Adjectives
The trees in the orchard we stopped at were mostly bare. Here and there hung a Cox’s Orange, tree-ripened to the extreme. I found one unblemished on the grass and still crisp, so I joined Godfrey in his apple-crunching.
“What’s in the classroom today?” I asked. He ate his apple beside a tree trunk. In front of us were the mountains, a range of blue that hopped and skipped along familiar outlines, blue against the lighter blue of the sky.
“Adjectives,” he said. “When I look at this apple, I think round. And I think yellow. Shape and colour. These are indisputable. I’m sticking with what is. For taste I say, dry, a tad fermented. For skin I say tough, resistant to the teeth. For blemishes I say two grey smudges, one small pitted hole.
“Now, to make a generalisation, for shape I could say golden sun-like. I could say little orbs. I’m starting to drift. I could say packs of summer sun. Now I’m getting ridiculous. Stick with the Cox, with the yellow and the two smudges of grey, the skin lightly wrinkled. This describes an old apple, one hung on the tree in winter sun too long. What else?”
“The grass?”
“Okay, start.”
So I said – “Blades, eight inches long at least. Fresh”
“How?”
“Their colour green. They’re not dry or stalky but a bright deep green and soft- textured and growing thickly and long (eight inches) and on the centre vein of each blade where the grass slightly folds in on itself, are drops of clear water – rain or dew or irrigation water pumped from the dam.”
“Yes,” said Godfrey. “Please don’t give me emerald grass unless you mean to set out that exact image, something cultured.”
“Not emerald grass of the orchard?”
“Look at it, it’s gone feral. It’s wet and rank and littered with slimy leaves and slushed rotten apples. Tree-fallen Coxes. And though we know where they came from, a reader might not. Be tempted to spell everything out.”
“Then to do that, I have to know it.”
“Yes, you have to know it, see it, hear it, taste it, touch it, smell it.” He put an apple in my hand. The apple had one side mushed off and the yellow skin had great circles of brown rot in it. “Taste it,” he said.
I put my tongue in it and the apple texture fizzed on my taste buds with the tang of bad wine and cooked barley. I pushed my finger into a brown circle and my finger went through. It was like cooked, stewed apple. I was getting to know rotten apple, all right. I held it up to my face and sniffed it – there – an edge of sharp Cox’s Orange apple smell and then the wine smell again, the smell of compost, something already on its way to feeding the soil.
“I’d have to know an awful lot about the world to start to write clearly about it,” I said.
We both had gumboots on and started walking down the row towards the houses. I threw my half-eaten apple back under a tree. Around the apple’s core it was spongy and dry. Godfrey had a good one. He even chomped the core.
“It’s not that you have to know a lot, it’s that you have to be prepared to learn,” he said.
“Okay, you’ve never been on an orchard. You can’t go and walk up a winter row like this, but you could buy an apple. You could leave it on a windowsill in winter sun. You could watch that apple, taste it when it rotted.”
“All that, for one sentence and two adjectives in a novel?”
“Why not? Have you got something against that?”
“Time.” I kicked at apples as we walked. I helped speed up their process of disintegration. Apple chunks lifted and fell.
“You need patience. You need to make the time to watch an apple rot for an adjective,” he said. “If that is what it takes. But – and this is where you learn – do everything, see, smell, touch, taste, listen – do everything with your senses turned up and your brain recorder on. I don’t want you walking round on autopilot. I know writers do, thinking about their next character, while under their feet the sand changes from firm to sogged with tide, to mud, to pebbles, to soft deep sand again.
“I’m not asking you to never plot and think again. I’m saying it’s what you are doing each moment in your own life, whatever that is, that will inform your writing, that will give the name, date, size, height of your adjectives.”
We reached the end of the row and the gravel road. I felt the stones roll under my feet. I heard the grating sound they made as they rubbed one against the other. Godfrey put his hands in his pockets and whistled a tune from Vivaldi. Across the road a dog barked. Further back on the highway I heard a truck throttle back and change gear.
In the trees beside us birds twittered. I saw a Tui, then another. They flew suddenly low and swooped up again, their wings noisy in the air. We reached my car. On the roof the red metal was warm, almost hot under my hand. My thighs were cold in my jeans, my gumboots wet. I looked across at Godfrey. He smiled at me as I unlocked the door.
“You’re even thinking precisely,” he said. “And that’s precisely what I wanted.”
©2009 Jillian Sullivan; illustrations Judith Cowley
“What’s in the classroom today?” I asked. He ate his apple beside a tree trunk. In front of us were the mountains, a range of blue that hopped and skipped along familiar outlines, blue against the lighter blue of the sky.
“Adjectives,” he said. “When I look at this apple, I think round. And I think yellow. Shape and colour. These are indisputable. I’m sticking with what is. For taste I say, dry, a tad fermented. For skin I say tough, resistant to the teeth. For blemishes I say two grey smudges, one small pitted hole.
“Now, to make a generalisation, for shape I could say golden sun-like. I could say little orbs. I’m starting to drift. I could say packs of summer sun. Now I’m getting ridiculous. Stick with the Cox, with the yellow and the two smudges of grey, the skin lightly wrinkled. This describes an old apple, one hung on the tree in winter sun too long. What else?”
“The grass?”
“Okay, start.”
So I said – “Blades, eight inches long at least. Fresh”
“How?”
“Their colour green. They’re not dry or stalky but a bright deep green and soft- textured and growing thickly and long (eight inches) and on the centre vein of each blade where the grass slightly folds in on itself, are drops of clear water – rain or dew or irrigation water pumped from the dam.”
“Yes,” said Godfrey. “Please don’t give me emerald grass unless you mean to set out that exact image, something cultured.”
“Not emerald grass of the orchard?”
“Look at it, it’s gone feral. It’s wet and rank and littered with slimy leaves and slushed rotten apples. Tree-fallen Coxes. And though we know where they came from, a reader might not. Be tempted to spell everything out.”
“Then to do that, I have to know it.”
“Yes, you have to know it, see it, hear it, taste it, touch it, smell it.” He put an apple in my hand. The apple had one side mushed off and the yellow skin had great circles of brown rot in it. “Taste it,” he said.
I put my tongue in it and the apple texture fizzed on my taste buds with the tang of bad wine and cooked barley. I pushed my finger into a brown circle and my finger went through. It was like cooked, stewed apple. I was getting to know rotten apple, all right. I held it up to my face and sniffed it – there – an edge of sharp Cox’s Orange apple smell and then the wine smell again, the smell of compost, something already on its way to feeding the soil.
“I’d have to know an awful lot about the world to start to write clearly about it,” I said.
We both had gumboots on and started walking down the row towards the houses. I threw my half-eaten apple back under a tree. Around the apple’s core it was spongy and dry. Godfrey had a good one. He even chomped the core.
“It’s not that you have to know a lot, it’s that you have to be prepared to learn,” he said.
“Okay, you’ve never been on an orchard. You can’t go and walk up a winter row like this, but you could buy an apple. You could leave it on a windowsill in winter sun. You could watch that apple, taste it when it rotted.”
“All that, for one sentence and two adjectives in a novel?”
“Why not? Have you got something against that?”
“Time.” I kicked at apples as we walked. I helped speed up their process of disintegration. Apple chunks lifted and fell.
“You need patience. You need to make the time to watch an apple rot for an adjective,” he said. “If that is what it takes. But – and this is where you learn – do everything, see, smell, touch, taste, listen – do everything with your senses turned up and your brain recorder on. I don’t want you walking round on autopilot. I know writers do, thinking about their next character, while under their feet the sand changes from firm to sogged with tide, to mud, to pebbles, to soft deep sand again.
“I’m not asking you to never plot and think again. I’m saying it’s what you are doing each moment in your own life, whatever that is, that will inform your writing, that will give the name, date, size, height of your adjectives.”
We reached the end of the row and the gravel road. I felt the stones roll under my feet. I heard the grating sound they made as they rubbed one against the other. Godfrey put his hands in his pockets and whistled a tune from Vivaldi. Across the road a dog barked. Further back on the highway I heard a truck throttle back and change gear.
In the trees beside us birds twittered. I saw a Tui, then another. They flew suddenly low and swooped up again, their wings noisy in the air. We reached my car. On the roof the red metal was warm, almost hot under my hand. My thighs were cold in my jeans, my gumboots wet. I looked across at Godfrey. He smiled at me as I unlocked the door.
“You’re even thinking precisely,” he said. “And that’s precisely what I wanted.”
©2009 Jillian Sullivan; illustrations Judith Cowley