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Prompt Week Day Three: Immersion

Added 2024-09-19 07:53:52 +0000 UTC

We speak a lot about tools that can improve the immersion of the reader—Use metaphors. Lose cliches. Create an evocative scene. We rarely speak about the immersion required of the writer, though, so we’re going to cover that today for our prompt. BlackHippyChick day will have to move to tomorrow, @Woody715

In order to write something well, you must hold a scene static in your mind long enough to get the words down. You must have absolute immersion or you have no hope of achieving immersion in your readers. This is tough in prose and even harder in poetry where abstractions and magic coexist. Still, it’s a skill no writer can succeed without. This is not an optional extra. It’s the very skeleton of the writing process.

You can’t describe a scene you haven’t visualized. You can’t define a character you don’t know, so it’s common practice for novelists to write a preceding chapter that nobody will ever read. That chapter usually includes an in-depth analysis of the book’s characters as well as the incidents that happened before the story begins. It’s a clever way to improve the writer’s immersion in their own book. Call this a root if you like. The story you tell is the tree. It’s all anyone will ever see, but it won’t stand unless you’ve sent an invisible tap root into the soil first.

You can’t have a plant if there are no roots, and you can’t create a successful piece if you start on the page. Your imagination must always come first, whether that entails exploring the emotions you’re hoping to evoke, the scene you’re hoping to describe, or the characters you’re hoping to create.

Mindfulness is one of the most effective ways to immerse yourself in your work. It helps you to put yourself in the present and stay there, and that’s precisely what you need to achieve when you write.

Today’s prompts are scenes you’ve experienced before for the sake of building your own immersion:

A cold, black night.
An uncomfortable touch.
A spring moon.
A kind of terror.
A vindictive rival.