THE SENSUAL WRITER
Does a person need to be sexy in order to write good fiction? That’s debatable. But it’s definitely a great advantage to be a sensual writer – attentive and attuned to the senses.
Just thinking this, I remember my mother’s voice: “Nancy, listen to the spring peepers!” “Nancy, smell the honeysuckle!” “Nancy, come here and look at the praying mantis!” Mostly it was look, look, look, at least a dozen times a day throughout my childhood. Look at the garter snake, the Jack-in-the-pulpit, the muskrat nest . Mom once got me up out of a sound sleep to look at a rare appearance of aurora borealis in New Jersey. Yes, she would awaken a sleeping child to show her something worth seeing. And it wasn’t just that once. She also woke me to show me a Luna moth or a harvest moon, or to have me listen to the shiversome sounds of screech owls or foxes in the night.
Mom was an artist who painted pet portraits (in oils) for a living and flowers that lived and breathed (in watercolors) for pleasure. We would go for walks and bring home wildflowers to identify and display. I got quite an education from Mom, but I don’t think she was trying to teach. She was a happy person, and her perpetual “Look, look, look!” sprang from an irrepressible sense of wonder. With her and because of her I looked at cattails, listened to the bobolink, smelled the lilacs, tasted wild strawberries, felt the dark magenta bark of the cherry tree. As the twig is bent; so does the tree incline; to this day I don’t miss much, and my nearly eidetic memory serves me well as a writer by providing me with images. The root word of “imagination” is “image.” It is my job as a writer to envision images and, by putting merest words on paper, convey similar images to the mind of a reader.
When I was a child, I pretended there was a camera behind my eyes that snapped permanent pictures of everything I saw. Would this have been the case if my mother hadn’t been an artist, all about looking? I don’t know, but somehow I’ve spent a lot of time around artists in my adult life too. An artist friend and I used to play at realism in color names: school-bus yellow, swimming-pool green, Pepto-Bismol pink, raisin brown. The challenge was never to write a cliché such as “white as snow.” White as a penguin’s tummy might be better, depending on context.
Other artists continue to keep me on my toes when it comes to really seeing: no, horses’ hooves are not black, and neither is night, especially not in the city, where it is more nearly puce, defined as the color of a tick engorged with blood. Then there are my musically inclined friends, who help me to hear how the refrigerator drones in one key and the ceiling fan in another, but they do not harmonize; it’s no wonder people go crazy. And then there are the good cooks, who coach me on taste and smell. My husband is The Nose of Noses. It was from him that I learned puppy breath smells like coffee. He hates the smell of doorknobs on his hands, or the smell of money. He once told me that angels smelled good, like lightning and gunpowder. I believe him. And the smell of geraniums reminds him of his childhood. Of all the senses – vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and whatever sense it is that informs a person about angels – of all these, smell is the one that resonates most strongly with readers. Yet it is the one most difficult to evoke without being commonplace, e.g. the smell of bread baking.
My childhood was so not about the smell of baking bread. It was more about the smells of oil paint, and bare feet, and feathers from the dusty chickens eating bugs in the back yard. Those sensual details among many others enriched my life then, and going “Look, look, look!” continues to enrich my life today. As do listening, smelling, tasting and touching. I sometimes think that the details I need for my work help keep me more alive than most people. And I know I am very lucky to be a sensuous writer.
As for being a sexy writer: to paraphrase Piet Hein, everything is either concave or convex, so everything has something to do with sex. The opportunities for symbolism are unlimited! Look, look, look.
Just thinking this, I remember my mother’s voice: “Nancy, listen to the spring peepers!” “Nancy, smell the honeysuckle!” “Nancy, come here and look at the praying mantis!” Mostly it was look, look, look, at least a dozen times a day throughout my childhood. Look at the garter snake, the Jack-in-the-pulpit, the muskrat nest . Mom once got me up out of a sound sleep to look at a rare appearance of aurora borealis in New Jersey. Yes, she would awaken a sleeping child to show her something worth seeing. And it wasn’t just that once. She also woke me to show me a Luna moth or a harvest moon, or to have me listen to the shiversome sounds of screech owls or foxes in the night.
Mom was an artist who painted pet portraits (in oils) for a living and flowers that lived and breathed (in watercolors) for pleasure. We would go for walks and bring home wildflowers to identify and display. I got quite an education from Mom, but I don’t think she was trying to teach. She was a happy person, and her perpetual “Look, look, look!” sprang from an irrepressible sense of wonder. With her and because of her I looked at cattails, listened to the bobolink, smelled the lilacs, tasted wild strawberries, felt the dark magenta bark of the cherry tree. As the twig is bent; so does the tree incline; to this day I don’t miss much, and my nearly eidetic memory serves me well as a writer by providing me with images. The root word of “imagination” is “image.” It is my job as a writer to envision images and, by putting merest words on paper, convey similar images to the mind of a reader.
When I was a child, I pretended there was a camera behind my eyes that snapped permanent pictures of everything I saw. Would this have been the case if my mother hadn’t been an artist, all about looking? I don’t know, but somehow I’ve spent a lot of time around artists in my adult life too. An artist friend and I used to play at realism in color names: school-bus yellow, swimming-pool green, Pepto-Bismol pink, raisin brown. The challenge was never to write a cliché such as “white as snow.” White as a penguin’s tummy might be better, depending on context.
Other artists continue to keep me on my toes when it comes to really seeing: no, horses’ hooves are not black, and neither is night, especially not in the city, where it is more nearly puce, defined as the color of a tick engorged with blood. Then there are my musically inclined friends, who help me to hear how the refrigerator drones in one key and the ceiling fan in another, but they do not harmonize; it’s no wonder people go crazy. And then there are the good cooks, who coach me on taste and smell. My husband is The Nose of Noses. It was from him that I learned puppy breath smells like coffee. He hates the smell of doorknobs on his hands, or the smell of money. He once told me that angels smelled good, like lightning and gunpowder. I believe him. And the smell of geraniums reminds him of his childhood. Of all the senses – vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and whatever sense it is that informs a person about angels – of all these, smell is the one that resonates most strongly with readers. Yet it is the one most difficult to evoke without being commonplace, e.g. the smell of bread baking.
My childhood was so not about the smell of baking bread. It was more about the smells of oil paint, and bare feet, and feathers from the dusty chickens eating bugs in the back yard. Those sensual details among many others enriched my life then, and going “Look, look, look!” continues to enrich my life today. As do listening, smelling, tasting and touching. I sometimes think that the details I need for my work help keep me more alive than most people. And I know I am very lucky to be a sensuous writer.
As for being a sexy writer: to paraphrase Piet Hein, everything is either concave or convex, so everything has something to do with sex. The opportunities for symbolism are unlimited! Look, look, look.
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Last Seen Wandering Vaguely
Befuddlements of a professional fiction writer
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"I have seen them...go out, day after day, for example, with empty pill-boxes, and catch newts, and beetles, and spiders, and frogs, and come home and stick pins through the miserable wretches...."
"And so it ends in your spoiling canvas with paints, and making a smell in the house; or in keeping tadpoles in a glass box full of dirty water, and turning everyone's stomach in the house; or in chipping off bits of stone here, there, and everywhere, and dropping grit into all the victuals in the house; or in staining your fingers in the pursuit of photography, and doing justice without mercy on everybody's face in the house."
No, Gabriel Betteredge could not understand it, "the idleness that splits flowers and pokes its way into spiders' stomachs".
Nowadays, folks who are able to live closer to nature, away from the concrete and asphalt with which it has been smothered, more easily can enrich their lives by looking, and wondering about natural history. They can bathe in forests, or in the remnants of forests, while the vast majority of urban dwellers subsist on other, more distant, less natural sensations. Remote sensing, if you will.
Mr. Betteredge, in his seventies, was finding it difficult to understand why a young man and a young woman would spend their four weeks after meeting, just before the young woman's eighteenth birthday, doing such things.
Wilkie Collins, who wrote the book, in serialized form, week after week, had more time to reflect, between creating those short chapters, than writers currently do (judging from a recent discussion by writers hosted by Tess Sharpe). He had more time to exercise his senses, something like the minutes of physical exercise every hour recommended for those of us who daily sit at a computer for hours.
Wikipedia just told me something interesting about Collins. He was home-schooled by his mother at first, attended school for one year before spending two with his parents in Italy and France, and then two more years at a boarding school where he was bullied by older boys. "One boy forced Collins to tell him a story night after night before allowing him to go to sleep."
"It was this brute who first awakened in me, his poor little victim, a power of which but for him I might never have been aware.... When I left school I continued story telling for my own pleasure," Collins later said.