Week 15 Story Lab: TedEd Videos, Style

Writing appealed to our senses, YouTube

One of my favorite videos in this series was "How to write descriptively- Nalo Hopkinson" (click!). This video firsts introduces a concept of the the process our mind undergoes when reading fictional plots. When starting a story on a blank page, writers are often given full creative freedom. The idea of this sometimes is ironically debilitating though without someone guiding you to become started. Primarily we read this genre to work our minds in certain ways-- whether it be to feel certain emotions, to solve something in our own conscience, or imagine ourselves through characters in a world of make believe. Oftentimes, good fictional narrative blurs the line between our own realities. With this said, writers have an incredible ability to have function in different ways for all different types of people and minds. The narrator says, "The point of fiction is to cast a spell... a momentary illusion that you are living in the world of the story." So not only do stories make our minds think in different ways. These stories also provoke elements of the readers senses allowing readers to put the sensory input in the context of the imagination created from the story. Instead of using generic words of the senses, (For example sound, taste, sight, etc.) talented writers are able to evoke a particular quality of each sense used. When writers use overused metaphors or phrases, the readers are already familiar with what it makes them feel like. The readers do not have to engage as much with the words and tend to more just go through the motion when reading. In the video about poetic patter, David explains that humans have an innate sense of rate, rhythm, and repetition in our bodies and behavior. He explains that great writers can appeal to this pattern of rhythm in the way they form their sentence structures. I loved how these videos gave me new insight into the world and strategies of fictional writers.