Do you feel it?
A friend recently sent me “Our Blue Dot” which is 90 seconds of Carl Sagan showing a photo of earth taken by Voyager 1 as it left our solar system. It is a nice piece. (https://youtu.be/7KBy_QsQDpE) Sagan and I don’t agree on everything, but he was imaginative and poetic beyond most of his peers.
Back in the day I thought it was unimaginative of NASA to send a teacher to space when they could have sent a writer. The sensations and experience of liftoff, re-entry, and just being in space need to be captured by a good writer.
Ray Bradbury “felt” science more than he wrote it. He would have been a good candidate to capture the essence of space travel. Read the first pages of Rocket Summer in the Martian Chronicles. (Or listen to them here. Excerpt of The Martian Chronicles – In Memory of Ray Bradbury by chazychris (soundcloud.com)
Someone once commented that only one story in the Martian Chronicles obeys the rules of science. Yet his prose captures the soul, the body, the imagination, and we accept science fantasy as if it were true science. We suspend disbelief.
The first chapter of Moby Dick reaches out to make your feel. It is no accident that when John Huston made Moby Dick into a film, he reached out to Bradbury to write the narrative. (Unfortunately, the artist and the filmmaker didn’t agree on how long the film could be and a good deal of Bradbury’s work never made it on screen.)
Does your writing say or feel? Both have their place, but one is more haunting than the other. One follows your reader around like an ear worm drawing them back to your pages. Try not to be too clinical, too exact. Grab the sensations as well as the scenery.
Genesis I is more sensation than science. We are asked to feel the power and love of God as He creates. The chapter does not teach a class on biology or geography. It offers up the wonder and awe, the sensations of the Master of the Universe rising up and doing something new…just for you. Let it follow you as you walk the earth today and see His handiwork calling out to you.
Now go write what you felt.
