TECH: Nanowrimo Notes #20: A Word In Need

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Word Lists

I was looking at Ray Bradbury's Zen In The Art of Writing, and almost started to summarize the article with the title, "Run Fast, Stand Still, Or, The Thing at the Top of the Stairs, Or, New Ghosts from Old Minds." I mean, there are pieces like this:

"I finally figured out that if you're going to step on a live mine, make it your own. Be blown up, as it were, by your own delights and despairs."

But the key thing, the thread that runs through that article, are the lists. Bradbury has this to say about them:

"But along through those years I began to make lists of titles, to put down long lines of nouns. These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull."

So I was playing with this notion of words, of putting down phrases and such. And it seems to me that at least for my writing, there often is a page of scribbled notes -- disjointed terms, phrases that snatch at the ideas that are tumbling around. And that page is part of what I pull out when I sit down to write. I'll take a phrase and stretch it, play with it, see what it suggests to me. The other day, in the train on the way to Osaka, I looked out at the passing trees and scribbled this down:

• Foliage -- colors, red, brown, gold, green, yellow.
• Capturing sunrise and sunset, draining them off into the trees as the day grows shorter?
• Fading into streaks of brown and black against the graying skies leaves falling into piles, heaps, rustling
• the clock ticks into the evening of the year
• the breeze sharpens into a cool shiver, a warning of winter's cold to come
• visions of the warm hearth and home, baking pies, roasting meat, the lights shining ahead

Looking at this list, I can see the patches of color in my mind's eye, the trees bursting like static fireworks. And then there's the notion that the trees are somehow grabbing the colors of sunrise and sunset off of the day, squeezing the day down as they pull those colors out of the sky and into their leaves. Although as the leaves fall, rustling and piling, the trees turn into brown and black silhouettes, inky sketches of themselves against the darkening clouds. And I haven't even started into the conceit of autumn as the evening of the year, perhaps with the celestial clock ticking slowly, day by day turning the annual cycle.

Anyway, you can see that that word foliage brings up a whole set of ideas and thoughts for me. So one of the things you can play with is taking some words that you like, that have some excitement for you, and play this game of listing out some of the tumbling thoughts in your head. Then later, slow it down and stretch it out. What's that about capturing sunrise and sunset? Explain it, consider how you might have a character talk about it, perhaps use it as a piece of background setting?

And as Bradbury mentions, you may simply want to write down the titles, the nouns, the points that grab your attention -- and then let them rub against each other, think about them, and see what turns up.

And of course, there's this final advice:

"I leave you now at the bottom of your own stair, at half after midnight, with a pad, a pen, and a list to be made. Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness. Your own Thing stands waiting 'way up there in the attic shadows. If you speak softly, and write any old word that wants to jump out of your nerves onto the page . . . Your Thing at the top of your stairs in your own private night . . . may well come down."

Okay? So feel free to make some word lists. Or, in the way of nanowrimo, to make the lists, and then expand on them, and use them as the base for daydreams and idles, for this and that and the other thing, for seeing what words will come when we have pages to fill before we sleep, and punctuation to use before a break. In other words, write!

Is a word indeed!
tink
(about 700 words)
Like a falling leaf, drifting down to the ground . . .