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EXCERPT:
Keeping A Journal You Love
By Sheila Bender

©2002 Sheila Bender
Permission Granted for Reprint for Review Purposes

Practicing What You See: Writing What You See
You may come to the page thinking that you cannot possibly get down accurately and interestingly in words what you observe through your eyes. Don't be intimidated. By adhering to the following ideas, with a little practice, you will be writing fluently and with momentum, allowing your words to describe a world, inner and outer, seen through your eyes. When you report what you see literally, you are actually also reporting your attitudes toward what you see. You are showing, instead of telling. You are trusting your images to offer the feelings as well as the reportage. In this way, writing what you literally see leads to the writing of your attitudes about what you see. With something on the page to actually see, not just something referred to as having been seen, your writing becomes richer. This richness will help you keep writing in a way that interests you. In other words, instead of saying something is exciting, show that it is. Writing "The birds were exciting that day" is not as rich in experience or emotion as writing "As the bright red cardinal visited my bird feeder, I watched two goldfinches sit awhile in the Canadian thistle, eager for a turn themselves."

• Look at an object in the room or place you inhabit right now. Describe what this object—say, a desk—looks like without relying on adjectives. Instead of saying "the rectangular wooden desk," say, "The desk is made of pine, with ten boards about six feet in length jointed side by side to make the width of a canoe's belly." Now that the word "canoe" has come up, it is easy to leap to an association like "and lucky days, writing at this desk, I feel myself paddle without a ripple among lily pads and marsh grasses, capturing the tadpoles and minnows of my thoughts even as they dive under the water or hide behind the tall grasses under the wide leaves." Look for images to "leap" from your words. Then take the leap.
  

• Practice with the writing strategies of comparing images to refresh experiences using similes (when you use a "like" or an "as") and metaphors (when you say one thing is another thing). Utilize sight comparisons to widen your observations and bring in fresh experience. All writers need to have facility with this kind of comparative thinking. It enlivens your writing and your view of the world, and it thereby keeps you happier and more intrigued with your writing. You can practice this simply by saying one thing looks like another:

A mirror looks like a lake.
A cornflake in a bowl of milk looks like a dolphin swimming in the ocean.
A shoe with its lace untied looks like a toaster with its electric cord unplugged.

Now try metaphors. Say one thing is another thing:

I sit at my desk, a marionette with no one holding the strings.
The thirty student papers on poetry in my briefcase are a thick sandwich.
Dressed up in the front seat of my husband's convertible without a scarf on my head, I see my hair in the visor mirror, madly waving fronds at the top of a stately palm tree.

Write lists of your own that are like these two as a way of exercising your simile/metaphor-making mind using the sense of sight.

Further Information:
• Review of Keeping A Journal You Love
• Interview with the Author