Quick, drop what you’re doing and do a quick 10-minute writing exercise:
Look out your living room window (or imagine what it looks like). You know what you see–neighbors’ cars, your winter flowerbeds looking dead, the Sunday paper still in your driveway, a forgotten ball hiding under your shrubs, whatever. Describe it on paper. But don’t just report it, feel it. What kind of mood are you in today? What is your motivation for getting out of bed? Let us see what you are feeling, let us see your goals, let us see your methodical cataloging of what you see through the lens of what you feel.
Ready, set, GO.
Are you back? This to me is the vital importance of description in a novel. It’s not just a hodge-podge collection of everything you can possibly see from your living room window, it’s how a character views the world around them, which helps a reader understand the character’s motivation, viewpoint, mindset, psychological state, you name it.
Next time you’re stuck in a scene, look up and around you (through the character’s eyes) and instead of telling us he was bored, show us how his bored mind views the world he’s in.
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The view is not my living room window, but from the patio, where I sit in the mornings on soft cushions under the palapa with the sun on my legs. It’s here, by the side of the Sea of Cortez that all things seem possible, that the world seems to be perfect place, that whatever problems I thought I had disappear.
Tall and short palms, freshly trimmed, swayed in gentle breezes. Their brilliant yellow green shimmers under the low angle of the winter sun. A bevy of finches chatter atop the palapa and their tiny feet make a scritch-scratching sound as they tumble frond to frond.
Isla Carmen, the largests of the seven islands that lie just off the Loreto coast rises out of the water a scant 12 miles to the east. She is desert bare, as is all the land here, parched for water and dressed in scrub cactus. Her silhouette at dawn never ceases to entice me to grab a camera and record the sunrise – different on each and every day.
This is morning. This is water and sky and sun. This is heaven.
What else is there in the world?
I cease reading the papers. It’s all bad news and there is little to nothing that I can do about any of it. If I have any affect, then it is in gathering myself together, to live and be present in the moment, to let my centering peace radiate into far reaching corners.
Its not that I’m always peaceful, although I wish that were the case. I wish I could let go of angst and frustration with a collection of incidents that have fallen on my shoulders. I wish I could simply wash some of life away. But consciousness doesn’t work that way.
But here, in these early moments, this amazing quiet respite, there is nowhere but here. There is no moment but now. This is no feeling but this.
Nice, Catharine!
Here’s mine:
I sit, my cup of peppermint tea perched in both hands, gazing out on a quiet culdesac. The kids that played basketball in yesterday’s semi-sunshine are gone, the cats that skirt the edges of the lawns with quiet furtive steps are off hiding, and the piece of newspaper that has floated from yard to yard all week has finally been captured. The stillness yawns to me through my mud-spattered front window. I yearn to take up a cloth and wipe it clean, but remember that there are other things to do today.
I mentally run through the list and then am distracted by the thick book on the table beside me. I could read just a few more pages. I hear my husband on the phone with his colleagues—being on call has marooned us to the house until tomorrow morning. We’re headed off to adventure tomorrow. A hike to Snoqualmie Falls, a picnic lunch, time spent sharing jokes and stories and helping Todd capture the perfect picture. It is our time, away from the pressures of work and school and life.
I notice the dust gathering on my bookshelves and turn away, opening my book to the place I left off. I am instantly transported to Addis-Abiba, Ethiopia, into life fifty years ago. I don’t notice the cat creeping around my flowerbed, sniffing at my potted plants. I don’t notice the neighbor kids walking to the basketball hoop to get some practice in, and I don’t see the cars taking slow turns around my culdesac, stopping to get a real estate flyer from my neighbor’s for sale sign. For now, until I can go tomorrow, I am already gone.
Anyone else?
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