Rhetoric

The art of using words effectively.

What you will read in the following is how the writer deems to see the world and how world the “conspires to blind the writer.” These are simple words, but with profound meaning.

Let us take, for example, the word “apple.” You go to any grocery store and you can buy apples, a simple enough act, right? Many varieties are available, highly waxed and stacked in bins of various geometric patterns, alight in shades of reds, greens and yellows. In its basic sense you take them home, eat them and your brain tells you that you ate an apple. However, you really have not, not in its strictest sense. You may have eaten it, but have you really tasted it? Unless you live where you can have access to roadside stands or go to growers’ orchards and pick firsthand the freshest apples from the tree, you have not really eaten an apple. You have tasted a lie. Real apples do not make it to grocery stores. What you see there are the “apple-shaped frauds that are waxed and preserved and fixed like bugs in formaldehyde. Most people have never really tasted an apple.”

What else in your life has been lying to you? What other excuses are out there masquerading as the real thing, saying that you have lived and experienced the world, when in fact you have been led around in blinders? As long as you follow the mainstream, you are subject to someone else’s rendition of what is real. Unless you have been to Alaska in the middle of a salmon run, fished for these glorious creatures, gutted it on the spot, wrapped it in tinfoil laced with butter, and buried it in hot coals to cook, you have never tasted real salmon.

What does all this have to do with writing? Simply this. If you have never tasted a real apple, you can never write about an apple that is real. If you’ve never been out in a cold November rain letting the rain soak through your clothes, or wipe your nose cold and dripping, letting snow form icy strands in your hair, how are you going to write about characters that live? They’ll only be seen from the inside of a heated room, or through an early morning windowpane damp from dew. If you have never lived it, how are you going to write about characters that live?

Real life is not free, but if you care to look, it can be cheap. Here is real for you. Turn off the television, go outside, and get by yourself. Feel the breeze blow across your face, look up at the sun with your eyes closed, taste some ugly fruit at the local produce stand. Bite into some runt Thompson seedless grapes your neighbor grows in his backyard. Ride a bike, smell the air around you, even if it’s not always pleasant. It’s better for your writing than recycled air-conditioned air. At least once, give yourself something real to hold on to, because if all you know is someone else’s perception of life, how can you write from within your own self? That’s the only true way there is.

In closing, I would like to add if one takes the above literally it would be an impossible task. All this was meant to be was an exercise in perseverance in becoming more aware of what we do write, stay in the moment, objectively stir our muse, and use our innate intuition to make our point. Good luck and happy writing.

gretchen L. ©