Time for my prompt group yet again! We did some exercises this time that were not exactly prompts, but were designed to teach us to write better. The first was one my friend MB did at a writer’s conference. It was: Imagine a situation with a strong emotion attached to it and pick an object to describe it. This is called Vessel of Place, a way of saying that an object can have more emotional memory attached to it than the memory of an event. (I hope that makes sense.)
The second one was a two part exercise. We first were instructed to describe a place we had recently visited. The second part was to use other senses. Specifically, we had to take out all references to sight. Mine didn’t have that much, so I worked instead to add more senses into the prose. I’m including only the second here. Please criticize me if I used too many visual references.
The final prompt was to take an object from the second prompt and do another vessel of place exercise with it.
Please post your exercises as well! I’d love to see them. I’m posting my responses below and then will end this post with some brief writing tips we went over.
Prompt 1
The wine glass was half filled so by default it was half emptied. I stared at it and saw the reflections of the lights from around the dining room glaring back at me and hurting my eyes. Looking through it, I could see him sitting on the other side of the table, his own glass of wine in his hand. He swirled it around and around, mixing the sweet wine with a bitter bite to it. I took a drink myself and what had previously seemed sweet and aromatic now seemed bitter and ashen. It was funny how a few words could change the taste of a vintage wine.
I’m not certain but I’m pretty sure I lost more than my taste for wine that night. The glass slowly drained in the same way the life slowly drained out of him. What was before savory had turned ashen. Link the life blood draining out of him as he left this world, the red wine into my mouth and disappeared forever. The reflections in the glass faded as the night ended and the light in his eyes slowly went out over months of illness.
The pattern on the tablecloth that night reflected strangely in the base of my wine glass and looked like a cross. I now believe it was a plus sign. It was telling me, “It’s a plus that you’re with him now. It’s a plus that you get to see this happen to him before it happens to you.” But it was a plus for HIV positive, which is always a negative.
Prompt 2, Part 2
The ground was soft and muddy. Most of the sites had ground the consistency of a baby’s diaper and the ones that weren’t were none too common. When we finally found a place, the rain let up just enough to make us brave enough to venture out of the car. Only one site had both a grille and a fireplace, both critical things in our opinion that the site director didn’t seem to find important. A square of flat land had a few sticks that we threw into the woods so that they wouldn’t poke us in the back all night. We should have considered that we’d want them later for firewood. My husband opened the trunk and we got out the small tent, only then realizing that I’d forgotten the big tent at home. This isn’t exactly what you want to realize 3.5 hours from home when you’re on a budget camping trip.
$106 later we were back with the roomiest tent in the site and were happily setting up for our other friends to arrive. The sun was finally coming through the clouds and the humidity started to dip below 100%.
Prompt 3
The car smelled like a wet dog. The carpets had mud rubbed into them from the college friends who didn’t bother to wipe their boots after hiking. I found an entire McDonalds meal under the passenger’s seat. It seems someone didn’t listen when I asked them to take their trash out when we left the car.
The squished bug on the inside of the back windshield will still be there six months later and the smell of spilt beer will never really leave the trunk. The back seat still smells like river and the driver’s seat will always feel like shiver exasperation at the follies of men and boys. I saw the ‘emergency tent’ we bought when I went to put my summer beach bag away for the winter. It reminded me that even if you forget the shelter, you can remember to bring over 5 gallons of beer, as long as you have your priorities straight. That’s enough return money to buy another 12 pack, in case you’re interested.
A Few Tips
I won’t be too long winded here, but we discussed a few tips and techniques for writers to utilize. The first tip was to start with a list of names so that it’s easy to grab a name for a throw-away character while writing and you don’t have to stop and look around for one. One member of our group suggested BehindtheName.com to look for names based on origin and meaning. I’ve used this site for a piece I’m working on and it’s very helpful, I highly recommend it as well.
The second is something most writers know already; that every detail about your character and the words they say should give meaning to the character. For example, I can say that Joe ate breakfast. All that says is that Joe’s hungry. If I say Joe ate a cold Poptart, you might think “Joe’s in a hurry and a bachelor.” If I say that Joe had bacon and eggs you will probably think “Joe’s a family man with a wife who wakes up really early.” Either way, the detail of what he ate tells you who Joe is. All details should tell us about the character.
The third trick might sound like my earlier post about strong language, but it’s not to use ‘lazy’ words. For example, everyone wears shoes. ‘Shoe’ is a lazy word. A woman wears stilettos or boots. A child wears tennis shoes, a grandpa wears Oxfords. ‘Shoe’ is a lazy word that doesn’t give us much description. Someone can be ‘nice,’ but it’s better if they’re friendly or pleasant. Try to stay away from very general words when a stronger noun would do better.
The last is one that I think is critical for good characterization and it’s to use a ‘language bank’ for each character. We each have a vocabulary that’s uniquely our own and when we speak we say something differently than someone else would say it. Also, individuals have phrases that they use a lot that another person might never use. My example of this is Jay Gatsby who always says ‘old sport.’ Once it’s established that Gatsby is the one saying this, Fitzgerald could even leave off dialogue tags because the reader knew that was part of Gatsby’s vernacular. I plan to do this with my WIP characters. I want to take any scene in which a character talks and put the dialogue into one document. It should read almost like a stream of consciousness from that character and individual quirks about how the person talks should be evident in each one.
I hope these tips are useful to you. Please leave a comment and let me know or leave a comment with your own tip. Thanks for reading. 🙂
Taking On a World of Words 