More inspiration for beginners: And then I remembered the weevils . . . .

“I didn’t know you had these pictures, Mom!”

Matt’s face beamed. He grinned his biggest grin, spellbound by the photos he held in his hands.

Hushed, he studied one snapshot after another.

“These will be great, Mom, to show my girls the people and places I’ve been telling them about all these years.”

Matt was talking about pictures I took in South America when he was age six through nine and our family lived in a remote mission center at the end of the road in the middle of nowhere. 

Because of Matt’s delight in discovering those old pictures, I scanned old slides by the hundreds, getting prints, scrapbooking them, and placing them in three-ring binders among written stories from those years. (And eventually, I wrote a memoir, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir.)

What are the takeaways for you?

Point #1: Include photos with your memoirs. Your children and grandchildren will be at least as delighted as my Matt was to see our old photos.

Point #2: Photos can help you discover, and then add, detail and richness and depth and breadth to your memoir—and those are important ingredients for (a) capturing readers’ interests and (b) helping them live your stories with you. 

Readers can get inside your stories when you recreate them through the five senses—sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. Photos can help you do that. (Remember Peter Jacobi’s words, “No story has a divine right to be read.”)

For example, here are two photos of the little commissary at our mission center in South America. That's me in the red shirt. (Oh, my, I was much younger then. And slenderer.  Sigh . . . .)

When I stumbled upon those pictures many years later, I remembered the commissary’s smells: ripe, tropical fruit. Powdered laundry detergent. Broccoli. And rancid bread—if the bread man had come.

And then I remembered the burlap bags. Since we had no paper bags, one of our options was to lug groceries home in colorful locally-made burlap totes. They were coarse and scratchy and had a dried-grass-burlap-ish smell.

And then I remembered the flour I bought at the commissary, hand-scooped (by someone, somewhere—I probably didn’t want to know the specifics) into tiny little plastic bags, usually a bit grimy. 

And then I remembered the weevils that lived in that flour.

And then I remembered that at first, I didn’t know what to do about the weevils. I must have led a very sheltered life because I didn’t even know what weevils were, let alone that they could live in flour.

When I first arrived at the mission center, no one taught me that I could (a) put the flour in the freezer and freeze those little critters to death, or (b) spread the flour on a cookie sheet and bake them to death. Then all I had to do was sift out their lifeless little bodies.

And then I remembered that before I knew how to murder weevils, I fed them to a big crowd. I was asked to bring cinnamon roles to an event and, you guessed it—they were speckled inside with little black, crunchy dots—dead weevils. (You can read more in my memoir, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir.)

See what I mean about the value of photos? I knew those stories—but I had forgotten them. I needed to rediscover them. Taking another look at those photos did that for me. And then I could include them and their stories in my memoir.

Sharon Lippincott, too, knows the value and joy of old photos. Reading her "Photographic Memory Jolts" was pure enjoyment for me. From only one photo, she listed dozens of memories.

Take, for example, Sharon’s memories of saddle oxfords. Her post reminded me that every morning before school, I spent a lot of time polishing my own saddle shoes—the white part and the black part.

And I’d forgotten all about my Ivy League saddle shoes with the oh-so-cool little buckle in the back.

And then there was Sharon’s memory of Natalie Wood using Scotch Tape to keep her bangs in place while they dried. Yes, I did that too.

Sharon’s post is a fun read, a treasure trove of history especially if you’re around my age—and all from just one photo!

How about you? Pull out an old photo related to one of the stories in your memoir.

• What emotions does it stir up?
• What songs were popular at that time?
• What styles of clothing, eyeglasses, hairstyles, shoes, furniture, and architecture does the photo capture?
• Does the photo raise questions?
• What happened just before the photo was taken? Just afterward?
• Was something significant brewing at the time, even if you didn’t know it until later?
• In later years, what happened to the people in the photo?
• Does it remind you of additional stories?

Go beyond looking at your old photos. What smells come to mind? Textures? Sounds? Tastes? Sights?

Listen. Smell. Feel. Taste. 

Relive. 

Unravel.

I have a hunch you’ll discover details 

that will add gusto to your stories.

Have fun!

 

Dreaming of a black Christmas

Today I’ll share a December excerpt from my memoir, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir. The scene takes place on a mission center, Lomalinda (pretty hill), in South America, during our family’s first December there. 

But first, review Your Christmas stories need sensory details, and then notice those that I included in my excerpts, below. (Sensory details: What do you see, hear, taste, smell, and feel?) 

Lomalinda was into the dry season with clean cerulean skies and hardly a wisp of a cloud. Daytime temperatures rose to over a hundred degrees in the shade—cruel, withering. The green scent of the rainy season had given way to the spicy fragrance of sun-dried grasses. Immense stretches of emerald disappeared, leaving grasslands stiff and simmering under unrelenting sun.

      Muddy paths and single-lane tracks turned rock-hard and, with use, changed to dust. Yards and airstrips and open fields turned to dust, too. 

      From sunrise to sundown, a strong wind blew across the llanos, a gift from God because it offered a little relief from the heat. On the other hand, we had to use rocks and paperweights and other heavy objects to keep papers from blowing away. Dust blew through slatted windows and into homes and offices and settled on our counters and furniture and in cracks and crannies and on our necks and in our armpits and up our noses. . . . 

      During rainy season, sometimes laundry took days to dry in our screened-in porch, but in dry season I hung laundry outside and, after pegging up the last garment in the laundry basket, I took down the first pieces I’d hung—the hot wind had already dried them.

      Dry season gave homes and furniture and clothing and shoes and photos and slides a chance to de-mildew. Roads were easier to navigate, no longer gooey with mud. The parched wind gave us a break from the profuse sweating we endured in the rainy season so, in that way, it was a friend.

      But dry season could also be a foe. One sizzling afternoon, Dr. Altig hollered at our door, “Call for help! We have a fire!” Across the road behind Ruth’s house, flames leaped and smoke billowed. . . .

That year, our family’s first there, we learned December traditionally was a time of wildfires in and around Lomalinda, leaving acres of black ashes. Shortly after that day’s fire, the following happened:

One December day I walked a sun-cracked track while that celestial fireball cooked my skin and the smell of charred grassland swirled in the breeze. The school principal puttered up to me on her red motorbike. “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!”

      Pris watched me for a few seconds and then laughed—my face had betrayed my thoughts. I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, “This looks like Christmas? You’ve got to be kidding!”

    To me, Christmas looks like frost-covered evergreens, and snowflakes, and frozen puddles. Heavy coats, scarves, mittens, boots. Runny noses. Sledding. Ice skating. Swags of cedar and pine and holly tied with red ribbons.

      I learned a lesson on that hot, dry December day. “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” means different things to different people. To most Lomalindians, especially kids, Christmas looked like a bleached landscape, charred fields, hot wind, and a whiff of ashes in the air. Folks enjoyed saying, “I’m dreaming of a black Christmas.”

What are your memories of unique Christmases? 

• Did you spend one Christmas fighting a war overseas? 
• Or did you celebrate the holiday in Hawaii one year? 
• Or did you take a trip to the Holy Land?

What about traditions you enjoyed? 

• Playing fun games 
• Serving Christmas Eve dinner at a homeless shelter
• Going to the Nutcracker each year
• Watching It’s A Wonderful Life or Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer
• Christmas caroling in nursing homes

What memories of traditional Christmas food do you have?

If you have a Nordic background, you might have traditions around smörgåsbords with

• lutefisk, 
• pepparkakor, 
• gubbröra, 
• liver pâté,
• vörtbröd, 
• pickled herring, 
• pinnekjôtt,
• glögg, and
• julekaker.

If you have a Scottish background, you might have 

• haggis 
• tatties and neeps, 
• black pudding, 
• Cock-a-leekie soup,
• clootie dumpling, and 
• Yorkshire pudding. 

Have fun remembering Christmases past.

This is a super busy time of year, but if you keep a pencil and paper handy, simply jot down ideas for now. When things settle down after the holidays, you can spend more time on a rough draft.

And be sure to include sensory details.

A fun project for you: Describe autumn

 

Autumn is here!

 

Well . . . on the calendar, anyway.

 

In our state summer weather has dominated autumn, but we did have two frosts recently. Temps have been in the eighties since then, but the frosts have inspired leaves to begin changing colors. Soon, it seems, autumn will be here to stay.

 

And that has me thinking . . .

 

Do any of your memoir’s stories take place in autumn?

If so, now is an ideal time to gather words

to describe those scenes.

 

Sensory details:

sounds, smells, textures, sights, and tastes.

 

Such rich details invite readers to join you in your story

and to experience what you experienced.

 

In addition, sensory details can send readers back in time

and revive memories of their own similar experiences.

 

That, in turn, enables readers 

to have an emotional connection with you.

Bonding is good.

 

Here, then, is the task before you:

Study autumn details around you this month and next.

Make time to stir up memories of:

• what autumn sounded like in your story,
• what it smelled like,
• what textures and temperatures your skin felt,
• what autumn details you saw with your eyes,
• and the unique tastes and flavors of autumn.

 

Embrace this lovely advice from Judith Barrington:

 

“When you write, ‘. . . it’s always a good idea to get up very close and start using your senses. . . . describing some of the details, using your ears and eyes, calling up a smell that belongs to the story, or reaching an imaginary hand back through time to touch a piece of furniture, or the texture of a dress, or someone’s skin. . . .’” (Writing the Memoir)

 

With these points in mind, you’ll enjoy Elizabeth Stout’s description of a minister taking an autumn drive on a back road “with the window down, his elbow resting on the window edge, ducking his head to peer . . . at the side of a barn, fresh with red paint, lit by this autumn sun. . . . when every flicker of light that touched the dipping branches of a weeping willow, every breath of breeze that bent the grass toward the row of apple trees, every shower of yellow gingko leaves dropping to the ground with . . . direct and tender sweetness. . . .” (from Abide with Me)

 

Set aside time to find words to make the following come alive for readers:

• the sound of leaves crunching underfoot—or if the ground was wet, the sound of squishy, soggy, damp leaves
• the smell of wet leaves on the ground, that earthy smell that drifts up from plant life dying and rotting and getting moldy
• the scent of leaves that are crisp and brittle in the sunshine, disbursing a spicy—maybe even sweet—perfume
• the fragrance as well as taste of pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, pumpkin spice coffee, pumpkin spice candles, (nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, allspice)
• the taste of Halloween Candy, Thanksgiving turkey, and caramel apples
• the smell or the sight of woodsmoke filling the air from fireplaces or bonfires
• the feel of icy fingers and a cold, runny nose

 

Here’s another idea: Get creative in describing colors. Instead of calling autumn leaves “red,” describe them as “crimson.”

 

Instead of “reddish-brown,” try “auburn” or “rusty.”

 

To describe something that’s golden yellow-orange, consider using “amber.”

 

If something was “brown,” describe it as “cinnamon brown” or “coffee colored.”

 

Instead of “orange,” think about “tangerine.”

 

For more ideas, click on Color and Pattern Thesaurus at One Stop for Writers.

 

Here’s a final tidbit to enthuse you:

 

Houston journalist, TV reporter, and author, Tom Abrahams, said:

 

“I was always amazed by how somebody

could tell a story that I could see inside my head,

and that could take me somewhere else.”

 

Be inspired by Tom:

 

Use sensory details  to tell a story

readers can see inside their heads—

and more:

that they can also hear, smell, feel, and taste.

 

Invite them to join you in your story, or,

as Tom said it: Take readers there with you.

 

 

 

Back to Basics: Write a believable story by including the stink, slime, and grime

 

Readers want stories that catch their attention and reach into their hearts. They want stories that will stick—stories that will make a difference in their lives. 

 

To that end, in recent weeks we’ve worked on creating well-rounded main characters your readers can relate to. (Click on How to create “a sensory world that you and your readers can inhabit together” as well as Refuse to let cardboard characters lurk in your memoir.)

 

We’ve also worked on crafting the best descriptions of your memoir’s key places so readers feel they’re with you at that place.  (See The importance of “place,” and How’s your progress in describing your memoir’s key places?)

 

In addition, you’ll want to write a believable story.

And for that, you must include 

the stink, the slime, and the grime.

 

In Walker in the City (1951), Alfred Kazin has returned to his childhood home in the Brownsville district of Brooklyn. He writes about everyday sights and experiences. He creates vivid images and includes sensory details:

 

“The greasy, spattered front steps, just off the Chinese hand laundry in the basement, led into what must have been the vestibule of a traditionally stately Brooklyn Heights mansion. Despite the metal shields holding up the battered front door, you could see that it once had been a beautiful door….

 

“…I step off the train at Rockaway Avenue, smell the leak out of the men’s room, then the pickles from the stand below the subway steps…. An instant rage comes over me, mixed with dread and some unexpected tenderness.

 

“It is always the old women in their shapeless flowered housedresses and ritual wigs I see first; they give Brownsville back to me. In their soft dumpy bodies and the unbudging way they occupy the tenement stoops, their hands blankly folded in each other as if they had been sitting on those stoops from the beginning of time, I sense again the old foreboding that all my life would be like this.” (From Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, William Zinsser)

 

Perhaps your story is set in a country’s slums. Remember from our recent posts: Show, don’t tell.

 

Instead of telling people that children clawed through acres of garbage searching for something to eat—show readers. Describe the raw sewage flowing between row after row of rusty, crumbling, patched-together dwellings. Include sensory details:  smells, sounds, feels, tastes, and sights.

 

Show, don’t tell the extreme poverty of the slum-dwellers and their lack of good nutrition. Show the people too poor to get medical help for their diseases. Show the high mortality rate among children under age five. Show the dense population, filth, and environmental hazards. Include the high unemployment rate and the lack of educational opportunities. Show that almost no slum-dwellers have electricity or running water. Show the kidnappings and rapes.

 

“Some budding memoirists rush through a scene

without stopping to smell the rain on the pavement.

Granted, you don't want

to overwhelm your readers with details;

you have to keep the story moving along.

If the scene or event is crucial,

slow down and describe it so that the reader

can experience it with you.”

Sharon DeBartolo Carmack

 

Use specific words, compelling words. Gritty words.

Study old photos to discern specific details you might have forgotten. Did you write letters or emails about your experience? Did you keep a diary?  If so, they’re great resources for you.

 

Avoid sugar-coating.

Recreate your experience so readers will feel

they’re beside you, encountering what you did.

 

“ . . . feel the rush and throb of real life.”

O. Henry

 

Remember this good advice from Rhys Alexander:

 

“Detail makes the difference between 

boring and terrific writing. 

It’s the difference between a pencil sketch 

and a lush oil painting. 

As a writer, words are your paint. 

Use all the colors.” 

(“Writing Gooder”)

 

Back to Basics: How to create “a sensory world that you and your readers can inhabit together”

 

I can’t remember the book’s title or author but, some fifteen years later, I still recall the main character—but not in a positive way. I knew almost nothing of her physical appearance or inner qualities.

 

The author had created a stick figure. I had little interest in the longings of the character’s heart or the setbacks she faced. I wasn’t cheering for her.

 

When you write your memoir, avoid making the same mistake. Make key people come alive! Help readers to sense they’re with you in your experience, seeing what you’re seeing, smelling what you’re smelling, hearing conversations alongside you.

 

Roy Peter Clark, one of my favorite writing mentors, says:

 

“In the best of cases—when craft rises to art—the author conjures a character that seems fully present to the reader, a man standing against that very light post waving you over for a conversation.” (“Keeping it real: how round characters grow from the seeds of detail”)

 

I like that: Characters that seem “fully present to the reader.”

 

Write so your memoir’s central characters become more than a shadow in the corner.

 

That’s often easier said than done.

 

In his webinar entitled “They Walk! They Talk! Secrets to Writing Engaging Characters and Vivid Dialogue,” Dinty Moore said:

 

“Characterization in memoir is always a challenge:

how can we make the people we know feel as real

and alive for readers as they do to us?

 

As writers, we must remember that

our readers have never met the people in our memoir;

they know only what we tell them.

 

And sometimes, we know our characters—

family, friends, enemies—so well

that we forget we need to introduce them

in all their complexity. . . .”

(Dinty Moore)

 

How do you do that?

 

For starters, this week we’re paying attention to sensory details: sight, smell, feel, sound, and taste.

Judith Barrington explained, “This is not a matter of throwing an abundance of details—say, of a person's visual appearance—at the reader, but of selecting those few that capture the essence of the person . . . a quirk of speech, a mannerism, the way his hair falls across his face, an item of clothing, the smell of her, or how she walks.” (Writing the Memoir) 

 

Study William Kent Krueger's uses of sight (what a reader would see—would envision) in this example about a man named Wally Schanno in Iron Lake:

“In his mid-fifties, he was tall and lean, had hollow cheeks, thick pale lips, and a nose like a big ragged chunk of granite shoved in his face. . . . His enormous feet required shoes factory-ordered straight from Red Wing, Minnesota. . . . He had a penchant for suspenders—nothing wild, just plain red, or black, or gray—and he almost never sported a tie.”

Let me share a personal story. We were attending a gathering in Seattle, Washington, when my daughter Karen overheard someone—someone she didn't know—refer to her three sons as “surfer boys.” Now, Karen and her husband live in Malibu, California, and indeed their boys are surfers. But she was surprised a stranger could look at her boys and recognize they were surfers.

It shook her up. “Mom,” she whispered, “how could they know my boys are surfers?” Karen was so immersed in the surfer culture that her boys looked normal to her, no different from other people. She needed to step back and pin down her surfer-sons' prominent attributes.

Take a fresh look at key persons in your memoir. 

What unique features would others like or need to know?

For example, what makes surfers look different from most other Americans? Their hair often gives them away. Surfer guys' hair is longer than most guys' hair, unruly—tousled and tangled—sun-bleached, and often stiff from saltwater. Surfers usually have deep tans on their muscular bodies. They often have salt caked on their eyelashes. They walk around with sand sticking to their feet and legs, which they bring with them into their trucks and homes. You'll often see a black wetsuit drying on the porch railing.

What does a surfer sound like? Pin down his vocabulary. If something is  “gnarly,” it is awesome. If he describes a fellow surfer as being “goofy-footed,” he's talking about someone who places his right foot (instead of his left foot) at the front of the surfboard.

What distinctive features can you include in describing your key people? Maybe a woman in your story spoke with a Canadian accent and pronounced “out” and “about” in that distinctive Canadian way. (I can poke fun at Canadians because I'm related to a number of them. In fact, I'm told I have a Canadian accent.) If a character was a ballerina, did she walk tall and straight and gracefully? Use sensory details to describe them.

For example, if a reader had stood with you in the presence of a pastry chef or a dairy farmer, what would your reader have seen, smelled, felt, heard, or tasted?

 

Think about sitting on your dad’s lap when you were a little kid. Did you smell his aftershave? Or the beer on his breath?

 

Kathleen Pooler, in her vignette “Seeds of Faith,” wrote of what she smelled, heard, and felt when visiting her great-grandmother:

 

“I sat on the edge of the bed and she pulled me close. . . . ‘God bless. God bless,’ she whispered. The musty scent of age lingered as she gently rubbed my back. . . . Her tiny hands felt smooth, like a soft leather glove.”

 

Incorporate a person’s facial expression. What did your boss’s eyes look like when he was mad at you?

 

When you hid in the woods and smoked cigarettes after school, how could you tell, when you got home, that your mother had already found out? What did her face look like—her eyes, her mouth? Did her nostrils flare? What did her voice sound like? Did she yell, or did she give you the silent treatment? Did she cry? Or laugh?

 

Look over your rough drafts and breathe life into your memoir’s main characters.

 

“Pull your readers closer . . . into a sensory world

that you and your readers can inhabit together.”

(Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir)

 

Come back next week: I’ll share more secrets

on how to develop your memoir’s main characters.

 

Back to Basics: How’s your progress in describing your memoir’s key places?

 

Are you making progress in describing the key places—the key settings—in your memoir? I hope our recent blog posts have inspired you. (Click on Details, a must for your memoir;  It’s super fun to gather “crackly” words. . . . ; and The importance of “place”. . . . )

Today I offer you more inspiration:

Write your memoir so that 

your “reader gets zipped into your skin,” 

in the words of memoir guru Mary Karr. 

When you include sensory details 

(smell, taste, sight, sound, and touch), 

readers will feel drawn into your story with you—

and when they’re “zipped into your skin,” 

your message will make its way into their hearts and minds.

Think back: Think of a book that made you feel you were in the story, smelling scents she smelled, tasting flavors he tasted, seeing sights he saw, hearing sounds she heard, feeling textures he felt. 

Often the best way to learn how to describe a place 

is to study how others have done that.

With that in mind, notice sensory details of sight and sound that Naomi Benaron used in her novel set in Rwanda, Running the Rift:

 

“He stood until the truck became a speck in the red swirl of dust. When even the speck had disappeared, he broke into a run down the road, where life paraded on as if nothing had changed. He strained up the hill, sacks of sorghum and potatoes draped over bicycle handlebars or stacked in rickety wooden carts. Children herded goats fastened with bits of string, lugged jerricans filled with water, trotted with rafts of freshly gathered firewood on their heads. Women chatted on the way to and from the market, basins filled with fruits and vegetables balanced like fancy hats.”  

 

Because I lived in East Africa for several years, Benaron’s details transported me back. For those not acquainted with that culture, her details offer an authentic view of life there. Her words make the reader feel he’s in the scene.

 

Notice details of sight, sound, and smell in another excerpt from Running the Rift:

 

“Market goers created a congestion through which the truck barely moved. In the dying afternoon, hawkers called out bargains, packed up unsold tools and clothing, used appliances held together with hope and string. Flies swarmed around carcasses of meat. The aromas of over-ripe fruit and gamy animal flesh made Jean Patrick queasy. A bicycle taxi swerved into their path. . . . The woman on the back loosed a stream of insults in their direction. The radio droned; the truck engine whined and coughed. Their bodies jostled together from the potholed road. . . .”

 

Butch Ward offers advice inspired by Jacqui Banaszynski: 

“Write cinematically. 

Movies pull us through stories with strong themes, 

compelling characters and revelatory details. 

Written stories can do the same thing. . . . 

Zoom in tight on details or images 

that have the most meaning; 

be descriptive and specific.”

 

Caution: Avoid subjecting readers to irrelevant details—details that don’t enhance your main settings, details that don’t pertain to the point of your story/vignette.  Extraneous details slow down your story.

 

Revisit key places and scenes in your rough draft and ask yourself, “What did the place smell like?” Were you in a stable, or at the perfume counter in Macy’s?

 

Ask yourself “What noises were in the background?” The rumble of trains? The hush of snowfall?

 

What did you see in the distance? Mountains? Unending desert? Jungle? What did you see within your immediate surroundings?

 

If you were with a group of individuals eating tadpoles in okra sauce, how did that feel on your tongue? What was the texture? Find words to describe the taste and smell.

 

Include details that invite readers 

to encounter the same experiences you did. 

“Zip them into your skin.”

Back to Basics: It’s super fun to gather “crackly” words for your memoir

 

Last week we stressed the importance of inviting readers to experience your story as if they were with you. You, the writer, can make that happen by helping them to see, feel, hear, taste, and smell what you saw, felt, heard, tasted, and smelled. We’re talking about sensory details.

 

We’ll continue working on sensory details in the coming weeks but today we’re taking a slight—and fun!—detour which will enhance your use of sensory details.

 

A number of years ago I bought The Writer’s Portable Mentor by Priscilla Long, and it became one of my favorite writing books.

 

Oh, how I’d love to sit at her feet and take classes from her! But she has retired—sigh. However, second-best is her book: a treasure chest packed with jewels.

 

Priscilla praises writers who “collect words the way some numismatists collect coins.”

 

She also recognizes writers who, on the other hand, approach “language passively. . . . The writer is using only words that come to mind, or words he grew up with, or words she stumbles upon while reading The New York Times. . . .

 

“He strives for expression with rather general, conventional diction [word choice] that has little to offer in the way of echo, color, or texture.”

 

Priscilla continues, “The writers of deep and beautiful works spend real time gathering words. They learn the names of weeds and tools and types of roof. They make lists of color words (ruby, scarlet, cranberry, brick).

 

“They savor not only the meanings, but also the musicality of words,” she says. “They are hunting neither big words nor pompous words nor Latinate words but mainly words they like. . . . They are not trying to be fancy or decorative.”

 

Did you get that? Not big, pompous, fancy, or decorative.

 

Words that don’t require a dictionary.

 

One caution:

Avoid using words that draw attention to yourself,

words that might cause readers to say,

“Oh, what a clever writer he is!”

That interrupts. That lures readers out of your story.

 

Instead, use words that keep readers involved in your story,

words that make your places, characters,

and experiences come to life.

 

Priscilla quotes Annie Proulx who admits to collecting and reading dictionaries (!) and to gathering words:

 

“I have big notebooks, page after page of words

that I like or find interesting or crackly . . . .

From time to time I will,

if I feel a section [of writing] is a bit limp,

take a couple of days and just do dictionary work

and recast sentences so that

they have more power because their words are not overused.”

 

That’s important: Avoid overused words.

 

Priscilla encourages The Lexicon Practice: a deliberate, ongoing gathering of words and phrases. She explains:

 

“There are two parts to the practice. One is to make your own Lexicon [word book] and the other is to collect words and phrases in a list that pertains to the piece you are currently working on. . . .

 

“Writers who do the Lexicon Practice have left in the dust [those who don’t]. Writers who don’t do it . . . are pretty much stuck with television words, newspaper words, cereal-box words.”

 

I’ll let you in on a secret—a confession of sorts. I thought I was the only one who collected words! I was giddy upon learning from Priscilla that I was not a weirdo. A nerd—yes. A geek—yes. But a weirdo—no! (Whew!)

 

So, now that I feel okay about being a word nerd, I’ll share a few words I once gathered, words that would meet with Priscilla’s approval. They are not big words, not pompous, fancy, or decorative words. They don’t require a dictionary.

 

Whimsy

Wry

Beguiling

Chummy

Sluggard

Wiley

Paunchy

Irascible

Thrumming, thrum

Mirth, jollity, glee, merrymaking

Jolly

Jovial

Peerless

Cull

Kafuffle

Befuddle

Canter

Miserly

 

I’ve also worked on a second type of lexicon Priscilla recommends, a word book for an era, such as 1950-1960. It was so fun! More on that another day. . . .

 

For now, though:

 

Are you a word nerd? If so,

leave some of your words in a comment below

(or on Facebook) so we all can enjoy them.

 

If you’re not a word nerd, don’t settle

for “television words, newspaper words, cereal-box words.”

Instead, give Priscilla’s Lexicon Practice a try.

Enrich your vocabulary.

 

 Creating your own word book

could lead to a new realm of writing for you.

 

Happy writing!

 

Back to Basics: Details, a must for your memoir

 

The holidays are over—!! So . . .

we’re returning to our Back to the Basics series

for our newcomers—and for all of us,

no matter where we are

in the writing of our memoirs.

 

You want your story to come to life so readers will feel they’re a part of your experience. Sensory details can do that for your readers.

 

Your task is to write so readers connect with you. Invite them to see, feel, hear, taste, and smell what you saw, felt, heard, tasted, and smelled. That way they can enter into your story with you.

 

Make your story happen all over again, this time for your readers.

 

The following quote will help you understand sensory details and why they’re important:

 

 

“You must recreate how you experienced the places,

people and situations of your life experiences

through the senses.

Where you were and what was happening to you

originally came in through your ears,

nose, tongue, skin, and eyes.

That is what the reader needs, too,

to experience your world

and draw the conclusions you did . . . .

 

As writers we must learn to rely on the outer world

for the images a situation provides,

rather than relying on thoughts and summaries.

Sure, those will come into our writing, at times,

but using them sparingly . . .

makes them all the more powerful.”

Sheila Bender,

“Letting Images Do the Talking”

 

 

Below, I offer you additional quotes for inspiration:

 

 

“In writing, imagery is the key

that can unlock a reader’s imagination.

When an image is rendered with the right combination of words,

it magically appears in the reader’s mind

like a photograph or a film clip.”

Melissa Donovan,

“Creative Writing Prompts for Crafting Compelling Imagery”

 

 

“Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. . . .

When your character is in a new place,

or things alter around them,

that’s the point to step back

and fill in the details of their world.”

Hilary Mantel,

“23 Writing Tips from Booker-Prize Winning Authors”

 

 

“If you’re like most writers

the dominant sense is visual.

That’s because most of us write ‘by sight.’

That is, we include what we see and, sometimes,

what we hear.

Rarely what we smell, taste, or feel (as in the sense of touch).

If your writing tends to fall within this ‘mostly sight’ category,

you may fail to engage your readers.

If you want to write vivid memories,

then you must learn to remember vividly—

not just see, but smell, taste, feel, and hear those memories. . . .”

Amber Lea Starfire,

“From Memories to Memoir, Part 3—Remembering Vividly”

(See Amber’s whole post for step-by-step tips

on how to remember vividly.)

  

Look over your rough drafts and have fun crafting scenes that include what you want your readers to see, smell, taste, feel, and hear.