As a writer, I use my journal to both play with strategies I pick up from other writers’ work and test strategies I invent. In combination with observing the “show don’t tell rule” (use imagery and detail that appeal to the senses rather than intangibles that tell the reader how to feel — i.e. “the light bounced off the water in diamonds” not “the bay was a dazzling sight”), playing around with the strategies helps me create new writing more easily.

Using Sound Imagery
One of my favorite exercises is to play with sound in my writing. We are a very visual culture, and it is easy to neglect sound imagery in writing since visual imagery comes more naturally to most of us.

To force myself to get sound imagery into my writing, I think of a noisy place — like the street I used to live on in Los Angeles on garbage collection day — and then set about describing it in a journal entry with words that describe the sounds. Here’s an example:

On garbage collection days, the disposal company my husband calls Loud and Early slams and smashes its way into our sleep. We hear the sounds of garbage cans colliding with the thick rusty truck, then scraping and clattering across the asphalt and cement of street and curb. When we hear the garbage truck grind the dregs of our existence to a pulp, we slide our feet to the floor. A police helicopter hurls its hello from overhead, shaking the walls and shattering any memory of our dreams.

The work pays off when I find myself immersed in my experience from new angles. In this case, all the noise of life in LA floods in and once I write about sliding out of bed and being on my feet under the noise of the helicopter, I am ready to write about other LA sounds: the cracking sound a building makes during an earthquake, the sounds of a neighbor’s TV and another neighbor’s guitar practice coming out open windows not more than 10 feet from mine, the sound of shopping carts down the concrete sidewalks, pushed by the homeless, and the sound of a pack of parrots that live in the trees.

 The more sounds I think of, the more I can recreate my time living in LA and the more I can do that, the more I am able to compare it to where I am living now — through sounds, of course: the raucous upset of cawing raven’s when an eagle alights, the whoosh of the bay at high tide, the honk of geese and ducks and call of gulls, the way the sound of nesting pheasants reminds me of the “boom, boom” at the opening and between segments of a “Law and Order” episode.

An essay topic is beginning to present itself — I want to discuss the law and order of my personal life in both places and the forces that add chaos. How will I start? Maybe by writing about that pheasant — I am pulling weeds in my garden as I hear him, and because of the TV show, the sound makes me think about judge’s gavels. I begin to consider the personal “laws” (such as “feelings come first” — e.e. cummings) I hold to in my life and the ways in which I am accountable to them wherever I live.

Evoking Your Smell Memory
Smell is another underused sense in written work. I am fond of playing with similes to evoke smells. Smells lead to memories I can put on the page with vivid detail. To start, I think of something I smell in my daily life and compare it to something else I remember smelling:

The smell of clothes fresh from the dryer is like the smell of bread baking at my friend’s house.

The smell of the charcoal grill after the fire has died down is like my girlfriend’s clothes after the fire in her apartment.

The smell of jasmine flowers as I walk by is like the smell of my grandmother’s dress as I clung to the folds.

What I like about writing these similes is that I never know what leap of association I’ll make and what story I might launch myself into. The memory of my grade school friend’s apartment building burning down is vivid to me as it comes back through my sense of smell, and I might set to writing about memories of standing outside with my friend and her mother, of watching red flames coming out of all the windows, of feeling the heat that the flames produced, and of being overwhelmed by the actions of the fire fighters dragging heavy hoses and climbing onto the roof. I could write about the smoke damage to my friend’s apartment, how for weeks she came to school in clothes that smelled of smoke.

This memory of a tragedy leads to memories of others that are vivid from childhood — ones I can get to through smell: the smell of an uneaten tuna fish sandwich I brought for lunch in fourth grade is forever mingled with the tragedy of a boy from my class collapsing and dying on the playground. The smell of onions frying remains is entwined with the memory of the day my father came home with blood on his hands from stopping to help a motorcyclist he found dying on the side of the road. The smell of lunch cooking on a grill at Girl Scout day camp, located in a park near the town’s model of a one-family bomb shelter, is combined with fear of nuclear war.

My sense of smell enables me to gather material together that will help me reconstruct the dichotomy between the safe and cozy home I was growing up in and my realization that disaster intrudes as it wishes.

Borrowing Sentence Logic
Just as forcing ourselves to write from our senses of hearing and smell can produce topics and skillfully drawn description, relying on certain sentence structures can help us be clever and entertaining.

I am fond of copying fiction writer Ron Carlson’s sentence logic when I want to add wit to my writing.

He shared his style of journaling years ago as a contributor to my book The Writer’s Journal: 40 Contemporary Writers and Their Journals, and I’ve been playing with his ideas ever since. He writes clever sentences and keeps them around for “thickening the brew” when he fleshes out stories. Here’s one of his sentences:

They discovered that the elevator in their dilapidated building acted as a bellows for the air conditioning, so they sent the child out an hour every afternoon to ride up and down.”

When I used Ron Carlson’s sentence logic of cause and effect as a pattern, I wrote this:

Because I discovered that my cats’ scratching altered the upholstery on my couches, I let them do a patch every day and then I came with darning needles and embroidery paraphernalia and wove a beautiful array of colors into the tatters. Now people all over the world order my cat-scratched upholstery.

I had invented the beginning of a story about the way the business changed the “I’s” life. I was interested in writing a short story about this “I” and I also know I can keep on using this sentence logic exercise to write about more discoveries until I evoke another interesting character who just loves to put the world together in his or her own way.

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The beauty of playing with these exercise ideas is that you can use them when you want to write but don’t know what you want to write about as well as when you have a topic but don’t know how to start. Using the strategies, you’ll bring more willingness to play with words when you write, even when you are writing about sad and difficult times. Willingness to come to your material in new ways stirs the pot so you maintain interest in what is brewing as you put words on the page.