Exercises – Words

These are things I want to try to work on — sometimes they are embodied as exercises, other’s just as observations of what I think works.

Contents

Exercises from reading OBE with KC

I am trying to focus more on applying what I notice in reading essays to my own writing. Here are a set of prospective exercises (originals here) I’ve generated after re-reading selections from the Oxford Book of Essays with KC :

SUPERPOSITION: Ambiguity of level/reality, figure/ground

Providing differing points of view on the same thing/event/space to convey uncertainty/ambiguity. [cf. The Haunted Mind, Note 3, offers alternate PoVs: Is the sound of the bell from the dream or the world? Is the author is in the space of the dream or are the dream figments in the bedroom?]

MINOR KEY INTERLUDE: Shift into and then out of dark turn

A description of a train of thought, or conversation, that in response to some happenstance moves into a minor – dark, distressing, depressing – mode, and then, through more happenstance or perhaps intentional effort, moves back out of it. Attend to the inflection points. [cf. The Haunted Mind, Note s 6 & 7, where hypnagogic turn dark when being swaddled in bedclothes evokes a corpse in a shroud, and then attention to everyday objects serves to vitiate that line of thought].

ANIMATED TRAJECTORY: Camera-zoom through space

Convey the sensation of a 3D environment by allusions to its structure; by agents moving through it; by objects falling and bouncing; by sound. [cf. The Acorn-Gatherer, Note 2, on the rooks moving about in the tree].

VIVID INJECTION: Author experiences scene climax

Vividness, particularity and layering of detail makes a description more convincing, and then with the describer injects themselves into the scene as describes themselves in the act of seeing and feeling. [cf. The Clergyman (Beerbohm)]

“I see the curate’s frame quiver with sudden impulse, and his mouth fly open, and — no, I can’t bear it, I shut my eyes and ears. But audible, even so, is something shrill, followed by something thunderous.  Presently I re-open my eyes. The crimson has not yet faded from the young face yonder, and slowly down either cheek falls a glistening tear.”– Sir Max Beerbohm, A Clergyman, 1918– Sir Max Beerbohm, A Clergyman, 1918

INTIMACY ZOOM: Distant to intimate in describing Ix

Zoom in on people interacting. Begin with a comfortable distant overview (e.g. momentary distant glimpses), and then zoom in to show the fine-structure of intimate and not-entirely-easy interaction, whether wanted or not (e.g. continuous up-close eye-contact). (cf. Insouciance).

Other Exericses (From “Phrases”, March 2023)

SCALE-SHIFT: Description zoomed way in or way out

The road lifts and falls, on and off, ramps rise and meet in midair; smooth sculptural ribbons of road plaiting briefly then peeling away.” [5]
I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids – and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. [7]
“Seen from the further end of the Moorish bridge by the Calahorra, where the road starts to Seville, Cordova is a long brown line between the red river and the purple hills, an irregular, ruinous line, following the windings of the river, and rising up to the yellow battlements and great middle bulk of the Cathedral.”– Arthur Symons, Cordova, 1898

“For sixty miles the road plods on through this monotony and then it falls over a precipice. Suddenly it crosses the lip of the high plateau and tumbles helter-skelter, lickety-split into a chasm: and as you slither down the horse-shoe bends you see in the ravine below you, secreted in a fold of the massif, the city of La Paz.”— Jan Morris, La Paz, 1963

TIME-LAPSE: Process is sped up (or slowed way down)

the continents crumple, throwing the land skyward under its own momentum [9]
wandering fingers of green crept up the meanderings of river systems, and fringed the gravels of forgotten lakes. [6]

EMBODIED PERSPECTIVE: POV from author’s body

The sky wheeled over me, Loren Eisley

MYSTIC GLIMPSE: Invoking a vision of the imaginary

Here and there through the swirling vapor one catches a glimpse of a shambling figure, or a half-wild primordial face stares back at one from some momentary opening in the fog.[6]

“It was if someone had taken tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life. Thus displayed one could not get over the strangeness of it.”— Virginia Woolf , The Death of the Moth,” 1925

APT-but-ODD: unusual similes and metaphors

visible silence,still as the hourglass,
the endless murmurings and stirrings [of the forest], like the noises of a convalescent ward. [3]
wings pressed tight together like hands in prayer… [5]
a knuckled red fist rises from a soft green landscape… [5]
a stream cuts a torn-paper precipice in a sandy bank [9]
they tesselate into a helix [9]
Long after death, incorporated into the bedrock, their combined and dappled chemical shadows will remain. [9]
the water forks over the flat, a tree drawn in black on white canvas [9]

PATTERN-DESCRIBES-PROCESS: Describe motion via its result

short willows write wordless calligraphy on the wind [9]

PROCESS-DESCRIBES-THING: Describe something via a description of how it came to be, either literally or metaphorically

the continents crumple, throwing the land skyward under its own momentum [9]
wandering fingers of green crept up the meanderings of river systems, and fringed the gravels of forgotten lakes [6]
The western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes [11]

BLENDED-&-EXTENDED: Mixed & recurring figures

but beneath the ice running water made dark droplets, like little tadpoles racing downslope, playing tag, catching each other in continuous playful arabesques [2]
Some lands are flat and grass-covered, and smile so evenly up at the sun that they seem forever youthful, untouched by man or time. Some are torn, ravaged and convulsed like the features of profane old age. Rocks are wrenched up and exposed to view; black pits receive the sun but give back no light. [6]
Thin vapors, rust, wet tar and sun are an alembic remarkably like the mind; they throw off odorous shadows that threaten to take real shape when no one is looking. [6]
…lie there listening to the peculiarly clear, articulated noises of the forest at night, the sighs and fidgets of wind and leaves, the weary groan of boughs, the endless murmurings and stirrings, like the noises of a convalescent ward. [3]

KEEN EYE: Attention to what’s not usually noticed

Entrapped air bubbles radiate out from the center of the ice, diagrammed in tiny dotted lines. [2]
paths of light run like snail trails where the crowns fail to touch. (30) [9]

AGENTIFIED OBJECT: Capturing motion or sound or dynamics by imagining it’s intentionally created

running water made dark droplets, like little tadpoles racing downslope, playing tag… [2]
The trees just stand around, as is their wont. The drizzle plays them. [1]

INVISIBLE REFERENCE: Omitting what is referred to

beneath billowing skies that scatter and amass [4]
giving the impression of coiling staircases leading up into the dark fuzz above

ARCHITECTURE-ANALOGY: Built-form as analogy for structure, connectivity, movement

giving the impression of coiling staircases leading up into the dark fuzz above

Example Sources

[`1] Anne Lamont, essay in the Washington Post, 14 March 2024
[2] Zwinger and Willard, Above the Trees, p. 4
[3] Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods
[4] D. G. Rossetti, Silent Noon, quoted in [3]
[5] Cal Flynn, Islands of Abandonment
[6] Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey, circa 1946
[7] David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing that I’ll Never Do Again [book of essays]
[8] E. B. White, Essays of E. B. White
[9] Thomas Halliday, Otherlands, 202x
[10] Henry David Thoreau, Walking, in The Art of the Personal Essay, Philip Lopate
https://archive.org/details/PhillipLopateTheArtOfThePersonalEssay/page/n555/mode/1up
[11] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 131-132, in The Making of the American Essay, John D. Agata