Wicked Words and Spotted Dogs

Spotted Dog Sundaes
Exercise: Composting
http://www.dailywriting.net/Composting.htm
Completed February 21, 2006

I love to collect words.

Specifically I love to collect morbid, macabre, maniacal words.

I love words that bring to my mind’s eye tombs and fog and phantoms and graves and shrouds and corpses, cats, werewolves, lunatics and ghouls.

I like to say words like embalm, witch, demon, and scalpel, malevolence, mystery, zombie, wicked and wail.

I collect words that make me feel sinister, shadowy and gruesome because I write tales of the strange and supernatural and of horror and mystery.

Once I began a story for the Faraway Activity based on words from my list. Here it goes:

There is a woman who is voiceless from wailing and wasted from weeping and Death visits her from Faraway at Midnight.

“How did this happen?” you might ask me.

Voiceless, wailing, wasted and weeping made me think of an abandoned insane asylum full of abandoned souls and the story of a woman shunned by death and time came to the Land of Faraway and it festers there still.

“Why would you write something like this Anita?”

Its part of my new philosophy on writing and I like to call it “ Operation Just Because”.
I don’t know, those four little words rattled around in my head for a day or two after I listed them and by the third day I sat down and there it was.

“What is this thing you call ‘Operation Just Because ‘? It sounds like you might have an attitude problem there Anita.

Oh, that’s simple; I got tired of trying to explain why I write the things I write. I don’t know why, I don’t care why, they’re stories and they want to be told. I want to write. So it’s you basic win-win situation.

Are attitude and philosophies related? There’s one for the old dictionary. I’ll have to look that up. Before I forget:

Dictionaries are a Writer’s Best Friend.

I don’t use an on-line dictionary for this. It’s not research; it’s a game I like to play when I don’t feel like working.

I get out my well used Webster’s Dictionary and pick a word from my list. Then I list the definition I’m the least familiar with.

Here’s the fun part, I turn the definition into the first line of a story.

Here’s my word and definition- I chose it because I was a Mortician and I never would have defined this word like this:

Embalm: To fill with sweet odors.

Here’s my line:

Alissa took the small plastic bottle of light blue embalming fluid from the shelf behind her and as she unscrewed the lid the light odor of tropical fruit juice filled the air.

It’s a throw away line, but it’s true. I thought embalming fluid smelled like fruit drinks.
So keep up here, that sentence brought to my mind a mortician with her hair tied back with blue yarn and you know, I might keep her and ditch the sentence. That’s okay, because now I have a rough sketch for a character.

See how this works?

Play with words, words are your friends and if they give you a hard time and won’t work for you don’t take them out and beat the snot out of them because they won’t cooperate. Go and have some fun, blow off some steam and then see what happens.

Something good I’ll bet.

Try it and see.