Here’s my test. I have to draw stares when I’m reading on a park bench, the airport, a waiting room—laughing out loud—and not care. Bust a gut laughing, as they say.
He worried his mother would have too much pride to take his pension, but wrote to his sister, "She might as well have it. I know plenty mothers getting it who has twenty dollars to mother's one."
"You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling, dynamic labor going on inside you."
When my grandmother died a few years ago, she left behind her own mother's trunk, filled with photographs (some of them dating from the mid 1800s), stacks of old postcards, a few tragic telegrams, and a letter signed by J. Edgar Hoover about my missing great-aunt, who'd run off to California.
I’ve written before about the poignancy of regret in “I Want to Live!,” a story that manages to weave the nineteenth-century German philosopher Schopenhauer’s ideas around a bantam rooster named Mr. Barnes.
SENSE of place, because senses—at least a couple of them— are usually involved.
Metaphor, simile, details-- these are not just tools for the poet. The best journalists, essayists, novelists-- know how avoid clichés (like the plague...ha!) and use sharp details to create vivid pictures. I love coming across these beauties when I read. Here are some favorites: