MONDAY creative writing exercise because it’s a good way to start the week. DESCRIPTION

This a great exercise for the days when you have no time to write. When you’re in the kitchen preparing dinner you can jot down ideas while the pasta is cooking; if you’re commuting set yourself a time limit: the distance between train stations, bus stops, the next person coughs.

Spend just a minute jotting down as many things as you can that you feel are impossible to describe, or nearly impossible. (Aim for ten.)
Don’t think about it too much, just them down. You can have abstract concepts like love or something more tangible like the sound of laughter or the taste of vodka. Then look at the list and circle the two that you feel are the hardest to pin down.
Then do just that, nail that sensation, make someone else feel what you feel about it.
Oxymorons can sometimes help. The word comes from the Greek meaning dull sharp and is a combination of two opposites.
Brawling love, feather of lead and damned saint all come from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet while Milton described the experience of being in hell as burning and freezing like ice in Paradise Lost
So, noting down the essential qualities of VODKA might produce:- fire, clear, water, horrible
Turning those ideas into something more lucid might result in a watery bonfire leaving an after taste of industrial disinfectant (did you guess I don’t like it very much). Ok, not brilliant but that was between Clapham Junction and East Croydon…
Adele managed it rather better when she tried to describe something equally hard to express when she wrote Set Fire to the Rain.

Writing can do anything, go anywhere, never tell yourself something is impossible to describe (or worse still write that phrase in a story) and if you want more evidence read this poem by Emily Dickinson.

A thought went up my mind to-day
by Emily Dickinson

A thought went up my mind to-day
That I have had before,
But did not finish,–some way back,
I could not fix the year,

Nor where it went, nor why it came
The second time to me,
Nor definitely what it was,
Have I the art to say.

But somewhere in my soul, I know
I’ve met the thing before;
It just reminded me–‘t was all–
And came my way no more.