Hazy Shades of Me

Lose me and I’m yours. Powerful words welded into sentences, zigging here and zagging there, spinning me in circles and propelling me through mazes hoping to never find a way out are on my Goodreads list.

Compositions making me forget that our (stupefying) Visa bill is on its way or that I’m waiting for the dryer to finish its cycle will forever hold a special place in my heart.

Passage into an imaginary world is largely due to description. In my (humble) opinion, it’s almost all we writers have when trying to entice readers into our wildly whimsical minds.

Description is kinda my thing. I can get very caught up in explaining how “the freshly painted wooden stool glistened in the sun like a shiny, red-skinned apple against a soft carpet of moss-green grass.” Some could say it’s overkill, but poof…there it is. You see the stool, don’t you?

I could have said; “The stool had just been painted red and someone had set it on the grass.” You may still be able to see the stool, but not quite in the same way and your mind would have to do most of the work.

Not that working your mind is a bad thing, but reading (for pleasure) is supposed to be effortless and having to do too much of the imagining is sort of redundant. You may as well write the book yourself.

I’ve heard people say; “Ugh, the description went on and on. In the end, I just skipped through it.”

What a shame. The author has taken what should have been an all-consuming, riveting experience and turned it into an arduous, irksome chore. It hurts my heart.

Descriptives should have us eating words slowly, savoring the different tastes each one leaves behind. We should feel like we just watched a really great movie and didn’t realize there were subtitles. Good descriptives should leave us praying there’s always one more page.

I write to find myself, but I read hoping to get lost. I leave the (mind-numbing, oppressed) map in the glove compartment.