h/t lucylamp
Hiya writers & frenz.
When you saw the top image, did any physical sensations come to memory?
Here are more, each caught in a moment of action, people/characters experiencing something palpable.
In looking at such images, we bring our own experiences to them to intuit what those sensations are, even though vision is actually the only sense we’re using here.
h/t Blue York
Actors famously observe the behaviors and responses of other people they see around them in ordinary life, to interpret and bring to their craft. (Famous actors complain that they can’t do it anymore because everyone recognizes them & acts unnatural.)
Some are known for going looking for wider first-hand experience themselves. Some directors are known for making them do it, like it or not: cop ride-alongs, archaeological digs, shadowing doctors or forest rangers, musicians, factory workers, scientists; study dance or martial arts, learning to ride horses or motorcycles, or ways it literally is and isn’t possible to move —or think— in the garb and intrigue of an 18th century royal court ... or the cold and muck of a medieval peasant hut.
And of course, most actors remember what it was like making their nut in the lean years on food and drink service, carpentry, pool-cleaning, janitorial, temp staff, and other “day jobs.”
Every slightest sensory perception and every tiniest experience of motion/action — even the effort of motionlessness, of woodenly inexpressive face or refusal to react in situations of provocation unaffordable TO react to, for example — is grist for the mill. (Lousy jobs desperately needed make for a lot of wooden-face.)
And painters, photographers, sculptors, and other artists all/each bring to their own media their subjectively and objectively observed experiences. Note that they can’t actually say, “I taste … feel/touch … smell … hear” etc — they gotta show, don’t tell.
Some writers tell the readers. That’s overt description.
Others learn to use language in ways that zing the readers’ own past experiences, so the readers practically feel it for real because of memory. Example: a violent storm — we’ve all been there — the chemicals and damp in air, the pressure and vibration on skin or inside the skull, all are stored inside us, about how things really, REALLY are.
* * * * *
This last picture is of replicas of Philistine-era middle-east cooking/baking ovens on a replica village street based on the tel excavation nearby.
No one is shown doing anything, but even if we have no study background in the bronze-age experience of using those ovens, waking in those tiny houses, walking sandalfooted in muddy winter, shivering in the rain, to feed precious dry wood into the ovens because every day the village needs bread regardless of weather ... we can grasp what the ancient structures were made of, extrapolate that people knew how to level a slope, quarry stone, make bricks, cut wood, thresh grain and grind it into flour, cherish a familial stock of yeast perhaps, and how much to mix in. We can imagine in our own bodies the slight turn of wrist or spine in any task they had that we’ve had something like. The anxious sense of warning of something starting to go wrong, the satisfying sense of it going well, in the process of building, baking, living in that era. We might have to study up to write it, but then we could connect the study to our own bodily experience of everything similar in order to write it real.
Here’s something probably everyone’s had: recall a splinter/sliver in a finger or hand, maybe SO tiny it’s nearly invisible (the hair-like barbs of some cute, fuzzy looking cactus, maybe) but DAMN it makes its presence known! Even beyond the microscopic span of skin it’s in! Remember that?!!!
Quick review: the physical feels are:
- see, hear, smell,
- the touch&tactile group — pressure (including the extremely fine vibrating kind that gives perception of texture etc) temperature, pain, pleasure
- nausea/gag-reflex & other viscerals
- hunger, thirst, fatigue, energy
- balance, gravity, proprioception — where our body & limbs are positioned at any given instant relative to core parts
- suffocation
- a coupla others
Here are past WO posts on the feels, emotional/psychological included. Some of the diaries focus tightly, others less so. Most at least touch [sorry] on the fascinating fact that putting the reader inside the character’s skin and head is usually less powerful when explicit —e.g., characters rarely narrate experience as, “I smell something nasty in the air” so much as, “Phew! What a stench! Neighbor burning trash again.” and not so much “I am angry at him for doing that” (except maybe in dialogue when someone asks “Whassamatta?”) as “that shit-head!”
Usually, making a ms come more alive in this exquisitely subjective way is something we do in a revision phase, but let’s practice tonight without an existing ms:
<big>CHALLENGE:</big> a sudden sensory instant. Keep it a paragraph or less, no story ideas for now — credit your readers for being able to relate. The moment has to “work” standing on its own two feet, with minimal context, regardless of plot or setting.
- A bad situation or fail may be the quickest to come up with for now.
- DO NOT use any of the feel labels listed above or similar: show, don’t tell.
- Pick something real that you experienced, just give it to a character instead (you can even pick a film or television character or a famous print-fiction character to have).
As a basis or starting points, use any of the images in the diary
OR
Go into your kitchen or other task space RIGHT NOW, do a small chore there, and bring the most important feel back from it
OR
Look around where you are, recall a past sensory moment involving something there, give it to a character to have
OR ETC
It just needs to be a sensory instant that matters to the person at the time, for some strong reason, even if — in some other situation — it might not matter at all.
h/t BMScott
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