Wednesday 29 November 2017

Noises off

Following the excellent day I spent with Bridget from Wild Words recently, I've been focusing on covering all the senses in what I write. Sight and sound are the easy ones; touch isn't too difficult; but smell and, especially, taste are proving to be a bit of a challenge. I was writing a piece of fiction yesterday about someone sitting in a traffic jam (trust me: it's more exciting than it sounds) and couldn't think of a way to bring taste into it without really forcing it. 'He ran his tongue over his teeth and remembered that morning's fried breakfast' is lame and just a little bit unpleasant.

Anyway, I've been aware of sound in unexpected places over the last couple of days. In my yoga classes, for instance, I have a lady who insists that the gentle purring sound we often hear during relaxation isn't her. She says she even stays awake so she can work out who it is! Trust me on this, too: it's definitely her.

If you watched Would I Lie To You? this week, you will have heard Sheila Hancock telling a story about one of her stage appearances being interrupted by an audience member's attack of hiccups. (I won't spoil it by saying if her tale was true or a lie.)

Well, on Sunday, Mr Thorley and I went to hear the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in Northampton for a concert that was brought to us by the letter B, featuring Brahms, Beethoven and Bruch. The gentleman sitting next to me, a jovial fellow who filled his seat well, was a hummer. I don't mean he was smelly, but that he kept joining in. Rather than being annoyed by this, I found it hard not to laugh out loud. Clearly, he was singing along in his head, but every now and then a bit of music escaped. It was just a little snatch of maybe three or four notes and I'm sure he didn't know he was doing it.

Bless him. He may well appear in a story one day.

6 comments:

  1. Ha ha! Well, I once had Christopher Biggins sitting behind me in Les Mis. He laughed loudly in all the wrong places!

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  2. Interesting post, Julia - even though I've given a workshop about using the five senses, I keep having to remind myself about using them! Love the sound anecdotes.

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    1. Thanks for commenting, Rosemary. If you were closer, I'd go to one of your workshops.

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  3. My characters eat a lot, so I find taste easy to work into stories. Smell doesn't feature so often.

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    1. I shall have to set more scenes in restaurants, Patsy.

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