Think of writing as a series of photographs getting closer and closer to the defining detail. First there’s a town and then a certain street and a particular house…that has a door…with a knocker…made in a specific design out of a certain kind of metal…

We’re on vacation in San Miguel de Allende and every morning at seven we go out with a camera (Brooke) and a notebook (Barbara). I’m frustrated that I can’t capture the colors in words, it’s too hard. Brooke talks about light and angle and clicks away at the doors and those knockers and I’m thinking in my next life I’m going to be a photographer or a painter. And now back home, I look at my notebook and feel even more frustrated. My colors don’t glow like the doors above, they remain clunky words on the page: burnt orange, pink-raspberry, ochre. I want to find the defining detail the same way Brooke’s photographs do. And then I want to tell you how to do it. But all I can manage is the exercise below with hopes to write my way out of camera envy. I’m going to write 300 words about the jardin, the central square in San Miguel and having coffee there.

I’m going to write about the woman who sat next to us in the café and studied Spanish verbs every morning, the man who hired a cherry picker to be driven around town, 25 feet up in the air, so he could take photographs, the cop who used a pay phone. The sound of sweeping. Bells tolling at odd times. The smell of chilis. And I’ll remember all over again that no matter how much I want to write and love to write, a huge part of it is work, slow and hard.

To Do: Look again at last week’s exercise on writing about place. Choose one part of the place you wrote about and see how many layers deep you can go with it. You could use the above example: the street, the house, the door, door knob and buzzer, bell or knocker. Front stoop, keys, mail box or slot, etc. Write three hundred words of description about your own street and front door. Or maybe it’s one city block, a garden or coffee shop. This isn’t about the three hundred words, it’s about using all your senses in order to write them. It’s about working to find the defining detail.

Technorati tags: personal essays, Writing Exercise, Travel, San Miguel de Allende