This week while discussing Cathedral, we talked about the importance of objects. Even though when you think of an object simply, a chair, a table, a rose, a pencil, it is just a thing, an object. They are simply described by how they look. Objects though, are also what each person makes of them. A rose is not the same from one person to the next. A simple yellow rose can cause one sadness, as they remember their deceased mother's rose garden, but it can also cause one happiness, as they remember their wedding day. Things are a flurry of feelings to humans, and would have no meaning if people did not attach feelings and memory to them. If we did not attach feelings to them they would only be noticed in a moment of observance, but nothing more.
How could you explain an object to someone that had never seen one before, had never experienced it before? You could say it is yellow, small, pretty. What else? To fully know an object, a thing, an idea, it has to be experienced. Music cannot be explained, art cannot be explained, light cannot be explained... they all must be experienced, and so must everything else in the world
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Tess, I really like your post! It is so true how certain "things" can make us feel so many different emotions. So much of our world can only be fully grasped through the senses; many attempts to describe something through words fail miserably. This is the essence of a big challenge for writers: how do you communicate the full beauty, or horror, or sadness, etc. of an object simply through writing? I think I am going to have a difficult time describing things in my short story. It's so hard to show and not tell. Not only does this apply to describing physical objects, but also to showing people's thoughts and reactions. Thanks for a great post! It helped me realize something I really need to focus on when writing my story.
This is great, Tess! We talked about how it's important to make sure we use specific objects in our stories to give them realism and definition ("the creaky rocking chair" instead of "a chair") as if to prove that he narrator really was there and really does know exactly what was where. But to really "invade their privacy," as Mr. Allen would say, we can use specific objects to explore what meaning they have to a character. I'm so glad I found this... It should definitely help inspire a few words of the thousand I need.
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