A spark of beauty in the ordinary
I read a blog everyday which tells me what’s going on in my home town. It’s an interesting blog for those of us who live here detailing new restaurants which are going in, old ones which are closing, and the problems with new public transit proposals. Ordinary things which happen in American suburbia. Today, however, I learned about something wonderfully surprising. Beauty where I never would have expected it and wouldn’t have thought to look for it:
In the email notifications from the county waste management services—yup, trash pick-up. Apparently, unbeknownst to those of us who don’t get these notifications (although I could sign up to receive them, and now I just might have to), the woman who writes them has put a little surprise at the bottom of each one: a poem.
This week when we had snow on Monday, closing the county government and therefore pushing trash pick-up forward a day, she added in the Thomas Hardy’s poem “Snow in the Suburbs”. Very appropriate. Very pretty. Not at all what you would expect in a notification that your garbage is going to be picked up a day later than normal.
But what this woman does really spoke to me. She takes an ordinary, boring thing and makes it beautiful. And apparently, she’s been doing this for long enough that when she doesn’t put a poem at the end of her notifications, people complain!
As I sit here contemplating the novel which I’ve just finished writing, and I’m thinking about editing it (the most mundane part of the writing process for me), this woman has inspired me to look for the beauty in my job. How can I take something boring (trash pick-up, editing) and make it interesting? Surprising? Beautiful?
Can I do the same thing with my novel? Is there a spark I can put in where my reader would least expect it? Is there a surprise I can slip into the folds of my plot and subplots? A poem? A brief romantic moment amidst my heroes battling for their lives?
I don’t know yet what the answer to these questions are, but I’m working on them.
As I step back from the trees of my work—looking for passive voice, action tags instead of dialogue tags, getting rid of those dreaded adverbs—to analyze the forest of my novel to ensure that I have all of the elements necessary and enough of them in the right places, I will also look for places where I can slip in a little extra beauty. I will try to find a place for that unexpected beauty, that bit of fun amidst the ordinary.
Do you have these sparks? This moments of beauty in your work? A surprise where your reader isn’t expecting something? Did they happen naturally, or did you have to step back and work to find a place to slip them in?
