Remember when you were younger, and loved lying on your back and looking up at the clouds?  A few puffs would call forth from you the missing lines and contours to complete what the puffs caused you to think of.  It may have been the three rounded lumps that made you think of a stack of logs. Or a wisp that reminded you of the swirling fringe of a scarf as someone hurried around a corner.

The clouds are what you would report, the facts you could observe. The logs and the scarf are what they evoked. But here’s where the magic comes in. For a writer, the roundness and the wispiness are what must be explored, must be given fresh words that transcend log-ness or hurry-ness.

This is especially difficult when the subject matter is very familiar to the reader. The writer’s goal is the kind of surprise/delight that will give the reader new eyes on the subject.

Can I do this?  I’m trying!  In my WIP, A Conspiracy of Breath, I have my first-century protagonist describe her first look at the apostle Paul – including reporting, going beyond evoking, and reaching for those to the elements of his appearance that convey what I want the reader to see of Paul-ness:

I cannot best describe Paul’s physical appearance other than to say he looked like a man who had been repeatedly injured. It wasn’t scars (although there were those, I saw them later on his forehead in the sunlight) but it was the inclination of his throat, the reluctance of one leg in the process of walking, the nearly-unnoticeable favoring of an arm that required that he coax it upward with shoulder muscles and neck. Nor was his face remarkable except in its – how shall I say it? – lack of classical proportions. Whatever mean there was to his face, it was not golden.

I found myself trying to compare him to any other visage I had ever known before I realized the striking similarity to a statue I once saw of Socrates. His eyes were much too prominent. I would even say they were uncomfortable, though he showed no awareness of it. And there was an unsettling lack of symmetry in his chin and mouth.

If such a man were like Socrates, I thought, surely he would be given a compensating grace.

And he was. From the moment he bent over the Torah scroll he became translucent – not to his surroundings, but to his words. He had one lesson and that alone. It was not the theatre of remorse, but what I can only remember, and describe, as the paroxysm of resurrection. What mild and vague hopes I had from the Old Covenant scroll and the words of Chrestos on the New Covenant scrolls, they blanched in comparison to Paul’s story.

He told of his ambush on a road by an offended Yeshua so kinetic, so dominant of time and space, that the ontology of revivified flesh subsumed every other issue that a human mind could contemplate.

But his own experience he soon dismissed. It happened on a road, but… Here and here, he said, quoting from the Torah, peering into its folds as if seeing passage after passage fugitive from his relentless address. He reached in and dragged out verse after verse as if they were organs from a still-living creature; heart, lungs, kidneys, viscera that would only function to their destiny when placed into that resurrected One who, indeed, came to life yet again before our eyes:

As the shadow of the Torah, the manna hidden in the corner of a kerchief,

The inexhaustible light of the menorah;

Ram, lamb,

Perfected corner stone. . .

About Ariel Lawhon

Ariel Lawhon is the co-founder of She Reads, novelist, blogger, and life-long reader. She lives in Texas with her husband and four young sons (aka The Wild Rumpus). Ariel believes that Story is the shortest distance to the human heart.

• 
• 
• 
• 
•