“I’ll read you a story as soon as I finish cleaning up,” I
said. “Go pick out a book.”
Last week my five-year-old granddaughter Corrina spent the
day at our house. We did our usual things: had a tea party, made a tent out of
blankets, drew pictures with crayons. As I washed dishes from our lunch, she perused
our bookshelves. I’d just scrubbed the last pan when she came to me with a book
and asked me to read it. The book was The
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach. I’m guessing the bright
yellow flowers on the cover caught her eye.
I asked, “Wouldn’t you rather read the story about Harriet
and her ballet recital?”
“No,” she insisted. “I want to read this one.”
I never say no to reading. I dried my hands, led her
to a chair in the library, and opened the book, hoping I wouldn’t have to
censor any of the words or try to explain what was going on. The opening
paragraph said:
Muriel Donnelly, an old girl in
her seventies, was left in a hospital cubicle for forty-eight hours. She had
taken a tumble in Peckham High Street and was admitted with cuts, bruises, and
suspected concussion. Two days she lay in A&E, untended, the blood stiffening
on her clothes.
When she asked, “But where are the pictures, Grandma?” I told her
that grown-up books usually don’t have pictures in them.
Her eyes opened wide. “They don’t?”
“No.” I gestured toward the shelves. “None of these
books have pictures.”
Corrina was speechless, until I explained. “The people who
wrote these books created pictures with their words. When you read them, you
see the pictures in your mind—in your imagination.”
My first writing instructor advised his students to create “word
pictures.” That’s an amazing skill when you think about it. By combining words
into sentences and sentences into paragraphs, a writer can take her reader far away—from
suburbia to Saturn; from the city to the Citadel; from last week’s headlines to
the lost Ark of the Covenant—and create vivid images in the reader’s
imagination. That’s quite a super-power!
I enjoyed going to India with the guests of the Marigold
Hotel. I also recently visited the Blue Ridge Mountains with Cassandra King,
and explored Paris (both past and present) with Juliet Blackwell. The pictures
I saw in my imagination were more vivid than any a photographer could create.
Have a writer’s words transported you anywhere memorable recently?
