Photo Muse

I'll be gone on a trip for a week, so this is probably my last post until I get back. While I'm away from home, hopefully I'll still get to write a little bit. Hopefully you will, too. Here's a pic to inspire you. Think about the grass being soft underfoot, a cool breeze drying the sweat on your nose, the smell of pond water,  the shifting shadows, the cold metal of the bench and the grittiness of the dirt on it, and maybe the taste of honeysuckle.

Showing vs. Telling


"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."  Anton Chekhov (doctor and writer)

I love this quote for two reasons. One, it's so glorious! It's exactly what I like so much about writing and reading, that the right words engulf your brain with a delicious wash of images and make you see what they're describing.

And two, because Chekhov says the classic  "show; don't tell" so well, because as he's telling you to show, he's showing you how.

"The Sweet Taste of Success"

(Descriptive memoir-esque fiction)

           Each breath and every heartbeat rocks my vision like a buoy in stormy water. The grip is the wrong shape for my outstretched hands. The green sponges in my ears make the noises around me sound like they do in dreams: slow, murky, and blurred. I take a deep breath, but my heart keeps racing. The detachment from my hearing makes everything surreal. Am I really doing this? 

Through the muddy echoes outside my ears, a voice reassures me. Adjusting my grip and planting my feet more firmly, I hold my breath and squint one eye, and my vision steadies. There it is, the crisp white sheet. Then I pull back the hammer, shift my pointed finger into a curl around the trigger, and squeeze. The explosion punches my left hand like a metal fist as the barrel spurts flame, and the smoke and the gunpowder that settles deep in my throat tastes strangely sweet. I lower my hands and look down the lane. The sheet of paper sways gently, a clean black hole through the circle of red. Bull’s-eye.

The Blueberries in the Muffins

Irony and plot twists are the icing on the cake (or the blueberries in the muffins or the chocolate chips in the cookies). The short story, Roman Fever, by Edith Wharton has both. At the end my jaw dropped and all I could say was, "Oh my goodness!" My mom read it when she was in English school, and the other day she suddenly remembered and told me about it. Now I'm passing it on to you. :)

Chilly Read (concluded)

               The Igloo: Part IV

After that, the temperature warmed up again. The igloo survived a couple days of 60 and 70° weather. While the snow on the ground melted and turned to mud, it stood unflinchingly in the sunshine. 

But even the nearly one-foot-thick walls didn’t last forever. Each trek to the end of the street found the igloo in a little less of its former glory. Solid ice turned to pockmarked slush. One day, while we were there, the roof fell in. A bright blue sky shone in through the gaping hole. All too soon, the walls crumbled. What had taken us four days to build collapsed, melted, and disappeared. But not without a trace.

The day after it melted, I walked down the now dry street, and looked for what was left. There was no more snow, but where our white fortress used to stand, an imprint of it was pressed into the carpet of leaves. Gallons of frozen water had stamped its shape into the ground. It was like looking at roofless pillars on the cracked stone floor of a ruined castle and picturing where the entrance and the walls of the throne room used to be.

Like when visiting the remnants of a once stately old building, there was a feeling of melancholy. In that in-between time of no longer the glittering white beauty of winter but not yet the vivid greens and rainbow palette of spring, of a sea of snow crystals replaced by muddy leaves and wilted grass, of roads scattered with sand, not blanketed with snow, of the dwindling warmth and glow of the wood stove and the dissipating wood smoke from the chimney, I was sad. It is always sad to see winter go. But at the same time, I say that it is better to have snowed and melted than never to have snowed at all.

Word Economy

          I read about "word economy" and being clear and concise in how-to-write books. The classics seem to be full of page-long sentences and endless description, but nowadays short and sweet seems to be the literary fashion. Poetry as a genre is concise, but here's an especially good example. It's a three-word couplet by Ogden Nash.

                       Fleas
                       Adam
                       Had 'em

Chilly Read (continued)

            Igloo: Part III

Wednesday, the following day, my siblings and I tramped down to the igloo, armed with a lunchbox, a tarp, a board game, and a rolled up old carpet. The igloo stood proudly against a glittering white backdrop. Its walls were solid ice, having melted partially and then refrozen. It had snowed, too, in the night; the haphazard roof we stuck on the previous night was now a smooth round dome. As a final touch, we unrolled the carpet and spread it across the icy floor on top of a tarp.

Sam came over, and we celebrated more than 16 hours of work and our finished igloo with a picnic of cookies and juice pouches! Sitting cross-legged on the carpet, sheltered from a cutting wind, we munched on cookies and played the Game of LIFE. The noises from outside were strangely muted, and inside was peacefully quiet. It looked snug and homey, especially with our boots lined up on the doorstep, but when we all finally retired in LIFE, we were half frozen. My sister and brother and I gathered up our things, said bye to the igloo and Sam, and went home to thaw out in the warmth of our wood stove.