Prompts by Mary Ann Moore and Cory McRae

Mary Anne Moore Describe Your Day C ory McRae Visceral and Raw

I’m sure you’ve been told many times by several teachers not to convey emotion with language (abstractions, adjectives, adverbs), but through the senses. When it comes to describing abstracts like disappointment, sadness, envy, even love, it’s best to “show” what’s going on for you or the persona in your poetry or prose.

Rather than naming it in your piece of writing, disappointment say, describe your day as if you’re making a journal entry. You can start with this morning. You’ll find that it’s all there in the empty mailbox, the unanswered text, the cat that doesn’t return home when called, the rain clouds surrounding the mountains. You may have more than you need but you will find many images to suit the feeling of disappointment as you describe your day.

This is a useful and creative approach for the poem you’re writing, your memoir or your novel. I have found even with writing fiction, that starting with what I’m seeing in front of me leads me back in to the story.

This writing practice prompt came about as I wrote in my journal each morning facing a mountain known as the Grandmother of All Surrounding Mountains to the Snuneymuxw First Nation on whose unceded lands I live. I was missing my daughter, and writing about what I saw provided all the metaphors I needed. Writing has always been a very raw, visceral, and solemn experience for me. Coming packaged as I am with the suite of disabilities, life was not kind, not that it ever was illusioned as such before I came along. Still, that life also flavoured the way I approach my writing, and in a sick sort of way I’m grateful, as I would hardly be the writer I am today without both the suites of double-edged superpowers and experiences.

What I can offer is this: For prose… I craft a virtual simulation—places, people, plot within my mind. I very much become my characters, slotting myself into their brain-cage. The depth of emotion and experience of becoming someone else is jarring at first, but how else could you ever craft anything true to whom you are writing if you do not live as them? Depersonalization definitely comes easier for some folk, so practise.

Begin your poetry in a different way. Find a space where you feel safe and comfortable. Sit in silence. Then call upon your emotions. Call forth your love, anguish, terror, beauty, hatred, and the ghosts of everyone dead that you have ever known. Name those people, those feelings. Describe them with as many adjectives as you can. Feel it as true to yourself as possible. Let it roil up and consume you. Then write. Let it pour forth in torrent. Speak truth. Be you. Let the poetry reflect your inner self.

Mary Ann Moore leads poetry writing workshops and a women’s writing circle called Writing Life in Nanaimo. Her book of poetry is Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press, 2014) and she has a new writing resource called Writing to Map Your Spiritual Journey available at iajw.org. Mary Ann writes a blog at www.apoetsnanaimo.ca. Cory McRae teaches and writes within British Columbia, and is very excited for his debut novel The Marionette Man to come out via Oghma Creative Media! He is inspired by hundreds—Kay, Pullman, Leckie, Bradbury, Asimov, Vonnegut, more. You can find him at www.McRaeWrites.com.