Re-sending yesterday’s post as the link to read the story was broken - sorry!
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A slightly different version of this week’s post first appeared in the Mindful Fiction course I wrote and taught through my creative business, Retreat West.
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Writing Worlds
Whether we are writing stories set in the real-world, or a world of our own making, I believe that bringing mindfulness to our descriptive writing can really bring the settings of our stories to life to make them more vivid and immersive for us as writers and for our readers.
We are sensory creatures and everything in our world is experienced through our senses. Yet most fiction writers rely heavily on sight - which I believe is partly due to the mantra that gets drummed into us of "show don't tell". I believe as storytellers we have to show sometimes and other times we have to tell. Many of the stories I read that get sent to Retreat West for the competitions, to the WestWord journal I publish, and from those writers I work with 1-1 to edit their work, lack the full sensory experience of being human.
But even when we are showing the world of our writing we can use all of the senses to bring it to life - if all of them are applicable. Not every story will need every sense. And sometimes we may choose to deliberately leave one out to heighten the feeling we want a story to have.
In this flash fiction story of mine, Another day on the road from home to who knows where – three months into their journey, which was published in STORGY online journal which has since closed down, I chose to leave out one of the senses. Read it first then I will talk about the reasons I made that decision.
I have shared this story as it is set in our world, but in an imagined version of it. I thought carefully about what sensory elements to include in this story as I wanted it to reflect how numbed Nora was by this life on the road. I chose to leave out smell. Had you noticed?
Because of the filth, the wet, the monotony of her world, I chose to have her sense of smell numbed and instead focus on hearing and touch. The sound and feel of the bell, the mud sucking at her feet, the hiss of the fire that gives a sense of added threat, the cold absence of Bill when he leaves her side to get in his sleeping bag. The only time I include any aromas at all is when she remembers being in her home before they set off. Before she was numbed by everything yet to come.
Bringing mindful presence to the stories we write
Mindfulness is an approach to living centred in remaining present in the moment. This is key to writing worlds that come alive for us and our readers.
In the book, The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hahn describes how we can apply the principles and attitudes of mindfulness in our everyday lives so that we don't have to be sitting in meditation pose to be fully present and experience all of our senses:
While washing the dishes, one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes. At first glance, that might seem a little silly: why put so much stress on a simple thing? But that’s precisely the point. The fact that I am standing there and washing these bowls is a wondrous reality. I’m being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There is no way I can be tossed around mindlessly like a bottle slapped here and there on the waves."
This attitude can and should be applied to our writing of the worlds our characters live in. When we are describing them and their world we must be fully present in it and experiencing it through all of the senses, just as if we are really walking around in it alongside our characters.
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