Life in progress

Tag Archives: description


by 17 Comments

One-Liner Wednesday – Putting Off the Elusive Noun

I bought this amazing, fantastic, wonderful, marvelous, awesome, incredible, magnificent, fabulous … thing!

For the listener it’s: Yes? Yes? Yes? Yes? Yes? Yes?! Yes?!! Yes?!!? … ugh.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below.

As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday, if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.

The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:

1. Make it one sentence.

2. Make it either funny or inspirational.

Have fun!


by 14 Comments

The Most Important Thing in Fiction

The mark of an excellent novel, in my opinion, is made by how much I fall into the story and its world and how much I care about the characters. There’s really nothing quite like a book that I don’t want to put down. You know the kind – they’re the ones that leave you sad when they end.

I was thinking about the elements that go into such a story and it occurred to me that for me, it’s the author’s ability to leave things out. Description, in too much detail, takes away my need to imagine them. But having said that, it’s only certain things I don’t want described to me.

If a land, for instance, is extremely foreign then I need as much detail as I can get. But certain actions… Take sex scenes for instance. I find them much more erotic if they are sparsely described than if they are laid out like a users’ manual, unless there is something particularly unusual about the scene. Another one for me is the description of characters. Even if someone is described in minute detail, I tend to get my own impression of their appearance and I think a lot of what I imagine has to do with their character itself, for instance whether they are a villain or a lover. It’s like when I talk to someone on the phone on a daily basis – I get an idea of what he or she looks like based on their voice and the way they talk. It’s usually a shock to see what the person actually looks like!

The point is, it’s the lack of description in many cases that makes me think–makes me imagine more–and this is what draws me in. If I’m able to place a modicum of my own experience into a world I’m reading about, it becomes mine. It becomes a place I love to be, populated with people I can truly envision.

What do you like left out of the stories you read? Do you have a favourite thing you like to envision for yourself?


by Leave a comment

Private Thoughts, Private World Part 6 – Beauty

In each of us the idea of it is cradled, warm and glowing. It’s something we wish for, something we strive for, something we hope to behold and to create. For each of us there is a singular nuance that we recognize and when we see it, or hear it, touch it, taste it or even smell it we know. It lights up a part of our brain like nothing else can.

It is beauty.

It moves us, it inspires us. It comes in so many forms. I remember once, I had taken an overnight flight from England back home so I had been up all day the day before and because of the time change and having to look after my kids… let’s just say I was exhausted. In this state, I was in the car for some reason and the song ‘Comfortably Numb’ came on the radio. I sat and listened to the entire thing. It wasn’t until the guitar solo at the end when I started to bawl my eyes out, positive that it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard in my life. …at least since I saw Pink Floyd live so many years before that.

How do you describe something that, to you, is so beautiful that it makes you cry? By giving it life. Like the gritty, piercing of David Gilmour’s guitar crawling up the back of my neck and wrapping me in a warm blanket of pure, ear-splitting devastation.

By giving an inanimate object a soul we can not only describe what we see but how it makes us feel.

Sakura2

Sakura

I see a delicate cherry blossom, known only to spring. It signifies both the brilliance and the swiftness of life and all its glory, for it comes and goes, so very quickly.

Beauty can be defined in so many different ways. For some of us it is in a face, in the sound of children’s laughter. For some it is home and the aroma of freshly baked cookies or the comfort of a roaring fire on a cold winter night. For some it is the exquisite line, where pain and ecstasy meet – the drop of blood,  the single tear shed for love.

Beauty is one of only many things that move us, that make us want to write or to articulate our emotions in other ways. To be able to elicit in others the emotion that comes from our deepest most precious place where we know things such as beauty is a gift. It’s one that I hope to practice and somehow, perfect.