Crafting Beautiful Words – Writing Nostalgia:
How crafting beautiful words changes over time and what is the essence of beauty. There are several ways that words inspire a writer. Distant events allow us the privilege of feeling with a calmness. The writer can be more philosophical and detached versus an immediate event.
Writing about the past tends to be figurative. A writer replaces the uncomfortable with metaphor, describing events with the voice of a teacher versus a student. In each aspect we are all teachers, all students-the words we gather to leave others give perspective on our past.
Returning to a childhood home
I am still familiar with my childhood home. The roof is a little gray and thinner, the wood is “just fine” but the foundation is in varying degrees of sway. I’ve been away for a long time.
I remember it like yesterday, every dark corner and crooked beam were parts of my childhood. I can rem ember as it shrunk in the distance, as we drove to the local 711. Everything I knew changed on that gray November day.
5/5/22
Writing in the Present:
An immediate event often allows us more details to explain. The raw feeling is close enough that we can describe it accurately. We can still use metaphor and color it with abstract description but the feeling is closer to the surface.
It is the open wound, our ability to leave ourselves for a moment and write with the angst and feeling of a spectator experiencing trauma or joy is how we make feelings universal versus our own.
I learned from a mentor and muse about writing words that will touch others instead of writing a journal or diary. Most readers don’t want to be the detached spectator. They want to feel the emotion, the pain, the joy, all the aspects that make writing reach others.
They inject a bit of their own experience into the piece and in essence become a part of the writer’s vision. It is much like the safety of enjoying a haunted house attraction-the viewer gets to engage their fear without the cost and actual feeling of being in harms way.
I think writing creates that same space-close enough to feel without the ramifications of it being reality. Of course, the feeling of joy or beauty is something we all tend to seek, so being able to bring that to a reader who might be overwhelmed by their own life is another vehicle for the written word.
August and everything dies.
Heat pressing down on us like a vice.
All projects that began in spring
with the sincerest of care
Seem to shrivel from neglect.
The garden seeks its end
but I missed all the flowers there.
All I have is wasted funds and neglect
from the sincerest of care
8/24
The Joy of Writing:
This aspect of writing is just the feeling of language. The writer can experiment, test boundaries of rhyme, word use, metaphor and even language. There is less feeling in this type of writing but the excitement of the writer should explain itself.
I have enjoyed moments where I can write about something I’ve never experienced, testing what ifs and playing roles you might not ever have imagined or experienced. This type of writing goes for poetry and prose and the results are often very surprising.
Telling One’s Story:
Truth is stranger than….well you get the cliche but much about cliches are true. To tell one’s story as a spectator in their own life, to be able to remove themselves from the feeling of being vulnerable for what they say and speak honestly despite the risk.
There is a great risk in telling the story of one’s own life-it can be boring to the reader, overblown or just unbelievable. The poetry I have written over the years is a journal of sorts, an absolute memoir of living as a poet and creative person.
I have begun documenting the experience of being creative in blogs in the last 6 years or so. I have a story I am writing which allows a fictional account of being a writer, with growing up in this amazing, creative landscape filled with feelings, metaphor and imagined adventures: it’s called A Life of Words.
A Life of Words
As a creative child, he always feared the creatures under the bed. He was only ten and the dark shadowed divide between the edge of his bed and the shear line where the light from the window slipped beneath the mattress; this was his nightmare.
Depending on what television show he had seen or what creative excursion he took on any given day, the fears were always different but that place was always the same. That place where you avert your eyes and ignore the presence of that which crawls under the bed and waits patiently for your eyes to close.
This particular evening was different, there was no line, no dividing band of shadow-the rain outside, the crash of lightning and the pale haze of street lights created a dreamlike state where the poised creatures that waited were able to roam, this night they wouldn’t even be waiting for his eyes to close.
He could hear the movements beneath him, the shifting of the feet, the crunching of dried paint along the wall. The more he tried to ignore it the louder and more obvious the noise became. With every shadow across the room and with every shaft of light that crept through the curtains-another specter appeared, another shapeless faceless form threatened his waking moments.
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So many thoughts and ideas have made it to the written page-they come from such a diverse landscape.
The excitement I have for writing is that it comes from so many experiences both past, present and future, from near and far.
To writers-Where do you find your inspiration to write? To Readers-What moves you in a piece that you read? Is it the description? Feelings? or Nostalgia that draws you to a piece of writing or art?