Using the Mundane

Millersville University and California State University, Fullerton, co-host a website called The Journal of Mundane Behavior·, a journal devoted to “those aspects of our everyday lives that typically go unnoticed by us.” The articles cover topics like paperclips, cell phones, and bubble wrap. On the surface, these subjects are boring to most people, but even those ordinary things we take for granted each day can be valuable sources of writing ideas.

Many people think they can’t write if they don’t have unusual or exotic lives. They’ve never left their hometown, nor do they have glamorous jobs. Their families are pretty ordinary and without the conflicts that become topics of shows like Dr. Phil and Jerry Springer. You don’t have to live exotic lives to be able to write. Flannery O’Connor said if we’ve survived our childhoods, we have enough material to write about forever. Many published authors like Eudora Welty and Raymond Carver wrote stories about basic human condition. They were set in ordinary places. The characters were ordinary people. Their stories aren’t filled with exotic locales or glamorous people.

Make a list of seemingly mundane events or places. For instance:
taking a bath
brushing teeth
eating a meal
watching television
pumping gas
standing in line
shopping
reading mail

Choose one of the events from your list. Use it to create a scene where you make something interesting happen. Provide a twist. Perhaps someone gives in to the temptation to do something funny or outrageous. For instance, while brushing her teeth in her boyfriend’s apartment, Ashley decides to decorate the bathroom with toothpaste. While watching television, a 10-year-old boy calls Cleo the psychic and discovers that his life is about to change. Ask “What if?” Write your scene in any point of view. Feel free to be outrageous.

Once you create the scene, you may have a new story idea. See if you have a conflict that will carry the story. Outline possible conflicts and plot lines. This is your chance to do something you’d never do. Have fun with this. Don’t worry now about whether or not the scene is enough to carry a full story. Like all other exercises, this is practice. Tuck the scene away for another time. Who knows where you might be able to use it?

Here’s a variation of the exercise. Instead of listing mundane situations, make a list of ordinary objects you’d encounter in a typical day. Don’t think too much. List the objects as fast as they come to you. For instance: bubble wrap, instant coffee, door knob, dog biscuit, loose change, etc. Now write five actions associated with each object. For example:
1) A middle-aged man stomps on bubble wrap.
2) A mother wraps an urn with bubble wrap.
3) A child buries her dead hamster in a bubble wrap coffin.
4) A teenager wears a bubble wrap dress to the prom.
5) An interior designer makes bubble wrap ottomans

Choose one of the actions that stands out for your. Write for fifteen minutes without thinking or editing. Don’t worry about plausibility or logic. If you want, flesh it out with details, action, and dialogue. Let yourself go. Give yourself permission to have fun.

Smelling and Tasting Your Memories

Our culture is visually oriented. If it weren’t, magazines wouldn’t have large cover photos to entice the readers to pick them up, and editors wouldn’t spend so much time on layout. Many, if not most, stories rely on visual details. Readers want to see the character or landscape.

Author Rebecca McClanahan wrote in Word Painting, “ . . . ignoring the other senses in your writing is like sitting in a gourmet restaurant, wearing ear plugs, work gloves, and a surgical mask over nose and mouth.” You see the candlelight flickering in your water goblet, the waiters bowing to patrons and balancing trays on their shoulders. If you disregard your other senses, you can’t hear forks clinking against the china or a popping champagne cork. You can’t feel the bubbles tickling your nose, nor smell sautéed garlic and fresh basil. When the dessert tray comes, you’ll be able to see the glazed fruit adorning a cheesecake wedge, but you won’t feel the creamy texture inside your mouth or taste a hint of lemon."

Out of all our senses, our sense of smell has the best memory. It’s probably the most neglected in writing. Using smells in your descriptions will bring another dimension to your writing. Think of the different smells you encounter on a typical day. What smells evoke memories for you? Dove soap reminds me of my grandmother. Chantilly perfume reminds me of my mother and all the women my father dated after her. Magnolias remind me of my high school prom.

I started burning scented candles long before the aromatherapy craze. I like bringing the scent of lilacs and gardenias indoors, or filling the house with vanilla and cinnamon, when I haven’t baked in weeks. Now one can buy candles scented like chocolate cake, coffee, cookies, and even mown grass.

Smells don’t always evoke pleasant or relaxing memories. What about being in a room with two wet dogs? The Polo cologne an old boyfriend wore—the one who cheated on you? Or the container of General Tso’s chicken you left in the refrigerator two weeks ago and now has a green fuzz? Milk a week after the expiration date? A cancer patient’s room? A house filled with sixty cats, and the elderly woman found inside three days after her death? (This recently happened in my home town.)

If you notice, most of the smells I’ve described were in terms of how it makes one react. Writer Diane Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses) refers to the sense of smell as “the mute sense, the one without words.” It’s much harder to describe smells, because the connection in our brains between the smell center and the language center isn’t as strong as the connection between our visual and language centers.

Make a list of smells you’d encounter on a typical day. If it helps, go to various rooms and locations and close your eyes. Concentrate on the smells around you. What connections can you make? Freewrite whatever comes to mind.

Without smell, you can’t have taste. Seventy-five percent of taste comes from smell. When we put something in our mouths, molecules that make up specific smells and that trigger our smell receptors, travel to the olfactory receptor cells. These specialized cells are located in your nasal cavity. If it is blocked, so is your ability to smell. That’s why children pinch their noses before taking bad tasting medicine, or things seem to have no taste when we have a cold.

Like smell, taste is another “mute” sense. We usually describe it in terms of how it makes us feel. Sometimes naming the food is enough. Mashed potatoes. Apple pie. Chocolate. Spinach. These food names conjure unique memories. Atmosphere is important in describing food. Ice cream consumed in an old-fashioned ice cream parlor tastes different from ice cream consumed alone in an apartment on a Saturday night while watching “Sex and the City.”

Taste isn’t limited to only food. After being punched in the nose, a man tastes blood. A teenager tries a cigarette for the first time. A woman diagnosed with cancer smokes her last one. The wheat paste our desk mate ate in kindergarten. Crayons. Pencil tips. A kiss.

Spend a few minutes jotting down as many foods you can name. Then make a separate list of non-food words you’ve tasted. When you’ve finished your lists, look over them and see what memories they evoke. Freewrite about them as time allows.

Here’s another variation: Choose one of the items (food or non-food) from your lists. Then list five different atmospheres and situations for each. Refer to the ice cream and cigarette examples to get you started.

The next module of the free course, Creating Memorable Characters, is posted. This one discusses sympathetic and unsympathetic characters. Go to the main CS Writing Workshop page and scroll down to access the link.

In addition to Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses, I recommend reading An Alchemy of the Mind. It's a fascinating look at the brain, its functions, and memory. To see what else I've been reading, check out the Buried Treasures Bookstore.