I've been blogging about how to write in a more literary or meaningful fashion. It's always a good idea to do a five-senses check when you're writing or editing significant scenes, as I've said before, but the holidays are a particularly significant time to do this. Sensory input is so intense, universal, and often important for when you may write a holiday-connected story.
Sensory input during the holidays is something everyone can relate to. Most of the year, we all live our individual lives, unconnected, or rather, connected in the usual ways. Your experience may or may not overlap that of your neighbors, your friends, or the strangers in your audience. But over the holidays, we all tend to develop strong nostalgia, it's often cyclical, and it's often connected. You may have strong memories of making gingerbread houses, looking at lights, walking (or driving) through snow, and the like. But most people have many of the same kinds of memories. In writing about your own visceral, intense, and emotional sensory experiences, you're writing something with which so many others can connect.
That's why holiday songs have power after decades and new holiday songs that hit big come back around in so many variations within a very few years. That's why holiday movies so often keep coming back. We as a modern society, not just within one culture or religion or country, have a lot of things in common this time of year. Some may argue it's just a Christian, Jewish, Western, etc thing, but if a group of people does anything for the holiday season, there's a very good chance you'll find commonalities. Candles, strong spices like cinnamon, baking, greenery, gift-giving, etc. This is the time of year you can tap into all of that universality.
But my college poetry teacher always said that the best kind of writing, particularly poetry, has a general, relatable quality to it while being unique. You can do a five senses check as you're writing about your character's baking experience with her grandmother, his walk through a snowy mountainside to find a Christmas tree, a family dinner with all the trimmings, etc. Your reader will relate to that.
But your writing doesn't become unique or all that interesting until it those general experiences become specific, unique, and intensely emotional. Say the baking experience is the last Tia will have because she knows Abuela is dying of a rare kind of cancer, and she's always been resentful of coming to visit grandma since she divorced grandpa and married a younger man. Tia's now having to get past that. Making gingerbread cookies, her Abuela's favorite and Tia's least favorite, is her way of making peace. Say Jay-15, one of the last human clones left on earth, has to tap into the original Jay's grandma's recipes in order to find a recipe so appealing that he can draw off the monster skulking the town in order to pick him off. As he desperately scrounges through the wreckage of grandma's kitchen, he remembers original Jay's last time baking with Grandma before the monster got her. The universality of the experience appeals. The uniqueness of the emotive details compels the reader to really invest in Jay's or Tia's story.
How can you tap into the sensory and emotional power of the holiday, this or any other? How can you make your piece feel universal and yet uniquely meaningful at the same time?
