Category: • Personal Notes •

Iceland 2022, Travel Day: The Yellow Duffle

Saturday-Sunday, 23-24 July 2022

I have been looking forward to the Iceland trip for quite a long time. It had initially been scheduled for the Summer of 2021, but Covid concerns derailed that. The trip is under the auspices of ILSG –The Institute of Lake Superior Geology – which is a regional association of geologists, both professional and academic. I became acquainted with the group via the Geological Society of Minnesota, and went on an ILSG field trip to the big island of Hawai’i in the winter of 2020, just prior to the advent of Covid. It was a great trip, 11 days with about a dozen folks, and toured the five extant volcanoes of the island, including a helicopter trip to the suburb once known as”Royal Gardens,” now better known as a lava field of black basalt. It was a great trip, and although I am introverted, I very much enjoyed the trip and the people. That the people who led the Hawaii trip were also leading the longer and rougher Iceland trip, was a significant inducement.

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Things I learned from the 2021 Loft Essay course

16 August 2021

Things to pay attention to:

  • Telling details: One telling detail is preferable to many details
  • Embodiment. Emotions and actions work best when embodied: gaze, gesture, posture, proprioception, proxemics
  • Scenes. Scenes should vary in length, and be interleaved with summaries. This gives rhythm and weighting. Think of a scene as a spotlight. 
  • Language: avoid ‘to be’s. Avoid “is” “are” “have” etc. and limit use of adjectives. 
    “To be” is the weakest verb. Not “He is tall” but “He smacked his head on the door frame”
  • Language: avoid distancing: Avoid habitually using filtering/distancing language such as “I noticed,” “I heard,” “I saw,”  
    (That said, sometimes you may want to use it to distance yourself, as when you are uncomfortable and don’t want to be in it.) 
  • Language: avoid adverbs. Use actions and embodiment rather than adverbs:
    “Yeah,” she said, stroking his bare arm, “that’s what I heard.” vs. “Yeah,” she said gently, “that’s what I heard.”
  • Support reader inference. There is something about readers being able to figure something out on their own that is very rewarding.
  • Revising Tricks: Print it out in a different font. Read it out loud and notice where you stumble, speed up, lag, etc. Replace “to be’s”

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