Play Along Friday: Things I've Seen (this week)

what i saw in march (Diana+; Kodak GC400)

As I play with photography and paint and incorporate more of the senses into my writing, I pay more conscious attention to the physical world. About a month ago I did a little "things I've seen this month" post. A few people liked the idea of using it as a prompt. I invite you to share things you've seen this week in the comments or on your blog (and link to it in the comments). Maybe something on your list  (or on someone else's) will spark an idea for a longer piece of writing. If so, please feel free to share that, too.

1. Weeds just as pretty as the flowers we call plants.
2. Homemade strawberry muffins on a white plate atop my blue kitchen counter.
3. My angry reflection in the bedroom mirror.
4. Neat rows of typed words, little black symbols on white paper.
5. Stratospheres of milky white made by cooled melted wax in a blue-striped glass votive.
6. Graffiti in my quiet little town.
7. A brown-and-white stuffed cat toy in the shape of a squirrel perched on the bottom step.
8. The beam of a flashlight.
9. My pink yoga mat.
10. Soapy water flowing over the side of the basement's clogged utility sink.

Your turn....

"Things I've Seen" is a sporadically appearing list of visuality.

Ways to Enliven Your Writing (In The Word Cellar)

Carousel beneath Space Needle, Seattle (Diana+; Kodak GC400)

This week's nitty gritty writing tips are short and sweet, or maybe they're quick and dirty. (You decide which cliché you like better.)

How can you make your writing more lively? If you're bogged down in a section of writing that drags its feet and bores you, try a few of these tips to perk it up. In fact, they're good techniques to use all the time.

1. Avoid clichés. Wait, that tip itself is rather cliché, isn't it? Sometimes a cliché can be funny or drive home a point as a sort of cultural shorthand. But if you use one, be aware of it. Use it because it's the best way to say something, not because it's the easiest and quickest way to say it.
2. Use active voice. In active voice, the subject of the sentence does the action. In passive voice, the action of the sentence happens to the object. This is passive voice: The omelette was dropped on the floor by the chef. This is active voice: The chef dropped the omelette on the floor. Passive: The baseball was thrown by me. Active: I threw the baseball.
3. Use good verbs, not adverbs. Strong writing uses strong verbs, not weak verbs modified by adverbs. Don't run quickly out the door; sprint or dash out the door. Don't cry profusely; weep or wail. Don't call out angrily; shout or yell or scold. Some writers swear against adverbs at all costs. I'm not that strict, but I believe in the power of lively verbs to strengthen writing.
4. Use fewer "to be" verbs. To be verbs include the following: be, am is, are, was, and were. Sometimes you need to use a to be verb. But often you can find a much more interesting way to write the sentence.
5. Avoid word bloat. You probably need fewer words than you think you do. Remove unnecessary phrases or replace them with shorter, more direct phrases. Less is more. (Hey look, another cliché!)

Do you have any favorite tips for enlivening your writing? Any questions on how to handle specific sluggish sections? Share in the comments or email me: jennifer{at}thewordcellar{dot}com.

In The Word Cellar runs on the second and fourth Wednesday of the month. Read other posts in the series here.

The Adventures of Fixer Man & Lady Boy Shorts

"sweet big ass grapes, $2.99/pound," Pike's Place Market (Diana, Kodak GC400)

When I bought the single-use charcoal grill last weekend for $6.99, I had no idea it would end up costing me $833, forcing me to wear booty-creeper underwear for two days, and requiring me to fill the bathtub with water so we could flush poo down the toilets.

Here's what happened.

Wasps have transformed our broken-down, rusted-out gas grill into a condo unit. In fact, the buggers are trying to redevelop the whole back of my house into waspville utopia, a land that is neither white nor Anglo-Saxon nor Protestant. While we work out an extermination and replacement plan, my husband misses cooking out. So I bought some burgers and dogs (meaty for him, veggie for me) and a small disposable grill for our Memorial Day festivities.

Before placing the pint-sized grill on the fireproof mat that used to sit beneath the rusted-out fire pit (rust is a motif on our patio), James decided he needed to hose things down. But we'd left the hose and the nozzle out all winter, so instead of a spray he got a spit of water. When he tried to turn off the outdoor spigot, he discovered that the valve was stripped and would not catch. So the only thing keeping water from shooting out the side of the house was the hose, which would surely burst if left in this condition for too long -- as we have seen in the past. (By now you should see a general pattern of ineptitude with our outdoor housekeeping commitment and abilities. It's slightly better inside the house.)

The next day James put on his Fixer Man cape and made two trips to Lowe's, intent on replacing the stripped valve. Only Lowe's didn't have the replacement piece, so he had to replace the whole spigot. It was hard work twisting and twisting the spigot out of the wall, but the ginormous blue wrench he'd bought did the trick. Sure did: It twisted the copper pipe in two and pulled the whole damn thing out of the wall. Take that copper pipe!

Wait. What do you mean the pipe is broken? Shouldn't you have just unscrewed one pipe from the other? Oh, look at that silvery stuff. The pipes were soldered together. Oh, look at that. Hm. We can't fix this ourselves now, can we? No, my dear, no we can't.

Fortunately, I'd filled the bathtub with water and bought my body weight in bottled H20 before we turned off the house's water supply for Fixer Man's Adventures. (Yes, we checked for a shut-off valve leading to the outside spigot. No, there wasn't one.)

Did you know you can flush a toilet with no running water by filling up the back of said toilet with water from your bathtub? You can. This comes in handy when you have no running water and two people who will eventually need the bathroom for something more than a tinkle, if-you-know-what-I'm-saying-and-I-think-that-you-do.

For days before this I'd been walking around the house saying, "I need to do laundry. I'm running out of underwear." On the day that I bought the disposable grill, I showered and put on my last clean pair of underwear, cute little boycut shorts that are not meant for my body type. These cute little boyshorts tell me that they're not meant for me every time I move by riding up and over and in. This is their way of saying, "We don't belong here! Get us out of HEEERE! Halp!" It's like a panty revolt. They also say, "Ha-ha! Wedgie!"

I'd had the foresight to fill up the bathtub with water, in case we needed it. But I didn't have the foresight to do some friggin' laundry, in case I wanted to put on clean gutchies that weren't trying to tunnel their way into my body.

But there are plumbers. Yay for plumbers! Double yay for those who come the same day! And charge you $833! No, wait. That last one is bad. Boo for the $833 plumbers! Woe for Fixer Man and his inept sidekick Lady Boy Shorts who just wanted to clean off their patio and cook out on a cheapass charcoal grill and pretend they were real patriotic adults who could function like real homeowners. Boo! Woe! Or: Woo! Boe!

In truth, the spigot was bound to break at some point. Whoever installed it (not us -- yay for that!) used a plastic thingy instead of a metal thingy, and the thingy cracked, probably due to the intense temperature fluctuations of winter/summer here in our neck of the woods. Buying the grill and trying to hose down the patio just spurred on the destruction. And the ginormous blue wrench? Fixer Man has taken full responsibility for that one. And Lady Boy Shorts didn't yell at him once. She feels pretty good about that part.

Unanswered questions left over from our saga: Were we fleeced by the plumber? Will Lady Boy Shorts do laundry more often? Will she buy some underwear that fits? Will she let Fixer Man near that ginormous blue wrench again?

If you know the answer to the first one, don't tell me. I don't want to know.

Finding a Story's Heart (In The Word Cellar)

in the clearing, Frog Creek Lodge, Lakebay, WA; spring 2010 (Diana+, Kodak GC400)

Essays are the Dianas of the writing world.

When you write creative nonfiction (such as blog posts and essays), are you trying to record the facts of what happened or to capture the essence of the experience? Unless you work as an investigative reporter or a journalist, you probably seek to capture the essence of people, places, and events in your writing. You seek to tell a story.

Great nonfiction doesn't just tell us what happened. It creates art from real life.

There's the scene at hand, and then there's the story.

I used to try to take pictures that captured the whole scene and encapsulated every little true-to-life detail. But those photos bored me; they had no story. Playing with my analogue Diana F+ camera has started to change that. Plastic cameras like the Diana are known for creating photos with a vignette effect -- the way an image fades, blurs, and shades around the edges. Vignette is also the word for a short, descriptive story.

But you don't need a plastic film camera to take great story-shots. And you don't need to write short vignettes to create a story with heart. Digital or analogue. Blog post or long form essay. They're all about framing an object subjectively; about finding the light and shadows; about contours and composition. Art isn't just about capturing what happened. It's about making sense of what happened. Art is about making connections between one thing and another and then another. I'm drawn to stories (visual and written) that do more than simply record a scene. I want stories that offer a new perspective, stories that capture the emotion, essence, and meaning of a moment.

How do you write beyond the events and into the heart of the story?

In elementary school, I went through a phase of telling the truth -- the whole of it and nothing but it. I appointed myself guardian of just the facts, ma'am. If my mom and I ran errands, going first to the bank and then to the bakery, and she later told my dad that we'd gone to the bakery and the bank, I corrected her. She had the order wrong, which meant she wasn't telling the real story.

Ah yes, the real story. Earlier this month we looked at finding our true writing voice. I said that while there is such a thing as an authentic writing voice, it's also a living thing that evolves and can splinter into different (but equally authentic) voices. Turns out that the real story is another slippery entity.

A few months ago my friend Vivienne (who, incidentally, takes gorgeous photographs bursting with stories) and I talked about how to write beyond events and into what really happened. In other words, how to find a story's heart. This topic could consume us for weeks (and maybe it will), but here's a primer on what I know about getting to the heart of things.

1. Stories need meaning, not morals. (This is some of the wisest writing advice my pal Jen Lee has given me.) Give your readers enough meat of the story and its implications to help them understand why the story matters. Don't turn a story into a Sunday School lesson. Nobody likes a moralizing know-it-all. (Trust me, I know; I've been one.) Trust your readers, but don't make them do the creative equivalent of quantum physics to understand what the story means.
2. Stories need details. But not too many. And only the important ones. How do you tell how many and which details to include? It's different for every writer and for every piece of writing, but there are a few things to keep in mind. Details should create texture and interest within a story. They should focus the readers' attention on what matters. They should add to the artfulness of the scene you're writing. Frame your paragraphs as you would frame a photograph. Use spectacular and specific details to draw in readers and immerse them in the world you're recreating. Don't try to capture the whole world, even when you're writing true stories. Be selective.
3. Stories need a bridge between the personal and the universal. Even when you're telling an intimate story about a unique experience, readers should find something in it to relate to as fellow humans. But beware of moralizing here! Don't build a literal bridge that points out the obvious or talks down to the reader. Oddly enough, the more specific your details, the more universal your story can become. This is one of those things (like so much) about writing that I see and feel intuitively. I'm working on figuring out a more concrete way to explain it. Until then, mull it over and let me know if you can verbalize it any better. (Please share in the comments if you take a stab at it.)
4. Stories need a focus. The focus of a story drives the meaning, the details, and the bridge. I usually don't know a story's focus until I've written a large chunk of it. Only after sketching out and connecting ideas do I find a story's heart. I've rewritten essays five times before I found their real essence. A story can contain a lot of seemingly disparate elements, but you need to know how they tie together. If you don't know -- at least on some intuitive level -- your readers won't know.
5. Stories need to be True. That's "Truth" with a capital "T." This may be the most important point of all. Your story needs to feel True on the page, in your mind, in the eyes of your readers. I've written things that are technically true by dutifully capturing my thoughts or the true-to-life details of a scene. But the scene fell flat and veered outside the heart of the story. Annie Dillard says it best in her "Notes for Young Writers": "The work's unity is more important than anything else about it. Those digressions that were so much fun to write must go." This is another one of those things that you learn by doing. The more you write, the easier it will be to decipher what's True, and to sacrifice anything that doesn't serve the story. (Try to get your hands on Dillard's short essay. It may be the best writing advice I've ever read. You can find it in Issue 15 of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction.)

I want to capture the whole world in my writing, but I can only do it one frame and one heartbeat at a time. Now it's your turn: How do you write into the heart of a story?

**Post your writing questions in the comments or send them to jennifer{at}thewordcellar{dot}com.

In The Word Cellar runs on the second and fourth Wednesday of the month. Read other posts in the series here.

Right Now

circle of light; in a friend's living room (Diana+, Fuji Pro 400H)

Right now the time is 3:27 a.m.

Right now, I'm thinking about friends across oceans who are having their second cup of morning coffee or taking a late afternoon walk on the beach; friends in my own time zone who will be getting up in less than two hours; friends in the middle of this continent who are fast asleep; and friends on the west coast who may have just gone to bed.

Right now, through the open window I hear a bird chirping. He's been at it for hours. For awhile others had joined in, but now it's just his lone tweet over and over again. A quick online search tells me that perhaps this is a mockingbird, or some other bird defending his territory.

Right now, also through the open window, I can smell the pleasant stink of a skunk. I let it linger for awhile, and then I lit a lavender scented candle to take the edge off.

Right now, my husband and two grey cats are fast asleep. I wonder if anyone else in my neighborhood is awake to hear that nocturnal bird.

Right now is the best I've felt all day. A gloom of ennui weighed me down today, which I combatted by decluttering my house and studio. Now I can sit in my considerably less cluttered studio, in the quiet of night, by candlelight, and reconnect with the muse. I feel her coming back to me, and I am so grateful.

Right now, I am starting to feel sleepy. Soon I will wash my face, brush my teeth, take out my contacts, and crawl into bed. I'll do these ordinary, daily rites while a midnight bird stands his ground and a striped skunk skulks or scurries through the neighborhood.