How to bring your writing to life using your senses
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Hello writers and readers,
I write from windswept and waterlogged Cape Town.
Branches and whole trees have been felled by the elements, yanking up fibre cables, sewer cables, and more. Rooves have been wrenched off by the dispassionate gusts leaving houses opened up to the sky like mouths. Cars move in the roads like boats without oars, navigating the water with care. Electricity wires have been flung from their posts, waving at the traffic like crazed and dangerous octopi. In the city, people cling to each other, to buildings, to statues to avoid being lifted up and into the atmosphere. Beneath bridges, the unfortunate sodden who live beneath them hunker together, hoping for a reprieve.
The sound of the train wails in the wind, ebbing and flowing with the changing direction. Horns hooting. Leaves whipping. The air is too wet for petrichor. Now there is only the smell of wood fire from the luckiest houses, gas and paraffin from those less so.
There are no shoes suitable for weather like this. Even the most hardy of gumboots is too wide, allowing the torrent to pour down into socks, skin wrinkling before anyone can get anywhere. Umbrellas, feeble creations of metal and plastic, are all sucked the wrong way, pointless.
People cannot get to work. The government is closing schools.
How I feel about this? Well, that depends on who and where I am as a character, doesn’t it? It all depends on what I want, and what I’ll do to get it.
Subscribe now to find out how sensory information can make your writing come alive. Or if you’d like to think more about this, come and join me for a writing workshop this Saturday or next Friday. All the details, here
