Writing Process: An exercise for embodied memory recollection
Keeping the vitality in your writing even after the experience has been and gone
I have been worrying about losing the vitality of my travel memories since we started the trip itself, reaching fever pitch as we drove back across Europe for the UK (would my memories get left behind where they originated?) until I remembered that I have tools, or as I would prefer to call them ways and means, to keep my memories fresh for long enough to write them. After all, I have written two books now and both required repeated pendulation between past and present. Especially, Weathering. But I will come back to the How-To, shortly.
When you are writing about place, landscape, nature and so on for the benefit of a reader, it stands to reason that you want to bring a place to life for them. Lively words draw readers in, they move the reader, and they help the reader travel with you. We’ve probably all read nature writing that the author clearly wanted us to love but left us a bit, well, cold? My sense is that this is more than just ambivalence for the subject matter, but is more about the ability of the writer to take us on a lively, engrossing, heart-felt (not head-felt) trip with them.
Writing with vitality is a necessity then, and a skill, and it’s hugely frustrating when you lose your exciting thread to the regular unfolding of life, and new, overlaid memories that feel as if they threaten to steal away your precious experience before you’ve even got beyond the first paragraph. Incidentally, this is part of the reason why I love poetry so much - to read and write - it has the power to capture a moment, in a moment, before interruption. A poem can be drafted very quickly on the hoof.
The inevitability of distraction is surely why so many writers want to retreat into solitude to get their words down before the world interrupts them. Life is a never-ending supply line of interruptions and unless this is what you want to write about, or even how you like your writing to be flavoured, then as writers we need new and creative ways to stay focused, while letting just enough of the world in that it suffuses our writing with the life that is always happening around us and may alter our memories and experiences for the better.