The Dear in Ungulated

In the short Ungulated there is a woman who is hell bent to keep this deer from eating her vegetables. She sets up fences and barbed wire, It's almost like she creates a small scale Fort Knox. On the surface this story didn't interest me at all, it sounds almost like a simplistic version of a farmers life. In reality it could be that, but after further analysis and group discussions another idea came to me.

The story as a whole paints vivid images of vegetables in great description and has an almost artistic feel to it. This idea led me to the concept that maybe the story isn't about a physical place or time, but a painting that is being described, as someone looks at it. The issue with this however is that there are still references to real life events making that idea a stretch. It was then brought to my attention that this is a real life experience and that experience is being portrayed as artwork being destroyed by a deer. The vegetables being the artwork that is.

This idea opened up many doors of interpretation, the deer could be represented as a continues struggle, not just in eating the plants but as an emotion as well. If the story is viewed in this light then it tells an uplifting plot. Even though the deer is destroying the farmers plants, the farmer doesn't give up. She continues to fight, trying to overcome the deer. Displaying a message of never giving up, even if your most precious art work is being destroyed.

Specifics in Writing

In writing there are good writers and bad ones, really there is no in-between. The writer can either take an idea and explain it on paper with the fullest amount of clarity or the writer can misinterpret the ideas meaning on paper. Two scenarios every writer faces, there is virtually no human being that always gets an idea transferred to paper with success. Everyone in their  lifetime will at some point leave some detail out in a sentence and that sentence will then become a boring ambiguous concept that drowns in the weight of a line. It sounds pretty terrible, no one wants to see a good story go down that road and thats why Natalie Goldbergs chapter in Writing Down the Bones, Be Specific, caught my eye.

It's a chapter basically explaining to the audience that the power of specifics can take a story a long way. She states in her opening paragraph that the writer should not tell you what the object is but to show you that object through excessive detail. She explains the example of a fruit, don't just say the piece of fruit on the table. Say, the gorgeously red gala apple is resting on the brown mahogany end table. A much more in depth sentence that can paint a far greater picture in the readers head. Natalie states a good way to accomplish a more descriptive story as a writer is to research plants, animals, food and so one. The more educated a writer is, the more descriptive details they can produce.

This article hit home with me because it's an idea I have struggled with sense I can remember. I can't stress enough how often I used "it" when I wrote, for example I can't find it. I look at that phrase now and I think, man, how could anyone understand what I could be talking about. I most likely couldn't even remember. The good thing is, I understand the power of excessive detail as an evolving writer. The word "it" is now extinct in my vocabulary. I constantly use a thesaurus to seek out an abundance of ways to express thoughts onto paper. Research is a writers best friend. If expressing ideas on paper isn't hard enough, as a writer, you might as well add as many words to your arsenal so that idea can be displayed in a correct fashion and it can transform from an idea into a vibrant portrait.