I have the privilege of giving a writing workshop at Gold Country Writers in Auburn on Wednesday, June 15. It’s free and open to the public, so you are invited to attend. The title is “Spice Up Your Writing With Sensory Details” and I intend it to be a lot of fun. Gold Country Writers meet from 10am to 12noon in the Rose Room at the Auburn City Hall building at 1225 Lincoln Way. Join me if you can!
Have you ever had this experience? You’re reading a great book, thoroughly engrossed in every detail of a great story. You are transported into the place and time of the story and lose all track of your real world. When someone or something startles you back into reality—the phone rings or someone taps you on the shoulder—you jerk back into the here and now, but for a moment you’re not exactly sure where you are. You’re not exactly sure which world you is really yours.
That’s a real skill, being about to write like that. In his book, On Writing, Stephen King calls that the magic of good writing. It’s like teleporting or time travel or mind-melding. It’s an out-of-body experience. You and the author are personally engaged and intimately communicating across miles and years. You are magically transported.
While I was preparing my talk about how authors use sensory details to transport readers into their stories—right into scenes alongside their characters, right into the action—I was reminded of this little essay I wrote in the pre-pandemic “before times” about an interesting experience I had while hiking in the Sierra.
Lying on my back on a granite slab high in the Sierra—a narrow rocky peninsula reaching into the inky blue waters of Loch Leven—I gaze lazily upward into the clear blue summer sky, clearing my mind and taking in the glory of the brisk and breezy day. The air is pristine, infused with the crisp scent of pine. Breathing, I feel the clear, cool oxygen molecules enter my lungs, my bronchial tubes, hitch a ride on red blood cells, and deliver a burst of energy to each and every cell in my body, down to the tips of my toes. I am intensely aware—aware of the hard sharpness of the earth beneath me—aware of the vast blue space extending above me—aware of the soft cool breeze sweeping away the warmth of the sun's rays—aware of...
Suddenly, the sky around the sun is filled with iridescent and sparkling fairy dust—no, not dust—floating strands of fine thread. Millions and millions, perhaps billions and billions, of silvery silk strands twinkle in the afternoon sun. I hold my hand aloft, blocking out the blinding light like a palm-shaped eclipse, to better see the morphing, shimmering shapes. An illusion of the eye, I'm sure, they appear to fly only in concentric circles around the sun, creating a huge, shining, spiraling vortex of silky wisps. I am mesmerized by this totally unexpected and miraculous phenomenon.
Watching the floating vortex dancing weightless above me, images of the planet Pern, from fantasy novels by Anne McCaffrey, come to mind. Pern is a distant human-colonized planet that is home to real, live dragons. Every several decades, in a pattern as regular as clockwork, Pern passes near her sister planet, which is populated exclusively by fungi. When the planets pass close to one another, long shimmering strands of fungi spores float and drift across the short distance of space and passively land on Pern's surface. Shifting to aggression, the fungi voraciously devour all they contact. Dragonriders, astride their flying dragon steads, are the planet's only defense. Though her description is eerily similar, certainly, the fantastic phenomenon I am witnessing is not the advance guard of a fungi space invasion of Earth.
A much more benign image, also from fantasy literature, arises next in my mind. The closing scene in E. B. White's classic story, Charlotte's Web, has Charlotte's progeny taking to the air. Millions of baby spiders, riding on air currents, each with its own delicate spiderweb parachute, are whisked airborne safely to new homes.
It is much more likely that the singularly mysterious phenomenon I am observing is a mass migration of minuscule spiders on iridescent web filaments, rather than an army of invading fungi space aliens, but in either case, it is magically beautiful. I wonder, were similar real-life observations by storytellers McCaffrey and White the inspiration for their delicious novels? If so, one author described the actual natural process that he witnessed, while the other, like me, chose to remain under the magic spell created by her own sense of wonder.
I recently read two of Kim Stanley Robinson’s books. The first, his most recent science-fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future, is rich and intriguing, and I thoroughtly enjoyed it. Robinson is long famous for his sci-fi “other worlds”. The second book was his new memoir, High Sierra: A Love Story, in which he recounts his love affair, dare I say obsession, with my very own Sierra Nevada. In one chapter, he describes how the inspiration and models for several of his “other worlds” were specific places or environments within California’s mountain landscape. It will surely have me looking at my beloved Sierra with new eyes this summer.
For information and a map to Loch Leven (there are 3 lakes) check out this from the US Forest Service: https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsbdev3_028092.pdf
I’d love to hear your thoughts:
#ForceOfNature #Sierra #SierraNevada #HikeCalifornia #LochLeven #GoldCountryWriters #GCW #SierraWriters