Category: Art Of Storytelling

Evoke the senses with your writing

Neera

E. L. Doctorow once noted, “Good writing is supposed to evoke a sensation in the reader—not the fact that it’s raining but the feeling of being rained upon.”

Like the one below by Jean Georges, a New York writer, and a master of sensory writing.

After a winter storm several years ago, Jean was asked to check a friend’s Long Island beach house while the friend was away.

Jean expected to find a ‘dreary scene—an abandoned cottage set among pines, stirred by mournful winds.’

But the instant she climbed from her car, she found a world of harsh beauty, discovery, and sensory delight.

The air smelled clean as I looked at a brilliant landscape. The sea was a violet blue, the sky turquoise, and the beach, which the last summer had sloped gently, was not steep, scooped out luminous. Crabs scurried for burrows and gulls spiraled down on them, like paper airplanes against the sky. At the water’s edge, empty shells that whisper when summer waves turn them now made shrill, whistling sounds.

She saw a couple walking hand-in-hand. The man leaned down and wrote something in the sand. She smiles at his age-old act, the epitome of transience: romantic declarations written and so quickly erased by the sea. Not so.

When she came upon his sand message—one word only, his companion’s name—the erosive winter waves were sweeping it, etching the letters more sharply and deeply until they fairly shouted their permanence.

They will be there forever, she thought… or at least until the next high tide.

What a beautiful story and how beautifully and simply it is written.

Everyday Stories

Neera

In the last few posts, I have been sharing everyday stories with you. Ordinary stories from ordinary lives.

Yet they are compelling and stay with us forever.

Some of the best writing—the kind that the readers readily identify with—comes out of all the little happenings in our daily lives.

How little snippets from our daily lives get stored in our memories, percolate there, and then turn into stories, have fascinated me.

A few weeks ago, when I sat down to write my father’s eulogy, the first thing that came to my mind was his hands.

My father had big, soft, and caring hands. The kind of hands a father should have. I started writing about them and out came to a story that I didn’t know existed in my memory vaults.

When I was a little girl, on one hot summer day while playing in a park, I got thirsty. My father led me to a water tap where I tried to drink water with my hand. My tiny hands couldn’t hold much water. Watching me struggle, he cupped his hands, filled them with water, and let me drink from it. My thirst was quenched with just one handful.

Out of millions of such snippets, I was surprised that this one surfaced.

I wondered why. Why didn’t I recall so many other things we did together? Why was nostalgia didn’t take me to the jokes he cracked or the poetry he recited?

Following that, another snippet of memory surfaced. This time he was putting five-years-old-me to sleep by patting my forehead.

Then another one. A photo from my wedding day. He had his hand over my head in the form of a blessing.

It made sense. My father was the symbolic protective hand over me all my life.

But that was not the reason for these memories to come flooding on the morning of his cremation.

It was because he held my hand briefly when he took his last breath, as if reassuring me one last time that everything was fine. He was fine. I will be fine.

The memory of his touch conjured other similar memories.

That is perhaps how everyday stories are formed. One memory recalls another one until they all get interconnected.

Stories are all around us. The trick is developing an active curiosity about them – the way a child does.

“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”- Eudora Welty in One Writer’s Beginning.

Better than anything else, that probably summarizes what these personal stories are all about and what they tell us about the diversity and story worthiness of ordinary people.

They speak to our sense of closeness.

Columnist George Will once put it so succinctly:

“It is extraordinary how extraordinary an ordinary person is.”

And even more extraordinary is the number of stories they’re carrying around—waiting to be written.