We all fantasize about our novel being made into a movie, don’t we? Now-a-days people make book trailers for the book itself. It’s an intimidating concept, unless you have unlimited funds and can hire people. Instead, I found a decent compromise using Tiktok. Tiktok’s algorithm isn’t great for literary writers, as far as I can tell, and the longer your video, the shorter its reach. Also, their editor is somewhat limiting. For instance, the slides can’t be re-ordered once you upload them, and there aren’t any smooth transition effects for changing the photos. It’s also time-consuming to order the blurbs using their timer function. But I love that you can use the music Tiktok has contracted with for free.
When I imagine Blue Woman Burning the movie, Pink Martini ‘s songs “Le Premier Bonheur du Jour” and “Que Sera, Sera” would be a major soundtrack theme. “When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, what will I be….” is the perfect reference to the flawed relationship between Fallon and her disappearing mother. The unbalanced-carousel background music of Pink Martini’s version is a beautiful expression of that feeling of “unreality” you get when you’re being snowed by a narcissist parent.
If I could use Pink Martini’s music for free, I’d use the “Ken Burns” effect in Mac’s iMovie slide show application. My father took the pictures I used here in Chile way back when, and they feature the family members the main characters of my novel were partly based on. A few of the images are from Unsplash. Then I clicked on “effects” and selected “visual” and “water for that ripple over the top. And that’s all she wrote. For today.
Heck, here’s a link to my whole BWB spotify playlist. Enjoy!
To support local bookstores, order from the Northshire Bookstore in Saratoga Springs, NY. My book of magical realist short stories Strange Appetites is available now, and Blue Woman Burning will be available by December 9th, 2021.
The first, The Colony, totally works for me. Judging from the use of several clips of the same people, I’m guessing they actually filmed the clips? I don’t know. Maybe the subscription services come with a few clips of the same people.
Obviously, my trailer is a little less Hollywood suspense, and more about flavor and texture. It takes all kinds. I’m betting that it’s best to make your trailer match your book. Blue Woman Burning is a psychological page-turner, but not a thriller.
Davidson Family Photo, taken by my dad. Camping or picnicking somewhere in south America.
When you write about family, publishing your first book isn’t always the happy occasion you think it should be. My first novel Blue Woman Burning will be published by Red Penguin Books on November 23rd. Instead of excitement and joy, I’m riding a see-saw between dread and numbness. It has been SUCH a long and confusing journey with so many stops, starts, revisions, and reinventions. Though excellent work can be written in the thick of emotional turmoil, I had to grow a few decades to write mine. When I began it (34 years ago!), I was too stuck in its emotional backwaters to understand and complete it.
Discovering Direction
The novel started with a short story I wrote after I had been accepted to a graduate creative writing program at the University at Albany in 1988. It was about an 18-month family stay in Chile during my childhood. I wrote in a charming, humorous voice, which I later figured out was only to protect myself from pain caused by family dynamics. I used magical realism to externalize my perceptions.
I had no idea how to end the story because I was angry with the main character, Eustacia, based loosely on my mother. I didn’t know the main character angered me, though. It was so charming how she didn’t know how many children she had; how she accidentally packed a child into shipping container and blithely congratulated herself for her brilliance when it was discovered; how she named them all after her own body parts. When I discovered my anger, the ending came with an explosion.
Long story short, autobiographical material confused and distracted me. We really did drive from Santiago, Chile to Upstate New York in a Dodge Dart as the novel depicts. We really did get stuck in the altiplano, a high desert plateau. But that wasn’t what the book was about. It took me a long time to realize the novel was about me being trapped in a Bermuda triangle between my mother, my brother and myself. Yet, I wasn’t even the main character in the original version!
Huge revisions later, I cobbled together something presentable in 1999. I found an agent, and she sent it to all the best publishers. Somewhere in my basement lurks a copy of a very complimentary rejection from Grove Press.
She asked me to revise. There was clearly something wrong with it. I and my writing style had changed so much in those twelve years of writing the novel, that it felt like I had jammed two different bodies together. The bones just didn’t match up no matter how much I massaged the skin. I was sick of it, I had just had a baby, and I didn’t know how to fix it.
I needed a few more decades of growth to get past the emotional pain of the autobiographical material. That’s when I was able to ask myself the real question all writer need to ask to complete a novel: “What do my characters need?” Not, “What do I need?” The latter is a great question for therapy and for getting started. But it doesn’t end there.
So, many more revisions later—and I don’t mean mere edits, but rather, throwing out half a book and writing a new half, then throwing out half of that, and reorganizing and trying new points of views— Blue Woman Burning is both my first novel and my tenth novel, all rolled into one lifetime of learning. I also just learned it is the first book in a new imprint for Red Penguin Books. I’m honored.
And now? I want people to read it…and I don’t want people to read it. I want it to be wildly successful…and I also know that the chances of that are slim. I’ve been working hard to promote the hell out of it, but I still have a day job, the task is endless, and I have a secret fear that the publicity gods just don’t like me. Maybe I enjoy the secondary gains of obscurity too much: protection. Will obscurity continue to protect me? Probably.
Family Fallout…
I have warned my family about the autographical content. I was worried about my mother reading it, as I knew she would recognize herself and also the places where I fictionalized. There’s a death in the novel that I know would wound her. Sadly, at the age of 98, she doesn’t remember much. Yet, it is sadly fortunate that my novel is being released now: I can share my accomplishment with her, AND I know she won’t be able to read it.
Speaking of which, at her insistence and against my better judgement a few weeks ago, I agreed to read the prologue aloud to her. Not surprisingly, cherubic and charming narcissist that she is, she interrupted me twenty times to tell me how it really was, and how I should revise. I explained that the book was finished, and she told me she was trying to help me improve it. I said, for the first time in my life, “It doesn’t need improvement.” Though I had to take a restroom break, I marveled at how little the exchange hurt. Twenty years ago, it would have cut deeply and lastingly. Whew. Growth!
But there’s the rest of my family. I worry about that my two older sisters, who are not in the novel, will feel exposed by having the family in the public eye. I wonder do they feel bad about being left out entirely? Then there’s a fictional version of my younger brother. Will he mind how I characterized some of his surface attributes?
I am most worried about my older brother’s feelings. The character based on him, Ovid, is a major character in the novel. I have spoken with my brother about it, and he has graciously applauded my publication and told me not to worry about how the character is depicted. Still, will friends call and ask, “Did that really happen?”
I told him a writer can never capture a whole of a human being on paper (at least, I can’t). I’m also hugely aware of how unreliable memory is and how biased we all are. That is my defense. He is okay with me noting that he is bi-polar in real life. But I clearly took it to a more dramatic level in the novel. It made a better story. It was not wish fulfillment. A writer says to themselves, “What is the worst possible thing that could happen to this character?” and then they do it. I won’t spoil it for you.
Let me just end by observing that there is a huge danger to having a writer in the family. More books are more autobiographical than most authors let on. They expose family and friends even when cleverly disguised. There is also a huge danger in being the (published) writer in the family The writer dares to shape the family narrative how they see fit. The writer gets the last word. But do I?
So let me be clear, as the acknowledgment of Blue Woman Burning says, “Thanks also to my family of origin for adventures in distant lands, arguments and inspiration, and for your forbearance, as I borrow family stories and likenesses, and change them wildly” to make a better story. There will be some fallout, no doubt, but I will endeavor to embrace the learning that will follow.
Meanwhile, friends and family will be joining me at a launch party on December 9th in Saratoga Springs, NY, and expect I will feel the joy, then.
Over the last few months, I’ve been exploring a variety of social media platforms to cultivate an audience for my upcoming book releases. I must have listened to the same podcasts as all the other writers (Creative Penn, The Bestseller Experiment) because there’s so much chatter out there, it’s hard to hear ourselves speak. We’ve all become slaves to whatever shifting algorithm these platforms use to determine who gets the views. So now, not only do we have to write, we have to master fifteen new apps. And often, to use an app, you have to master another one first. We have to become our own marketing mavens.
There’s a high likelihood we’ve been tricked into becoming human battery cells à la Matrix for the benefit of the social media CEOS and advertisers. Oh well.
Here’s what I’ve learned. My Tiktok following has stagnated at less than 200, and the number of likes and views seem to be inversely related to the time I spend making them. Tiktok likes humor, spectacle, self-branding, and imitation (via “dueting” and “stitching”). I know, right? I should write a glossary. Anyway, I can be humorous, but not wildly so, and being ADHD, I thrive on variety, so I’m not really suited to Tiktok. They say it’s four young people, anyway.
Also, Tiktok doesn’t foster the kind of literary audience I’m looking for with a few exceptions, like Panic_Kyle. Finally, I’m NOT going to do the literal song and dance routine required of Tiktok authors. I’ve got nothing against dancing. I just like to do it for fun, not for selling books.
In contrast, Twitter has a stronger literary community. In a few short weeks I’ve doubled my followers by seeking out like-minded authors. There’s a strong ethos in Twitter that if someone follows you, you follow them back. Replying to posts is as important to posting your own thoughts. I find my best twitter replies are instinctive– the ones I don’t think too hard about. It’s like trying to see the Northern Lights when they are visible in NY. They are so faint that if you look at the sky too hard to you don’t see them. You have to cultivate a fuzzy focus.
My Twitter follower number seems to hover at about 44% of the number of people I follow. I’ve gone from not understanding Twitter to looking forward to engaging with strangers about New Yorker articles. In fact, I almost look forward to checking my Twitter messages more than my text messages. Worrisome. Borg induction? Social dissolution? Hope not.
Nevertheless, I enjoy the video editing app on Tiktok. It provides a set of creative constraints, visual tools, and copyrighted sound clips. It has prompted to me to revise, edit, and shorten previously written works, just for the hell of it – which is a good thing.
So, last night, I took a poem from the previous post “November Bones” and, in the effort to fit it into a 60-second Tiktok with visuals and music, I “stripped it down to the bones,” a process I enjoy as much as earth does in the poem, now an “Ode to Death.” A similar thing occurred with my flash fiction, “Lilith Confesses.” I like how the app forces me to weigh each word individually. So, it might not get me views, and it might not sell any books, but it does something far more important. It stimulates curiosity and creativity. Algorithm be damned. See what you think. But don’t think too hard.
I was delighted to be invited to be on Vox Pop with Barbara Chepaitis and Ray Graf as we talked about the creative process. Had to tell myself as I watched the clock count down to the second we were on air– it’s just a conversation with a good friend. Only one f-up– when I said the title of Anne Lamott’s essay, “Shitty First Drafts.” Ironic that we can teach that in public college, but can’t say it on public radio. Almost gave them a heart attack because of the fines they would get. Luckily, they have a delay and were able to catch it and bleep it out! Exciting.
Barbara Chepaitis is author of 12 published novels, including her most recent The Aquarius Project, about a young woman who can wish people dead. She’ll be telling ghost stories with Whispering Bones this October, and is currently working with some Lithuanian folks on her screenplay, The Amber. She teaches performance and writing at the College of St. Rose.
My novel, Blue Woman Burning, a road-trip in search of family with lashings of the supernatural, will be published this November by Red Penguin Books. My short story collection Strange Appetites won the Adirondack Center for Writing’s People’s Choice Award and will be re-released soon! Oct 26! As you know, I am a Distinguished Professor of writing at SUNY Adirondack, and recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Scholarship and Creative Activities.
Listen here, but not before you subscribe to my mailing list for a free digital copy of my collection of short stories, Strange Appetites. For more description, check out the books tab above.
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In the early 20th Century, third person and first person central became the only point of view that was acceptable for fiction. Omniscient was reserved for children’s books and spy/thriller genres. To my thinking, it was the only authentic point of view, acknowledging the inescapability of our subjectivity.
Editors, teachers, and writers generally contended that omniscient narrators are authoritarian, and we’d entered a non-authoritarian, post-modern age where readers didn’t want to be told what was going on. They wanted to be the protagonist of the book and figure it out on their own. Omniscient narrators were so 19th century.
But some of my favorite 20th C. books are omniscient, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude.
With the advent of hybrid genres, more people are breaking out of the mold and mixing narrators like complex cocktails. I’m seeing shifting third person and first person, changing narrative point of view with each chapter, as with There, There by Tommy Orange (about Urban native Americans in Oakland California) and The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi (about bi and trans people in Nigeria).
Jess Walter wrote The Cold Millions nimbly from multiple points of view, starting with first person narration from a minor character who dies before the book proper even starts, but whose death sets a wheel in motion. The rest of the novel is subjective omniscient narrator with some occasional first person narratives. The omniscient narrator and multiple perspectives seem better designed to give us a bigger story about people in a time and place. It asserts that people are part of their society and their landscape.
How to do it, though, without ill-timed info-dumps?
Walters did it seamlessly (after first person preface) with Chapter 1:
They woke on a ball field, bums, tramps, hobos, stiffs. Two dozen of them spread out on bedrolls and blankets in a narrow floodplain just below the skid, past taverns, tanners, and tents, shotgun shacks hung like hounds’ tongues over the Spokane River. Season work over, they floated in from mines and farms and log camps… (11).
As we see above, we get an areal view of a whole crowd of which the main characters are a part, as well as the landscape where the novel takes place. Walters has tucked backstory into the setting, which sets the stage the class warfare of 1909 in the logging, mining, and farming industries. The second paragraph introduces us to one of the two main characters, Rye:
The sun was just beginning to edge the mountains when Rye Dolan sat up, halfway down the first-base line. He looked across the field of sleeping humps, his older brother, Gig, beside him, curled a few feet from the pitchers mound (11).
Instead of action, we next go to backstory on Gig, his connections with labor unions, and a flashback to the night before that explains how they came to be sleeping on a ball field. This goes on for five pages, before we come back to the the ball field where his brother, Gig wakes up. That’s all the current-day action for the first chapter. The rest of the first chapter is backstory with flash back. It’s not until chapter two that we get real present day action with the cops descending on the hobos with “billies and bats and the handles of axes.”
I was taught the structure of chapter 1 is “a bathtub story,” (character get into a tub, thinks about stuff, and gets out. The term comes from Canadian writer Doug Glover, I believe), and that this was a boring and unacceptable way to go, yet it was the opening of what was called “one of the most captivating novels of the year” by Washington Post reviewer Ron Charles. Also– I was taught that the first person appearing in the book should be the main character. Instead, it’s a peripheral character who dies. What it did for me was set the stage: here was a book where first person narrators could die. Here was a world where you thought you were the center of it, and it turned out you weren’t, which historically, is much more accurate than the traditional 21st century first person central novel.
Orange, Emezi and Walter’s narrative structure gave me permission to explore subjective omniscient and multiple narratives in my own novel-in-progress Against the Grain, about an extreme environmental activist who falls in love with the daughter of the logging tycoon clearcutting the redwoods in northern California in 1990. As I navigate this story with a huge cast of characters (including the trees themselves) and various conflicting human interests, I keep returning to Walter’s book for guidance.
So back to the question. How to give historical and biological background without creating an intrusive and unrealistic info dump such as the ones we’ve gotten used to in the TV series Bones and the various incarnations CSI?
Standout Books reminds us not to give information until the reader really needs it, when it’s relevant, or when it’s central to an immediate conflict between characters. Certainly the backstory we get in the first chapter of The Cold Millions helps to explain why hobos are amassing and sleeping in fields, but until Chapter 2, we don’t know why that matters.
More to the point, when does my reader need to learn that giant redwoods have can live 2000 years and respire 500 gallons of water a day? In my rough draft, I’d thrown it down at the beginning of chapter where we meet the heads of Pacific Lumber out in the forest. After much deliberation, I moved it to the chapter where the main character’s father is caught in a mudslide while trying to save the trees he loves. We shall see if it works.
The adventure continues. My first novel, Blue Woman Burning, is an internal narrative, mostly third person point of view, and mostly about the life of the emotions. It feels like the right place for a novelist to start. Now, I’m enjoying the learning curve as I branch out into a novel takes place in the external world with a larger cast of characters, a broader perspective, which is not just about the internal emotional growth of my characters, but about an environmental movement, the trees, and the most important issue of our time: human caused climate change and the battle to save us and the environment from ourselves.
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Lâle Davidson’s novel Blue Woman Burning about a woman who’s mother magically disappeared on the Altiplano between Chile and Bolivia, will be published by Red Penguin Books in November of 2021. Her collection of short stories Strange Appetites won the Adirondack Center for Writing’s People’s Choice Award for 2016 and is being re-released in October via Amazon. Her stories have appeared in The North American Review, Eclectica, and Gone Lawn among others. She was a finalist for the Franz Kafka Award issued by Doctor T.J. Eckleburgh Review as well as the Black Lawrence Chapbook Contest of 2015 and The Talking Writing Award for humorous writing advice. Her story “The Opal Maker” was named top fifty of 2015 very short fiction publications by Wigleaf. She is a Distinguished Professor who has taught writing for 27 years at a community college where she recently received the Chancellor’s Award for Scholarship and Creative Activities (2018).
Once your story is finished, and all the big things are in place, like setting, character motivation, climax, etc. here are a few editing tips that will make your prose stronger.
Get rid of the “filter” such as “she saw,” “he felt,” “she realized,” “they noticed.” This is called the filter because it filters physical detail though a perceiving consciousness and it generally has a dampening effect. It’s okay to use those terms when you have a good reason to call attention to the character’s perception rather than the physical surroundings. Generally, though, removing the filter forces you to use more active verbs, reduce the number of words, amplify the impact of the physical. Consider these transformations:
He saw a snake ripple in the grass, which startled him.
The snake rippled through the grass. He jumped.
She felt like she had been here before.
Had she been here before?
He realized he was never going to see his husband the same way again.
He was never going to see his husband the same way again.
She fell asleep but woke up when she heard faint music.
She fell asleep. Faint music woke her.
2. Use no more than one adjective in a row, and where possible replace adjectives and adverbs with strong verbs. This makes the sentence more vivid and reduces the number of words, while forcing you to construct more active sentences. Consider the following:
The house was full of the scent of fresh-baked bread.
The scent of fresh-baked bread filled the house.
The car was loud as it drove by.
The car roared past them.
The cats outside my window were fighting loudly all night long.
Cats screamed outside my window all night long.
She saw that clouds were coming in rapidly and the sky was turning green
The sky darkened as clouds raced in.
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Writers can benefit from the idea of writing in layers. You don’t have to get the first paragraph perfect before moving onto the second paragraph. You can write down the broad strokes quickly without critical thought, and return later to add in detail.
Here’s the hard part. There is no particular order or steps for what you should revise in each layer. A quick Google search will reveal a variety of checklists from attention grabber to setting detail, but which do you revise first?
My advice, after you’ve gotten down the first draft, is to ask yourself, what does my character want, and in each scene are they moving toward that desire or away from it? Their movement toward their desire should be thwarted at times, and they themselves should have some trepidation or resistance to change. By the end of the story, the character should have changed, not necessarily for the better. They can go from bad to worse. They can go from stagnant to stuck forever. But there needs to be a change.
Next, you might come back and ask yourself if you have externalized the conflict. The conflict shouldn’t happen all inside their heads or via thought. Instead of having someone think about how annoying a friend is, have the friend come in and do something that annoys them. Also, the resolution shouldn’t be a mere change in thinking-it should be prompted by some external action or event. In Jane Eyre, she doesn’t just decide to return to Rochester at the end, she hears his voice calling her.
When you’ve got your structure, come back and take a look at setting and gesture. Do you have enough? Is the setting doing double duty? Is it relevant? Is it creating mood, developing character, or underscoring a theme?
Next you move to line editing. Here you ask yourself if you are using too many adjectives, or strong enough verbs. I have some editing hacks I’ll share with you in another post.
Finally you proofread. This, for me is the most boring part, because you actually have to stop reading for plot and read only for comma errors, spelling errors, etc. But it has to be done, more than once, and preferably after a break from it all. I always need other readers to help me find my errors. I can proofread three times and not see an error until I come back to it weeks later.
Well, that’s enough for today. Please feel free to add your own comments and tips below.
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A lot of writers would rather be caught dead than caught writing clichés, yet a lot of novice writers don’t realize they’re using them– or actually think they are good. There are many reasons for this. First, we internalize language we like, and uncovering a memory can feel like an invention, second, if you haven’t read a lot, you may not realize how often the phrase has been used, and third, an awful lot of cliché cards and mass market fiction make money.
The problem with cliches (aside from going up in a puff of smoke or being obliterated by the writing police) is that they don’t move people. To the person reading their 105th romance novel, they can be comforting (as when her breast heaves and he gruffly kisses her), but for everyone else it rings hollow and can ruin a good plot.
However, there’s no need to crawl under rock in shame when you write in cliché. Clichés can be place holders when writing a rough draft. Highlight it, keep going, and come back later and meditate on the scene, feel it from the inside, and search for a new way to express it.
A quick fix is to revamp a cliché. “My heart breaks” is old and tired. But “My heart breaks like a stick” (borrowed from a poem I need to track down).
The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaewke Emezi is full of inventive similes that help us feel in a new way. Contrast, for example “She ran like the wind,” with “She moved like the ground was falling away beneath her feet, the future running toward her” (Emezi).
Some feel as if they simply cannot come up with new simile or metaphr. If so, try some writing prompts to loosen up, and realize it takes time. Sometimes I’ll write out fifteen different descriptions before I settle on the exact wording or image.
If you suspect something is cliché, ask a friend or search the phrase in Google. If it shows up even once, it’s probably a cliché. It’s always good to be in a writing group or have friends read your work, and above all, keep reading.
Comment below, and let me know if you can’t see the above video without downloading the Tiktok app! I’ve put another version here just in case.
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Metaphor is a natural human invention. We all do it. But some people have forgotten how to do it intentionally and originally. “Sun-kissed skin” is a common metaphor, now a cliché. “I was thunderstruck” is such a common metaphor we don’t even think of it as metaphor. “We’re just chilling,” is a metaphor that has lost its element of surprise but is effective.
This exercise will help you conjure vivid vivid metaphor AND learn about the power of synesthesia. Some of the questions were inspired by Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers, an invaluable book, written all the way back in 1973!
Synesthesia is actually a neuro-a-typical condition some people have, where the their senses are cross-wired. For example, they might hear sounds when they see colors or vice versa. It can be a mild condition that enhances writing, or can be extreme and disabling. For writers, it’s a great way to create an ethereal, other worldly, altered state sensation. Give yourself at least 35 minutes to try this. If doing it in class, pause between steps to have students share to assure them when they are on a productive track and steer them when they aren’t.
As with any writing prompts on my site, you are welcome to use them in class, just please mention my name and provide a link to my work. Thanks!
DIRECTIONS (Reserve at least 35 minutes. 60 minutes if sharing)
Take a piece of fruit–oranges are good, but strawberries also work well. Slice it up and distribute. It’s important not to try to do this from memory, but to have the physical object in front of you.
Step 1: Objective Observation and Description ~5 minutes
Describe the fruit physically using all five senses. Keep pen to paper for the entire five minutes. Try to see this orange in a way that you’ve never seen it before. Do not write what you think about it, only what you physically perceive. Avoid metaphor here. Just be a scientist logging what you observe with all senses.
Look and describe it in extreme physical detail
Touch it and describe
Listen to it and describe (twist the rind, taste and listen)
Smell it and describe
Taste it and describe
Step 2: Free-Association, a Brainstorming Session ~ 5 minutes
Write everything that oranges make you think of. What do you associate them with? This is a a very quick brainstorming exercises exercise where you do very little thinking and choosing; you just blurt. Don’t worry about whether it makes any sense. The definition of brainstorming is that no idea is wrong or stupid. Put it all down whether it makes sense or not, but keep coming back to the fruit and branch out from there.
Step 3: Create Metaphor-Brainstorming and Selecting ~7 minutes
You are now being asked to free-associate like in Step 2, but to go one step further…keep free-associating until you find a truly unusualcorrespondence between two things which on the surface are very different, but which in some essence are similar. In other words, brainstorm, but don’t always chose the first thing you come up with, keep brainstorming until you find certain resonance between the physical sense of the orange and the animal or thing you are comparing it. When you find the right word, you will literally feel a sense of release or expansion in your body, an internal “ah,” where the feeling and the words reverberate with each other and make each other seem bigger or more rich. If you don’t experience any of this, don’t worry, just be silly. Be selective, but don’t be overly selective. If you stall, throw something down and move to the next question.
Smell it. How does the smell move inside your nose? (I love this, because scent is VERY evocative of other emotions, but also hard to describe concretely. This is a great workaround… does it bubble, fizz, explode, creep…?
Smell it. If the smell was a kind of animal with a distinctive movement, what kind of animal would it be?
Taste it. If the taste was an event (party, conference, church service, battle, etc…) what kind of event would it be?
Look at it: What kind emotion is the color of this fruit?
Imagine: If this fruit was a building (office building, Guggenheim Museum, hut, etc…) what kind of building would it be? And if you went inside this building, what would it be like?
Free-Associate: If this fruit was a kind of weather, what kind weather, what kind of weather would it be?
Feel it. Focus on the feel/texture of this fruit. If the feeling or texture was a certain habitat (beach, forest, desert, suburb, city), what kind of habitat would it be?
Listen to it: When you bend the skin next to your ear (watch your eyes!) or when you chew on the fruit, what does it sound does it sound like? What other things sound like this?
Imagine: If this fruit were an instrument, what would it be and how would it sound if you played it?
If this was a form of transportation, what would it be? Train, plain, ox-cart? What would it feel like to ride it?
See? Who needs drugs. All the benefits and none of the side effects.
Step 4: Read and Select ~ 2 minutes
Read over this mad scribble and underline anything you like. Don’t try to pick out things that relate or make sense, you’re just looking for the most vivid nuggets, the things you wrote that truly surprised you, that maybe don’t even sound like you.
Step 5: Revise and Shape ~10 minutes
Fashion some kind of statement about oranges in a paragraph or three, making sure that it is full of surprising images and physical descriptions and associations. From that, you could turn it into flash fiction or poetry, using line breaks. Try to find the revelation buried in the piece, the moment when something is discovered, or a leap of association is made that is particularly thought provoking. Put that at the end of the piece. Voila!
Resources:
To learn more about synesthesia, watch this video Seeing Sound and search Ted.com for others.
Examples of metaphors:
...an eagle
was perched on a jag of burnt pine,
insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms
of his shoulders... - Robinson Jeffers
Summer was slack
a dog chain with it's dog gone... - Michael Chitwood
Examples of synesthesia:
The oriole, a charred and singing coal
still burns aloud among the monuments... - Amy Clampitt
The dark hills at evening in the west
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors underground - Edwin Arlington Robinson
Please comment below- adding ideas, links to other prompts or letting me know how it went!
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A Writing Life: Lâle Davidson 