The waves lap against sandy shores. Seafoam stirs in the predawn hours. Eyes veiled, a girl dreams of home. A gentle breeze blows. It rocks her hammock gently. Her fingers are twined through bronze tresses. Eyelids flicker as the waves crescendo. The last roar rouses her. Turquoise irises stare into the dark. The innocent sleepy smile is gone. The dream is gone.
This is one of the pieces that I wrote this semester for my ELI. The goal of this exercise was to write a descriptive piece in sentences of seven words or fewer. It was the companion to a piece that was to be the same length, but only one sentence. Here is the other:
Violet, indigo, rust, lavender, rose, and gold are the hues that she chooses to tend to, for they are the welcoming tones of a sunrise; that which she is about to memorialize on canvas with horsehair; the spread of the day star reaching into the depth of night to spread its magic, and that is something worth capturing, so the woman wakes before dawn to walk for miles, all so she can climb the perfect hill to apprehend a fleeting concept, an unreachable ideal.
The point of this exercise was to force the writer (me) to think about how sentence length and structure are important for the fluidity of a piece. This exercise, along with many others that I attempted, were in the book Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin. This book truly opened my eyes to writing. I was already in love with writing, but never had I gained such an appreciation for the craft as I did after reading this book. I have not read any of Le Guin’s books, but I would definitely enjoy reading anything she has written, if the way she discusses grammar and conventions in Steering the Craft is any indication of how she uses it in her works of fiction.
Grammar is a new love of mine. I had learned how grammar works, and how to write properly, but I never appreciated how important and cool grammar is. Reading Le Guin’s book made me realize that grammar is a writer’s best friend. (Next to inspiration, of course.) And I have slowly realized that grammar is taking over my life. In trig, I corrected my teacher’s grammar on a word problem. And when my U.S. history teacher is lecturing, I correct his grammar. (He said hung instead of hanged when he was talking about a person!) The best was in my English class, and we did syntactical analysis of a passage of The Scarlet Letter. I got really excited about it and increased the amount of how weird my classmates think I am.
The other exercises in Steering the Craft also contributed to my new admiration of grammar. A good example was the exercise on adjectives and adverbs. The point of this exercise was to write a passage without using adjectives or adverbs. This was a really difficult piece for me to write. I had never realized how much I rely on those parts of speech to augment my writing. I had to plan out each sentence before I wrote it down, so I would make sure that neither adjectives or adverbs slipped into the writing. All of the exercises forced me to think about not only what I was writing, but how I was writing it. This was new for me because I was used to running with an idea. It was a novel concept to me to slow down and think about every word in every sentence. Doing things slowly is not really my style. If anyone has a conversation with me about something that I am passionate about (animation, grammar, etc.), I talk a mile a minute with lots of hand gestures and jumping up and down. But now when I write, I think the sentence through before I write it. I feel like my writing has gained so much from my change in perspective.
While I still may not be the ultimate master of grammar, it is always something I can shoot for thanks to the knowledge that I have gained through exercising my creativity.
~Leah N.D.
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