As adults, we are so used to summarizing and editorializing. We have learned that abstractions are considered “smart” in writing and having opinions makes us sound even smarter. That’s what our teachers wanted from us on papers and on essay tests.

But creative writing, whether that is in poetry, fiction, personal essay or in longer memoir, requires something different. It requires that we create (or re-create) experience on the page. And experience is not a summary or an abstraction. It is something we live via our five senses: we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. We take the world in through the images these senses supply for us, but we do of course select the ones that will “build” the experiences we are writing about. Writing is a made thing, a shaped thing. As writers, we seek that shape and choose the images that will create the experience we are conveying (or are learning that we are compelled to convey).

So often, if we let our senses land on images around us, we learn more about what we are feeling, what we know, what we yearn for. The depth of it all is more than we could have imagined had we not let ourselves write the experience of our senses.

Before we can do this skillfully, though, we must learn to trust ourselves at finding and using images.

One of my favorite exercises is to look out my window and write five sentences, one for each of the senses. For instance, if I look out my studio window now, on a day when the sun is shining after days of rain, I write:

Today bunches of Shasta daisy leaves cluster inside a ring of orange calendula blossoms. When I open the door of my study, I hear the honking of the Canadian Geese gathered on the beach I cannot see from here. I remember the friend who I shared poems with, who gave me Welsh poppy seeds because the plants grow in shade and there is much of that on the path to my study. I want to talk to her, though she has been dead now five years. I want to tell her that the poppies are now lush, that in her memory I cannot thin them, must feel them as I brush past. Then the memory of the friend who said she could smell the dust in my house and asked if I could smell it, too. Now I walk the path to my house to warm up yellow soup, let the Indian curry spices fill my empty mouth.

If I give this a title, say, “At the End of May,” because that is when I am writing this, I think I might have written a prose poem or sudden nonfiction. I think the beauty and the sadness of losing a treasured friend, the flirting with thinking about my mortality in the dust image and the speechlessnesswe feel when we consider the mystery of death all resonate again the fact that I am writing this at a particular time of year, when so much is blooming and coming to life. But it is the end of May and that word “end” honors the transmigratory (oh, those geese!) nature of our lives.

Really, I sat down to write five sentences, one each for each of the five senses. I found I needed a few more (eight in all) to express what I needed to about my deceased friend and the dust that reminds me everything is transitory.

I let myself break the rules of my assignment, remaining conscious, however, that I hadn’t put taste in the piece yet. When I knew I couldn’t close without the sense of taste, I found that the path I’d described was useful for getting to the taste. I found too that where I would put the soup, into my mouth, felt more correct with the modifier “empty.” It just seemed to go with missing my friend here amidst the glory of the garden and the day.

So here it is again, presented with a title and looking whole, of a piece:

At the End of May

Today bunches of Shasta daisy leaves cluster inside a ring of orange calendula blossoms. When I open the door of my study, I hear the honking of the Canadian Geese gathered on the beach I cannot see from here. I remember the friend who I shared poems with, who gave me Welsh poppy seeds because the plants grow in shade and there is much of that on the path to my study. I want to talk to her, though she has been dead now five years. I want to tell her that the poppies are now lush, that in her memory I cannot thin them, must feel them as I brush past. Then the memory of the friend who said she could smell the dust in my house and asked if I could smell it, too. Now I walk the path to my house to warm up yellow soup, let the Indian curry spices fill my empty mouth.

***

You may be thinking that the windows you look out of are not windows that allow you a view of nature’s beauty. Be assured: this exercise works whatever you are looking out from if you trust your images.

Here is a poem I wrote many years ago about a man I loved who lived in a little house across from industrial buildings. Although I wrote it at campsite far from his house after we were no longer able to be seeing each other, I worked from an image I remembered from his window. It seemed to me that  wrote as if I were again for a bit looking out that window though I was far away:

Highways From You, Mono Lake, CA

Camped at this lake where water levels drop
each year and soon predators will only have to walk
to what is now an island where gulls hatch their young,
I sit before my campfire conjuring the two of us
dancing under the streetlights in a parking lot of cranes
across from where you live.

All day we’d watch the carts move boxes past your bungalow
wedged between a warehouse and a plumber’s yard
though we never saw any loading or off loading.

I know now something inside you takes its journey
big as Los Angeles diverting fresh water from this lake
until the water that’s left leaches so much salt from the bottom
even the brine shrimp, the one species that lives here, must die.

What I wanted was to write of sleeping with you, of mornings
you put coffee on or kissed my hair. What I wanted was to write
of two of us dancing under streetlights luminous as moon.

****

The lesson here is this: look out windows; record what your five senses bring in. Write about that. Then, wherever you go, pay attention with your five senses. When you write, the images are the words that will help you find and convey what is at the bottom of your heart and mind, what readers will read to find out what is at the bottom of their hearts, their minds.

This is the opposite of summarizing. This is the dangerous and beautiful territory of evocation.