The Feeling of (Highly Specific) Things

A multi-step writing prompt that taps into Goethe's " ... true nature of poetry, namely, the expression of the particular without any thought of, or reference to the general"

Have you ever been struck, unexpectedly, by the tender hilarity of human homemaking? These little boxes we tend and mend and fill with things—things which we often then hang onto, display, store, and, later, pack and carry if and when we move from one home to another. The things we collect sometimes, perhaps often, become bigger than they are because of the stories we attach to them, because of the stories we allow our things to hold and even become.

This idea of things being bigger than themselves is in part what we’ll explore in our prompt this week. Because once we really begin to see things—begin to see everything around us—in the most granular way, our writing can open up to organic metaphor and depths of truth and feeling otherwise unattainable. It has to do with how we home in on the particularity of the world, the blade of grass that contains multitudes.

Goethe said it this way:

There is a great difference between a poet seeking the particular for the universal, and seeing the universal in the particular. The one gives rise to allegory, where the particular serves only as instance or example of the general; but the other is the true nature of poetry, namely, the expression of the particular without any thought of, or reference to, the general. If a man grasps the particular vividly, he also grasps the general, without being aware of it at the time; or he may make the discovery long afterwards.

Back to the meaning we find in our own things, our own belongings. Ann Patchett poignantly describes the phenomenon of how things become more than things in her New Yorker essay “How to Practice,” which is about clearing out her house to prepare better for death:

I started in the kitchen, a room that’s friendly and overly familiar, sitting on the floor, in order to address the lower cabinets first. The plastic soup containers were easy—I’d held on to too many of those. At some point, I’d bought new bread pans without letting the old ones go. I had four colanders. Cabinet by cabinet, I pulled out the contents, assessed, divided, wiped down, replaced. I filled the laundry basket with the things I didn’t want or need and carried those discards to the basement. I made the decision to wait until we’d finished with the entire house before trying to find a place for the things we were getting rid of. This was a lesson I’d picked up from my work: writing must be separate from editing, and if you try to do both at the same time nothing will get done. I would not stop the work at hand in order to imagine who might want the square green serving dish I’d bought fifteen years before and never put on the table.

What I had didn’t surprise me half as much as how I felt about it: the unexpected shame that came from owning seven mixing bowls, the guilt over never having made good use of the electric juicer my mother had given me, and, strangest of all, my anthropomorphism of inanimate objects—how would those plastic plates with pictures of chickadees on them feel when they realized they were on their way to the basement? It was as if I’d run my fingers across some unexpected lump in my psyche. Jesus, what was that?

I too, am prone to anthropomorphizing. You can ask any of my children. Or even my grandchildren for that matter. I can hardly help it—the dolls, the trains, the trinkets all take on personas without even trying. Other things do too. For example, the door might cry when it accidentally bonks a toddler. The special coconut cup with the plastic flower tells tall tales from its travels all the way home from Hawaii. The salsa that went bad after being stuffed in the back of the fridge felt lonely to have been forgotten.

And so on.

As writers, this way of seeing things is more than fanciful: it is a critical skill, this ability to make emotions into things and things into emotions. We must conjure and continually sharpen our ability to make non-alive things more alive on the page. This is part of how we elicit feelings in readers. It’s part of how we invite readers to feel the pulse of the story without explaining or telling them.

Just look at how Denise Levertov manifests grief into the physical form of a dog in her poem, “Talking to Grief”:

Ah, grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

How does Levertov do this? Transform an abstract but acute state of being into the familiar form of a stray dog? A dog in which she sees human characteristics such as desire, longing, a need to belong:

You long for your real place to be readied

before winter comes. You need

your name,

your collar and tag. You need

the right to warn off intruders,

to consider my house your own

and me your person

and yourself

my own dog.

Levertov takes the oceanic but abstract experience of human grief, turns it into a dog, then elevates that dog toward humanness. One way to think about this is anthropomorphism, though there is a broader way to think about the feelings of animals, especially dogs, and also a broader way to think about drawing out emotion from things or materializing an emotion into a thing. But to keep it simple, let’s just say Levertov is using anthropomorphism—the attribution of human qualities, characteristics, or behaviors to non-humans, be they animals, inanimate objects, or even intangible concepts. And let’s just also say right here and now that this is a tricky device to pull off, because when it goes wrong, well, it can go very very wrong. It can come off as childish, cliché, kitschy, etc. We all know this.

But when it works, well, to know how that goes we can simply soak in the after effect of Levertov’s skillful hands. So, as we prepare for this week’s writing prompt, what if we dwell in the house of this poem, in its architecture, its shapes and textures? What if we roam its rooms for a while, exploring and touching its marvelous technique? What if we acknowledge that we might not get a perfect result, but that we might grow as a writer, and artist, and a human—we might advance our craft and our own experience of the world—through a simple (but not easy) process of getting very close up to the world with our words? What if I wrote out ten clear, super short, ordered exercises you can walk through to animate the world of your prose?

Let’s see what happens with this one—let’s see if we can take a risk and try something with such a high risk of failure. Let’s see if we can get one good sentence out of the deal. Here are the ten steps—let me know how it goes for you!  

Writing Prompt: The Feeling of (Highly Specific) Things

1.     Before you start on a prompt that entails some risk, as personification certainly does, you might want to first do something really silly, like make a funny face in the mirror or dance in the kitchen or start speaking for your appliances. You could even give your coffee pot a British accent or something. Why? Because you can’t take yourself or your ideas too seriously if you’re going to embrace risk. You must be willing to write some bad things before you get to something good.

2.     To get started on the actual writing, first choose a feeling/emotion (fear, dread, sadness, anger … or, if you want an even steeper challenge, a positive emotion like