Snow Effect

Have you ever been alone in a cocoon of snow? I read Verlyn Klinkenborg’s editorial in the NYT this morning on driving in snow. It reminded me of a day when I drove from Washington to Baltimore along the Parkway in a gentle, continuous snowstorm. I had finished reviewing graduate fellowship applications and was going to visit my daughter at Goucher College. The tall pines and shorter spruces and firs accepted inches of delicate snow capping the dark green branches with impossibly balanced superstructure. I turned off the radio and felt mesmerized by the soft flakes drifting down to light on top of the branches. I never saw one that completely toppled over. I kept expecting that soon one would have to drop its burden. A few times I saw a slide from one side of a branch, leaving the delicate stack on the other side untouched. I could barely drive for watching this dance. The suspence of not knowing if or when I’d see a whole branch shed its snow was delicious. Think about times when snow, rain, some form of weather became more visible than usual to you.

Silghtest Wisps of Hope

One of my students recently described patients who want to try stem cells now as “willing to invest in the slightest wisps of hope.” That volunteering scares those who love the risk-taking patients, as eloquently portrayed in His Brother’s Keeper: A Story from the Edge of Medicine by Jonathan Weiner. But in some sense, it’s the basis of ‘progress’ in medicine…the only way a new method can be established is by clinical trials, and without patients willing to risk them, none would occur.

Brain Damage Insights

Oliver Sachs’ new book about how music and the brain interact continues his usual mix of fascinating insights into medicine and graceful writing. At one point, he describes patients who suffer a stroke incapacitating their ‘left brain’ cognitive centers, only to suddenly become transcendent artists. The first thing I thought of was this: THE CRITIC, that brain obligato that insists nothing I write is any good, must be in the ‘left brain.’ How I wish she would shut up, and how beautifully I think I could write if she did. But I don’t really want to give up my ability to analyze either. I just want to be selective.

Moving your readers

I felt for some time that I could not really convey feelings. I left them out, and my readers were quick to aks, “and how did that make you feel?” Then I started saying how I had felt (or how my character had felt). But I made a new discovery recently. Deepest feeling can be conveyed with details. I just finished reading Three Dog Life, a memoir about a woman coming to terms with her husband’s severe brain damage from an accident. Evocative details of her life told the whole story and moved me to tears several times. Never did she say, “I was sad.” She must have decided to tell us how she felt, but not to say, ‘I felt sad.” She could tell us in what she did, how long she sat staring into her dog’s eyes, how many daytime naps she took.

Ways to Say "Go"

Being a writer makes you develop certain habits of mind. One that has been fun to develop is sensitivity to how saying the “same thing” with different words enriches the tone or feeling of a piece of writing. I started collecting ways to say “stop” recently and got up to ten while I was waiting for the optician , including “halt,” :freeze,” “cease,” ”stifle yourself,” “stow it,” “quit it,” and “enough, already.” Your Jewish mother will not say, “Halt!” while that LAPD officer will not say, “enough, already.” If you think about situations where a character would say stop in one of these ways, most of the time only that one choice would work. So making a list like this helps you to be ready with that perfect word choice when you write.

That made me think of a new challenge for you wordsmiths out there: how many words meaning “go” can you find? A prize will be awarded to the winner with the most different words!

Place as a Person

In some writing, the action wouldn’t change if the location changed. In other writing, for example Grapes of Wrath or Cannery Row by Steinbeck, place acts as a character. If a place is a character, it has good and bad traits just like a human character. I am thinking about a grocery story I visit often. Good qualities are the lovely smell of fresh tomatoes, strawberries, and peaches in the produce section, the smell of fresh bread in the bakery area, the many kinds of cheese they offer. To me the bad includes women who push free samples of packaged foods I don’t buy, the fact that most of the store is full of products that don’t interest me, the blockage of the aisles where the things I want are located by projecting product-stands displaying things I don’t want, and the fish section always stinking of long-dead seafood.

Mike Foley (UCR, Writers’ Review) gave me the idea that the same place can be a positive or a negative character, depending on what you describe and how you describe it. If I want to show the store as a welcoming setting to someone returning from California from New York, I can emphasize the lights, the produce’s attractive smells, and the baking bread. If I want to show how it antagonizes an ecological activist, I’d emphasize the excess profit emphasis, the aisles of processed foods, and the stinking fish. It would be the same raw material, either way. I could use different views of it if I was writing about the viewpoints of two human characters who felt differently about the market.

Do you have ideas about how to use a familiar scene as a positive or negative character?

I know I’m in California because…

I see green leaves on September 26, green even though it’s been a little cold and rainy. There are geraniums blooming in my yard and doves cooing in the eaves. I catch the eye of the driver across from me at a traffic light, she looks agitated and I beckon to let her precede me. She smiles and waves, then goes ahead.
This morning the doorbell rang at 7 AM. It was the NY Times delivery guy. He was concerned because he had delivered the paper earlier and didn’t see it when he drove by, but we usually aren’t out to get it that early. Did we need another one? No, it’s okay, we just got up early.
I go out barefooted to check on the dog’s water. The lawn chairs are still out and full of books from my husband’s last bout of studying. He must have left them after the rain, I think.
I make myself a cup of chamomile tea and watch a hummingbird on the one tall red rose outside the back window. Suddenly, my chair and I rock to the left and roll to the right. Oops, it’s an earthquake. Not a big one. My husband didn’t even notice it, probably because his chair was differently aligned towards the fault.

To me, the details in this description make it a California description. What kinds of details would say “California” or “Oregon” or wherever you are?