show your passion

february 26 | weekly warm-up

Write a short story or vignette that shows how you love writing instead of telling us that you love writing. You can also choose a passion other than writing if you like. How can we see your passion? What are the things you do or habits you have that best display it? What is the dialogue of the voices in your head while you’re doing it? Can you personify the passion by giving it human qualities? Experiment with different ways to dramatize it.

For the last couple of weeks we’ve been practicing with show don’t tell to describe a significant moment. This week, let’s look at how can we use this tool to describe abstract concepts like how we feel about something. When we are trying to convey how we feel as expressions of our mindset, disposition, or personality, how can we show these abstract concepts? Below I’m sharing an excerpt from a work-in-progress that describes how I felt about my mother slipping away from me due to mental illness. Instead of saying I wish I knew more about who she was before she got sick, I offered this:

“I study my mother’s photo albums religiously, pulling them out at least once a month to visit with the faces of my family’s past. She was always beautiful, bookish, creative, peculiar. Mysterious. I want to be like her. I practice her gaze in the mirror. In pictures, she’d either have a distant, far off look on her face or she’d be smiling, showing both rows of sparkling white teeth complete with a gap between the front two. Her skin is chocolate brown and smooth, while the rest of her family — mom, dad, brother, and sister — are fair-skinned.  She has Diana Ross hair that is long in some pictures, picked out into an afro in others and in some it’s pressed and curled into a bouncing bob. My favorite is one of her sitting with my grandmother in a fitted jacket, with Hollywood shades on and her lips parted just so. Her hair has that full bounce roller set look about it, like she just came out from under the dryer. I can almost smell the Jean Nate body splash that I still use just to keep her close. This picture gives me the mom I lost before she could tell me her secrets. 

But now her stormy moods are more frequent than the happy ones. Her accusations are getting more outlandish and she’s looking the way she behaves, twisted and confused, fire in her eyes. It wasn’t all at once. One day she started going out in a bathrobe, fully clothed underneath like the robe was a coat.  Another day she shaved off her hairline to get rid of her widow’s peak and side edges.  She said it made her feel cleaner and I should consider shaving mine too. The laughter and ease that used to exist around friends and family is now a sliceable tension. The slipping away of the woman we love. The fake smiles. The unspoken loss.” 

Your exercise this week is to experiment with describing your passion for writing, but feel free to interpret the exercise in your own way. There are some super helpful examples in this article.