Plagiarism Week Day Three: Body Scanning

Abstractions are the most useless words in fiction and poetry. Readers don’t feel or see words like “happy” or “beautiful”. They don’t have a visual component, so your reader must think extra hard to grasp what you’re saying. This is terrible terrain for writing. Bald emoting rarely works, so we must invent new ways to describe emotions. There is only one way to achieve that: By paying attention to your own internal world. What does happiness feel like? Where does sadness live in your body?

Body scan meditation is usually used as a calming exercise, but it has value to us as writers, too. Any time you’re confronted by an emotion, you should be scanning your entire body to notice responses you usually ignore.

Observe your body. Pay attention to tension, weight, temperature, and pain. Trace the feeling from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. Find where the emotion resides. What is your heart doing? What is your skin doing? How are your emotions affecting the way you think? Are they altering your day? Are you engaging in unusual everyday habits as a result of that feeling? Is our thinking distorted? Are your eyelids heavy? Are your eyes dry? What’s the best way to describe those responses?

All these details are prime assets in your writing. If you can describe your body’s reactions to emotion well, you will create visceral writing that your readers will feel in their very cells. Feel your body. Plagiarise your body.

Crow and Mama - by Ted Hughes

When Crow cried his mother's ear
Scorched to a stump.

When he laughed she wept
Blood her breasts her palms her brow all wept blood.

He tried a step, then a step, and again a step -
Every one scarred her face for ever.

When he burst out in rage
She fell back with an awful gash and a fearful cry.

When he stopped she closed on him like a book
On a bookmark, he had to get going.

He jumped into the car the towrope
Was around her neck he jumped out.

He jumped into the plane but her body was jammed in the jet -
There was a great row, the flight was cancelled.

He jumped into the rocket and its trajectory
Drilled clean through her heart he kept on

And it was cosy in the rocket, he could not see much
But he peered out through the portholes at Creation

And saw the stars millions of miles away
And saw the future and the universe

Opening and opening
And kept on and slept and at last

Crashed on the moon awoke and crawled out

Under his mother's buttocks.

Exercise

Write a poem about a feeling.