Of Haida art, smoked clams, and tsunami evacuations routes

Oyster Bay

Salish

Oyster farms along Hood Canal

Hood Canal

low tide

high tide

inlets

Skookum Creek

Haida art

shellfish

madrona trees

rhododendrons

logging trucks

Kapowsin

Skokomish

smoked clams

fish hatcheries

Lilliwaup

oyster farms

green: Douglas fir green, pine green, salal green, madrona green

blue: sky blue, saltwater blue, Hood Canal blue

I recently added those “crackly” words to my lexicon for a place I’ve driven through many times in my many years on earth: Hood Canal in western Washington.

At Priscilla Long’s delightful urging, I’m gathering words and phrases for stories about where my roots grow down deep.

I collected those words while driving along Hood Canal toward my destination, the north end of the Olympic Peninsula. Here are entries in that lexicon:

Discovery Bay

Sequim

Lavender Festival

Dungeness Spit

Port Angeles and the Olympic Mountains from Ediz Hook

Port Angeles

salty cool air

City Pier

Hurricane Ridge

salmon

the Crab House

smoked oysters

Olympic National Park

Hama Hama Oysters

Swain's General Store

“Where the mountains greet the sea”

tsunami evacuation route signs

rugged, snow-capped, forested Olympic Mountains

World-class ships 

Gordy’s Pizza

Chestnut Cottage

border patrol agents

KONP

Scooter Chapman

Sandy Keyes

M.M. Fryer and Sons

logging trucks

waterfront trails

world-class ships

MV Coho, Coast Guard station, and Vancouver Island in the distance

Ediz Hook

U.S. Coast Guard station

U.S. Coast Guard helicopters hovering low

seagulls

waterfront

fog horns

Vancouver Island, B.C. in the distance across the Strait

marinas

wild blackberry vines in bloom

Frank Prince

Pete Rennie

Peninsula Daily News

Peninsula College

Canyon Edge Drive

Roughriders

Little League baseball

Dan Wilder’s car dealerships

The MV Coho

maritime history

dense, tangled undergrowth

Dungeness crab

Hartnagel’s

farmers’ market

green: cedar green, fir green, wild blackberry green, bracken fern green, ivy green

blue: sky blue, saltwater blue, Strait-of-Juan-de-Fuca blue

If you haven’t already gathered what Priscilla Long calls“crackly” words, now is a good time to compile your own lexicon, or, more likely, several lexicons.

Do away with boring, generic, ho-hum words.

Instead, gather words and phrases from the unique eras and places and people and experiences in your memoir’s vignettes.

Doing so can be loads of fun, and using those words will add richness to your memoir and leave your readers involved and charmed within your stories.

The power of color

“…Push your story deeper, pull your reader closer,

and lift the heart of the story out of obscurity

into a sensory world

that you and your readers can inhabit together.”

(Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir)

Take out your WIPs—your rough drafts—and let’s have fun! Let’s spice up blah words.

Today, we’ll focus on colors.

If you’ve described something as “blue,” choose a word with more punch or charm. Try sky blue, powder blue, navy, royal, denim, cornflower, turquoise, indigo, or aqua. My daughter-in-law chose periwinkle blue for her bridesmaids’ dresses. What other shades of blue come to mind?


Instead of “red,” how about fire-engine red, cherry red, tomato red, blood red, rusty red, crimson, ruby, or scarlet. What other shades of red can you think of? Leave your ideas below in the comments, or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Spiritual-Memoirs-101/208789029139817


Below, you’ll find a resource you’ll treasure! For now, though, this little excerpt is a gem from James Kilpatrick, a man I’ve learned from for many years:

“This is the secret of good writing:

We must look intently,

and hear intently,

and taste intently.…

We must look at everything very hard.

Is it the task at hand to describe a snowfall?

Very well. We begin by observing

that the snow is white.

Is it as white as bond paper?

White as whipped cream?

Is the snow daisy white,

or eggwhite white,

or whitewash white?

Let us look very hard.

We will see that snow comes in different textures.

The light snow that looks like powdered sugar

is not the heavy snow that clings like wet cotton.…”

James J. Kilpatrick, The Writer's Art

Here’s that new resource—I’m so excited to tell you about it!—it’s a writer’s paradise! Hop on over to The Bookshelf Muse at http://www.thebookshelfmuse.blogspot.com. (I can't get this link to work, however, you can click over to it from right here on my blog—you’ll find an icon for The Bookshelf Muse in the right column, below.)


It contains a thesaurus for colors, for one thing. For example, to look up the color blue, use this link: http://thebookshelfmuse.blogspot.com/2010/03/color-thesaurus-entry-blue.html


You’ll find red at this link: http://thebookshelfmuse.blogspot.com/2009/07/color-thesaurus-entry-red.html


The Bookshelf Muse offers much more than a color thesaurus. The good people there have a thesaurus for weather, another for emotion, for character traits, settings, and more. Be sure to spend time there, and return often.


Soon we’ll work on other aspects of your written pieces but for now, spice up colors in your WIPs, and feel free to start a few new vignettes. They’ll be chapters in your finished memoir. Have fun!