Living Life Twice

Author, Annie Dillard says she has to maintain in her head a running description of the present. She needs to call to attention what passes before her. I fully understand how important this rehearsal is to a writer. I am continually in the grip of word storms. They bounce around in my head. Phrases and ideas form and reform continually as I go about this critical pre-writing phase.  Much of this word play remains invisible until it is ready to reveal itself upon the page. Eventually these words, tumbled and reshaped, will spill onto the page and from there further refinement will be undertaken. Non writers will not appreciate this. They will not understand.    Every day the words I hear, the words I see and the words I absorb, sing in my head. Yesterday morning while enjoying breakfast a song delivered the following words. They stayed in my head all day. ‘Let me be close to you So, I can understand Let me be close to you Under your ceiling fan...’ Later in the morning I w...

  I am proud and committed word collector. I listen, I acquire and I use particular words quite mindfully. I am a logophile. I recall as a child frequently delving into dictionaries in search of new words. My parents frequently provoked my thinking with new words. I remain most grateful for their word conscious efforts during my formative years. I find beauty in old words. Beautifully exact words. Words rarely used. Words from English and other languages that ring in my ears and beg to be slotted into conversations, jotted down for safe keeping in my various notebooks in the hope that I might find a place for them among forthcoming words. Occasionally, I recall or hear a word or phrase that has fallen out of use and I attempt to revive it by sprinkling into my conversations, my writing. I recently heard the word   skedaddle   and felt compelled to use it. As a child, we frequently   skedaddled   from the scene. Particularly when something   nefarious  ...

Going From General To Specific. Young writers benefit greatly when shown how to sharpen their writing by moving from the general to the specific. When they are armed with this important knowledge about writing, it improves the quality of the images that emerge in the mind of the reader. When we know the exact name of something, it brings that item, that thing,  closer to us. It provides us as readers with greater clarity. The fog of uncertainty is blown away. As readers, we are more alert.  ' The bird flew down ' conveys less information than writing, ' The eagle swooped. ' Judy Blume in her book ‘Tales Of A Fourth Grade Nothing’ uses specific details to describe the materials her characters used to make their school project. 'We keep our equipment under my bed in a shoebox. We have a set of Magic Markers, Elmer’s glue, Scotch tape, a really sharp pair of scissors and a container of silver sparkle.' Notice how the initial sentence is quite general, However, the ...