Rippling skies. Wrinkled waters. Soft stones. Rough clouds.
When you tell me a story, I want to see it. I want to see more than a brief glimpse of hair in my peripherals as she slips past me, leaving a whiff of peppermint and tea leaves behind to taunt me. I want to see her perched on a cinnamon colored tree branch, legs on either side as her blue skirt bunches around the middle of her tanned thighs; her kinky curls piled on top of her head in a mess of twists, held by a bright pink hair clip and her head tilted curiously to the left as her fingers push the page just past equilibrium so it reveals the words beneath it; the folds of her bell sleeves as she shifts her left hand and gets the edge of the sleep caught underneath the cover of Stephanie Meyer’s The Host. I want to breathe in the damp decay of leaves blown around by wisps of cold air that wrap around my skin like fingers. I want to be there.
Creative writing is more than just telling a story. It’s about sketching a picture that your reader can live in for the duration of the story, about sharing the reality you’ve experienced and created in a way that any reader (or nearly any reader) can understand. But how do we do that? Well, it’s in the color of the leaves, the shape of the lake, the sound of the wind squeezing through the nooks and crannies of the cave – it’s in the details.
Writing, specifically creative writing, is weaving words together that simultaneously paint a picture, play a melody, and shift reality. Some weavings are smaller than others, such as the words I listed at the beginning of the blog post, while others are larger. Both hold intricate details though. In the first sentence of the post, I used unique word pairings to shift reality just enough to intrigue you (hopefully), to make you pause and pay attention just a little bit more. I tried to take ideas that were nearly paradoxical yet concrete in detail to bring two distinct realities into play. I’ve seen water ripple when a rock is thrown into it, and I know what a sky looks like, so even if I haven’t experienced a rippling sky, I can imagine it, and hopefully, relate to how that may have made the character feel in the story I’m reading. The weaving is small, but the details in context can have a huge impact.
I explained in the paragraphs above what I wanted to see, but I want that same level of detail in the things I feel, hear, and smell. As a writer, you should insert those details in such a way that readers can almost experience the details themselves. If you live in Southern California you’ve felt the chill of a fall breeze. By describing the wind and how it feels blowing past, you allow your words to retrieve that past feeling in the readers mind so they can imagine the scene. Further descriptions, allow the reader to see things they may not have experienced (the smell of an incoming snowstorm and decaying leaves), transporting them to the world you, and your character, see. I’ve (hopefully) made the scene more concrete by emphasizing its interaction with the senses.
Creative writing, like all art, is found in the detail. By providing two well-known yet seemingly unusual words you can allow readers imagination to create the reality you’ve described. If you decide not to use unique word pairings, the explicit sensory details you incorporate will have the same effect and, when done right, can even tell readers a little more about the character through the things they notice and the way they react to certain details you’ve laid out.