.
How have you learned to read like a writer? I’d love to hear about it.
