Sometimes, when writing, you want to shed normal descriptions. You want to describe something as it's never been described before, while leaving no doubt whatsoever as to what that something is.
In your day to day life, you catalog senses, feelings, experiences, trying to shelve them like rare antiquities, squirreled away to relate later, in different lights.
My soap, bought on vacation and jealously guarded, used slice by slice from the main bar, had sharp edges this morning. The patchouli scent of it dulled the sharpness and made me want more.
I got a new kind of gum, hard white pillows in a plastic tray, foil backed like pills. When I bit them, the shells cracked and there was a tiny drop of liquid inside. It was how I imagined biting an insect to be; crack the carapace, liquid hitting the tongue.
Black ink on my fingers, fading purple with repeated scrubbings, nails dirty, then grey, then pale.
A papercut, too shallow to bleed my dry skin, edges of the loose skin white like a flower petal.
Purple prose is to be avoided, but sometimes, you just need to skate that line. You need to think of your words and roll them on your tongue, like somebody sampling a wine. Too much and it's too dense, too sweet. Too little, and everything is bones.
"You want to describe something as it's never been described before, while leaving no doubt whatsoever as to what that something is."
ReplyDeleteYes! I was just having a discussion much like this with a friend yesterday. I agree, sometimes we do need to skate that line, to dare just enough to make our work stand out. I <3 this post.
Thanks very much! I think a word I could have used well in this post was "evocative", but for some reason I forgot it until just now. It's probably just as well.
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