Preoccupied With Writing and a Lesson On Imagery: Changing My Main Activity For the Next Few Months

I've decided it:  I'm not going to put much effort into my writing (because that would make it less enjoyable), but, I'm going to make non-fiction creative writing my main task for the next several weeks.

This arose out of a desire not to be "preoccupied with the internet."  My current therapist hasn't said anything about this, but, I checked out the website of one of my therapists from when I was a teenager, and he lists "internet preoccupation" as a key mental wellness issue that he treats patients for.  Thus, I was convinced--I need to turn off the internet for most of the day.

I ruminated on the idea somewhat.  In my one creative non-fiction class I took in college, the professor, Prof. Colin Rafferty, mentioned rumination, perhaps hinting at its power in the development of non-fiction ideas you may want to write about, whether for money or just for fun, as I am writing now.  Anyway, the rumination told me:  I need to get preoccupied *with something else*.

The first thing I thought of was fiction.  I'm reading "Never" by Ken Follett.  I also considered doing more economics reading and research...but the problem with that is, I never get credit, and it's so huge in a way that I need to just sit and wait until my last large batch of research and ideas has been "processed" by someone, leading to me getting at least credit and recognition.

The thing is, I would love to be a high-brow and advanced enough writer to write fiction professionally--and I'm not--but I am not that thrilled by reading fiction.  I will probably keep reading "Never," but only as a part-time way to pass the time--not as a true preoccupation.

Eventually, it dawned on me--an "epiphany," as the excellent writing-about-writing writer Alice LaPlante would say--that I should focus on writing non-fiction.  It doesn't have to be about STEM, although it could be.  The challenge is, what can I write about?

I decided to begin by writing about writing.  Prof. Rafferty actually presented me with a grand total of one super-awesome idea about writing, and I decided to share it here in this essay.

Most of what I know about imagery I learned from Alice LaPlante's book, "The Making of a Story."  I'm not using imagery in this essay...but I can!  I do know how to!  Basically, imagery is using words to paint a picture that can be processed by thinking about all five of your senses--even smell and taste.  The words evoke feelings that are directly linked to your five senses, such as "a warm breeze on a largely grass-green yet bright-yellow-daffodil-punctuated day."  Your imagery doesn't have to win the grand prize for excellence--you can make it your own--but you must appeal to the five senses, no matter how brilliant or average your words sound.

This brings me to Prof. Rafferty's lesson.  In one of my essays I wrote for the class, I compared two friends I used to have to "the Super Mario Brothers."  When I read my essay aloud, Prof. Rafferty addressed my comparison with pretty much the following words verbatim:  "Don't you know exactly what he's talking about?  One of them is really tall, and the other one can jump really high."

At the time, I didn't know much about imagery; I hadn't heard of Alice LaPlnate yet, I was about twenty years old (whereas I'm thirty-nine now), and I often complimented one of the other student's excellent use of "descriptive language," without having a clue of how to emulate her.

Years later, the truth and point of Rafferty's comment finally made sense to me, when I ruminated over that as part of my day:  The sarcastic, yet not cruel (Prof. Rafferty used to say often, "No one learns from cruelty"), comment means, "If you start with an image and don't pin down enough about what direction you are going with it, readers will pick the 'wrong' direction and fill in their own less-than-ideal details for you."  In other words, to complete this unusual and allusive image, I needed to say *how* they were like the Mario Brothers.

In some cases, it's fine to be vague and let readers use their imagination.  In other cases, you must include more detail to take the reader down the "right path" in terms of processing your five-senses image that you have presented.  For example, you could be extremely vague, and say, "A flower was blooming in the garden."  This creates almost no effect.  To create a mood and atmosphere of melancholy, you might prefer to say, "A lonely flower was blooming in the garden, blowing indecisively back and forth with a gentle breeze," which says a lot more and paints a more vivid, "directed" picture for the reader to process.

Ultimately, this lesson was one more cool thing for me to ruminate on when I was considering being a professional writer.  To me, there are three things you need to make it big as a writer in a particular sub-market of writing:  percentile (your relative skill at producing high-quality writing), platform (the number of followers you have who like your writing and might buy/read your work), and market tightness (a totally awesome economics metric that I've used in job searches--in which case it's termed "labor market tightness"--that you should look up on the internet and assess as an alternative to supply and demand for figuring out whether a market is a "seller's market" or not).  Unfortunately, my platform is small--almost 0--and my percentile--my "stature as a writer," brain-wise--is not that great, and I can't pin down an exact number but I would bet that it's less than the 50th percentile among semi-serious writers.

That said, I might be able to make it as a non-fiction writer someday...if my platform increases.  Until then, I will just have fun doing some low-effort, fun, for-free writing projects that I can post on my blog for the thrill of it!