Feeling overwhelmed by data, random information, the flotsam and jetsam of mass culture, we relish the spectacle of a single consciousness making sense of a portion of the chaos…”

— Scott Russell Sanders

As readers of essays and poems, we understand what Sanders means, and we are grateful to writers who provide the spectacle of a consciousness making sense of a portion of the chaos.  However, when we sit down to be that consciousness ourselves, we realize that it takes a bit to overcome the effect of the ubiquitous flotsam and jetsam before we can do our work.   Sometimes, we find this debris floating around in our writing despite our efforts to keep it out. The daily flood of communication that is abstract, stereotypical, sentimental or imprecise finds it way into our creative writing and diverts our consciousness from making sense of our portion of the chaos. We find ourselves offering a universalized version of our experience and the more we do that, the less our writing will move others or even interest us as writers. What are the sources of the troublesome pieces of flotsam and jetsam that get in the way of smooth sailing?

The academic and work-report writing many of us were trained in or have to practice stress generalities and abstraction to dissociate brain work from heart work. As an example, here is an excerpt from an article in the November 1996 American Way Magazine by UCLA professor Richard Lanham:

Rhetoric, for most of its 2,500-year history, was the name for how the Western world taught its children to speak and write, and to think about speaking and writing.  We might think of it as teaching “the art of expression,” or more grandly, “the means of conscious life.”  Nowadays, we call it “communication,” and its importance is, I think, universally acknowledged.

These words require only the brain to work, not the five senses.  Many of us, having been given good grades if we wrote this way, feel self-conscious or wrong if we use personal examples or the names of things in our personal lives.  We sometimes have a hard time trusting that our heart’s thoughts are valid and of interest.

In addition to academic and work writing, greeting card verse surrounds us.  It addresses feelings in so general and abstract a way that one card can seem to suit millions.  Here’s a verse congratulating a newly-married couple:

The miracle of marriage
starts with a festival
Where two people
promise themselves to each other
come what may

“Miracle,” “festival,” “promise” and “to each other” are words from the lexicon concerning commitment and union.  “Come what may” is a catch-all phrase for life and its events, anyone’s life.  And “Where two people” indicates only the obvious.  There is no surprise or refreshed experience here.  The words indicate that there is reason for joy and celebration but provide no experience of these emotions.  There is a difference between a landscape of words and a lexicon of words.  A landscape has a terrain.  Here is an excerpt from “Bedtime” by William Matthews:

 When I start to turn off lights
the boys are puzzled. They’re used
to entering sleep by ceding to me
their hum and fizz, the way they give me
50¢ to hold so they can play
without money. I’m their night-light.
I’m the bread baked while they sleep.

As readers, we must use our senses to participate in this poem; we must smell bread baking, think of quarters, see lights turned off, hear murmurs.  A lexicon, on the other hand, is the language of a category.  By invoking a lexicon, we designate a category, but do not offer the experience of a life.

Some greeting card verses intended to inspire indicate they are meant to be personalized by their titles, “To Mother” or “To Grandmother,” for example.  They go on in short lines with the words we have learned are appropriate to show closeness, respect and gratitude.

Mother,
you were with me yesterday
when I was growing up
with friends and family.
You shared my laughing and my cries.

“Yesterday,” “friends,” “family,” “laughing,” and “cries” are words from the lexicon of words about growing up.  We read in these words that we should honor our mothers by telling them we know they have done the things that all mothers do, but not what they have done in particular.

Compare these lines by Stanley Plumly in his poem “Say Summer/For My Mother:

I could give it back to you, perhaps in a season,
say summer.   I could give you leaf back, green
grass, sky full of rain, root
that won’t dig deeper, the names called out
just before sundown:  Linda back, Susy back,
Carolyn…

In the names called out before sundown we hear many mothers calling to their children who have strayed into neighborhoods and fields in the summer light. How can the general words “yesterdays” and “tears” ever accomplish that?

TV news and newspaper reports, carried and repeated by multiple carriers, also generalize, abstract and universalize feeling without really exploring particular experience.  They often trivialize experience when reporters broadcast phrases composed of buzz words to which we are to ascribe the expected feeling rather than experience it:  “concerned citizens,” “innocent bystanders,” “tragic accidents,” “brutal murders,” and “senseless crime.”  We know how they want us to feel, but I think our feelings are dampened as a consequence of these words.  We have heard them before.  We can categorize and file away whatever incident we are hearing about.  Or, we can run it over in our minds like the videotape the stations replay again and again for at least 24 hours.  We feel the same anxiety until some new if-it-bleeds-it-leads sequence makes its way onto the news for the next 24 hours, but we don’t usually go very far exploring our response, feeling and perception.

Another way the news keeps us from true perception is in the language of eyewitnesses talking about what they have seen. Witnesses before the camera often describe a gunman who opened fire in a crowd by saying, “And then the gentleman….”  Gentleman?  A gunman gone wild against the public?  Maybe the eyewitnesses think of themselves as needing higher diction because they are being interviewed for TV and the word gentleman transmutes into their sentences about the gunman.  But as viewers, we’re not supposed to notice the use of this word.  The reporters don’t mention it.  But this language does impart undeserved elevated recognition to the gunman. Oddly elevated diction may enter our writing when we least expect it because it has begun to sound right to us when in effect it creates dissonance and lack of trust.

Advertising jingles direct us to make expected associations and those jingles sometimes make their way into our writing when we want someone to make a similar association.  I have read “Reach out and touch” in a number of student drafts and the phrase spoils the voice of their writing because the large feet of AT&T come stomping in.

Poets and personal essayists must always remember that the quiet search for learned truth and knowledge gained from particular experience requires writing what things look like, sound like, taste like, smell like and feel like to them, separate from how they appear to anyone else or from what society tells us to experience.  The creative writer re-experiences her experience through the environment she occupies by writing through her senses.

There are several simple measures we can take as writers to keep our writing voice free of empty speech and ensure that we don’t sound like we are in school or on television:

l. Use metaphorical thinking to make sure you evoke your experience rather than summing it up.  Metaphor making requires that you use tangible, sense-oriented words and avoid generalizations.  For example, instead of writing about the long, princess style telephone of my early marriage years, I can call up the “sense” my senses made of that phone by writing,   “The telephone had the shape of a tongue.”  If I want to describe my own hands, white against the grey computer keyboard, I can write, “My hands lay on the keyboard of my computer like clams outside of their shells on the winter beach.”

With metaphor, you can also use sound, smell, taste and touch as well sight.  For instance, to get at how I feel when it is sunny and I don’t tend to my gardening, I might write that my laziness about getting out and gardening on a sunny day overpowered the sweet scents of rosemary, sage and thyme with the heavy sulfur smell of a paper mill.

2. Listing offers practice using exact names and characteristics and is a way to organize the world according to unique perceptions. If you are writing about a particular Thanksgiving, for instance, you might list the non-food items on the Thanksgiving dining table or the peculiar speech characteristics of guests or things in the view outside the window.  If you are writing about a place from childhood, you might list the shapes shadows made at night.  Finding an unusual list to make that pertains to your topic will help you relive the experience you are writing about in very specific, lyric and moving terms.

3.  To further free yourself to acknowledge your unique way of seeing things and to conjure your experience, think of “sometimes thoughts.”  Here is how I have done this recently:  I am aware that at dusk, I often feel a certain kind of nostalgia or sadness.  I write a sometimes thought about that time of day:  “Sometimes at dusk, I think of when my children were in grade school and this was the busy time of day with dinner, homework, gymnastics, friends staying over, trumpets and piano practicing.” With this sometimes thought written down, I go on to list images I see and hear at dusk that remind me of my children’s early school days:  “At dusk, I see the lamp over the now silent and empty table, hear the hum of the refrigerator filling the room rather than the sound of a guinea pig’s cage door opening, remember the smell of left-over macaroni and cheese inside the refrigerator, see the white belly of our old cat stretched up against the glass of our backdoor, dream the in and out rhythm of routine. “  Before long, I am deep into my remembered experience.

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Using metaphor, organizing perceptions in your own way with lists and writing sometimes thoughts helps you circumvent the debris of mass culture to find inner emotional experience and make better sense of your portion of the chaos.