Using physicality to help tell emotional stories

 This is a short little assignment for a course I'm teaching on how to use the actions of our hands to help portray emotion and mood in the stories we write. I based the course on this blog post: https://cbonwriting.blogspot.com/2019/07/living-and-writing-with-less-money-and.html


1. What skills do you have? Draw on these.
Are you a quilter, a chainsaw carver, a wood carver or builder, a spinner, a knitter, a crocheter? 
Whatever your jam is, whatever your hands have experience doing, meditate on that, and come up with just one emotion, event, or scene that you could illustrate by using the action of the craft.
Either tell us your idea, or write out a few paragraphs of the scene.

Thank you!

Examples:

Imagine a woman in her craft room. 

SPINNING
We have, for example, that poor princess who had to spin straw into gold in the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumpelstiltskin). While she spun, she worried and worried.

BRAIDING/KNOTTING
Imagine writing about a teenager or a young spritely senior citizen braiding or knotting friendship bracelets, and thinking about the events of the friendship as she does it. In fact, what fun it would be to have a teen and her grandma doing that together, sharing the stories as they go.

KNITTING
Or imagine a woman knitting her cat a colourful, glorious scarf to wear into her grave after a winter's death, and a headband of the same skein of wool for herself. A grieving process that nonetheless knotted the colour and joy of their life together into a memory they could share forever, that she could wear in the future to feel connected to her departed furry friend. The knitting kept my hands busy while my whole heart and soul were with my cat while we waited, reluctantly, together, for her parting.
Teenage son, also putting his hands into his grief and love, walked to the hardware store to buy a shovel before Christmas might close it, and built a beautiful pine box in just her size with his two big capable hands. We had to carry boiling water to the grave site to make the frozen ground possible to dig on New Year's Day.

QUILTING
One of my day jobs is technical editor for a mining company. This week, when an engineer asked me how I could help with some documents she and her team are drawing up, I drew upon the analogy of a quilt. I (appropriate to the audience!) gave her a bulleted list. I said:

  • Imagine that the report writing we do is like a quilt. So each report has a number of squares or pieces that we then sew together into a beautiful whole. The best way for me to help you is:

    1. If you have a square complete, I could edit that.
    2. If you want some help figuring out how the pieces should go together, I can help with that.
    3. If you have point form notes and a clear idea of how a piece should look, I could help write the words for that.

     

    Does that make sense? But don’t throw me a whole quilt-in-a-bag without a clear idea of what tasks need to be done – give me a clear objective when you send me a task.

     

    If you are having a sort of “I have a jumble of ragged pieces in a bag and I need help sorting them out” then we should probably look at that together to figure out how to start. Is that fair?

BUILDING a GREENHOUSE
I didn't mean to make these all "female" crafts and I have an even better story about building a greenhouse and my Estwing hammer and my mitre saw and my grandpa and logs and windows smashing but it was turning out too long and I really want to see some nice short input from youse all so I won't share that unless you ask!
_._,_._,_

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