Up: [[Personal Essay and Memoir]] Created: 2024-04-13 Turn abstracts back into the experiences they came from. Example: Rather than “Women my age become invisible,” it could be “they handed drinks around and forgot me, again.” Find the images. Example: Describing the nurse’s feet when learning of your stillborn child. Shows that she can’t look up. Images use the five senses. Examples: - Sight — tiny brown split where a cookie has been filched from the tray - Hearing — high pitched hum at Thanksgiving dinner that turns out to be your father’s hearing aid - Smell — musty odour of grandmother’s closet, which smells of stale cigarette smoke, over polished leather, long-neglected laundry - Touch — the kid next door, getting ready to cut your hair, drawing an eyebrow pencil across your forehead to mark where your bangs should end - Taste — the jelly on the canned ham on white bread (mine!) Flannery O’Connor said it takes an appeal to at least 3 of the reader’s 5 senses to make a scene real. She said, *If you are deprived of more than two of your five senses, you almost aren’t there.* The showing should also convey my feeling. Example: Describing a house as having surfaces cluttered with knickknacks and an endlessly barking dog, we know you don’t want to be there. Write about the thing beside the thing. Example: The shoe in the gutter near the burned-out apartment building > [!User] Adair Lara in *Naked, Drunk and Writing*, p. 65