People-Oriented

I've said this before, but I don't get inspired by Nature much, particularly Her big picture. (In fact, I don't think I'm the big picture kind of person at all. My uber optometrist Julie Jones thinks it's a good thing I'm so near-sided, because she loves the details in my work.)

Anyhoo, in the writing workshop on Saturday, the first exercise was to describe a setting appealing to the readers' five senses and not bring in any humans, protagonist or otherwise. I've done this before in Joan's previous workshops, and I listened to her instructions, again. And away I went describing a teenage girl's bedroom in suburbia, midmorning sun filtering in, not a frilly fussy girly room. Then I started describing this bed spread, and I was off; it was made by her great grandmother when her grandmother was engaged, and then handed down to her mother when she went away to college, and how the quilt lived in the dorm for two years, and then at the Thinking Women's Flat for one, and though her mother was not a wild, Thinking Women collectively loved being in the limelight, and if the quilt could talk, etc., etc., etc.

All I wanted to say was it was not a expensively nor stylishly furnished room, she is not a fussy girl, etc., etc., etc.

My experiences in Ronette's drawing class, of doing things different from others, must have seeped into other areas of my life. I didn't even notice that I brought in four women in a half page description of the room, until we took turns reading our descriptions, and after about the sixth person, Joan said, "Oh, I can feel the protagonist in the room without your mentioning him!"

I don't know what this means, but I am and have been far more interested in humans than nature. I knew this. But the new awareness must be... good? Just curious to find out, and hopefully soon-ish, how this ties in with my depressed/paranoid/panic-prone misanthropic side of me, that hag that thinks she doesn't suffer fools easily, but in fact is so closed to the wonders of the world.

This discover/confirmation alone was worth going to the workshop. Oh, and the baking this one writer did for us - the chocolate covered macaroons!