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A WRITING BLOG About Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres and Different Literary Characters

Writing Leap #24 Describing What You See

Hi there Writers,

You are the experiencer who gives your reader details of what you are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling physically and feeling emotionally. Description creates a mood, a tone, so your reader drinks in what you do and gets lost there. That’s your gift as a writer to your reader.

Pick anything! How does it strike you? Write that. It’s the best practice for your fiction and non-fiction as well.

The Story Line is: CONTENTMENT

Here’s mine.

The Linden Tree

Remember what it felt like when you were a child and you found your own hiding place? A place where everything around it disappeared?

There is a very old linden tree that looms high among the maples and beech at our local nature center. The other day I leaned against its huge brown trunk and left the nature center for linden tree land.

It was droopy hot outside with a blinding sun. But under the thick branches that sprawled forty feet across and eighty feet high it was dark-green shady and as refreshing as a glen after the rain. Many of the branches hung down to within a few feet of the ground. This linden has been growing for over one hundred years and may even keep on going to one thousand. It was secluded under the tree. Private. It was magical.

Clusters of heart shaped, slightly lopsided leaves dangled off graceful stems. I took my sketchpad and drew the tiny sawtoothed edges and the little point at the tip. It’s the end of June and just past the time when the star-shaped flowers bloom and perfume the air with a mighty fragrance of honey and lemon peel. I missed that, darn it.

But hanging from the stems along with the round love leaves were long, very narrow yellow-green leaves, like wings, in clusters of two. Growing out of the center of the leaves were threadlike stems that split into a V, where two pea-sized white nutlets were thinking about dropping to the ground and starting new linden trees. Unless they decide to let the chipmunks and squirrels enjoy the seeds inside the nutlet for tea.

It was hard to leave.

LINKING THE ARTS

Painting: In the Shade of Linden Trees by Apollinaris M. Vasnetsov, 1907