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That poetry slam in Portland changed how I write dialogue forever
Back in 2018 I went to this spoken word night at a small coffee shop on Hawthorne. A woman got up and told a 3 minute story about her grandmother's kitchen using nothing but smells and sounds. No descriptions of what anything looked like. I sat there with my jaw hanging open because every single person in that room could SEE that kitchen. It hit me that I was wasting adjectives in my fiction trying to paint pictures when I should have been using the other senses. After that night I went home and rewrote a scene from my novel using only what my character could hear and smell. That one exercise fixed a chapter I had been stuck on for 6 months. Has anyone else had a live performance completely shift how they approach a specific writing technique?
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jamie9401mo ago
Hit up a writing workshop years back where this poet described a breakup by only talking about what was in her fridge on different days. Made me realize how much I lean on visual shortcuts when what readers actually want is texture. How long did it take before you stopped catching yourself defaulting to visual descriptions during rewrites?
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stellaperry1mo ago
That's a really powerful shift in perspective, and I get exactly what you mean about being stuck on a scene for months. Live performance has a way of drilling down to what's essential, stripping away all the extra stuff we usually hide behind. It's like a reminder that our readers are smart enough to fill in the blanks if we just give them a solid anchor.
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miller.rowan1mo ago
Oh man, that sounds amazing but I think you're selling yourself a bit short. It's not just about swapping adjectives for other senses, it's more about how the character would actually experience that moment. Like your example, the woman didn't pick smells over sights because smells are better, she picked what her character would notice first in that specific memory. That's the real trick, yeah?
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