Write a TechniColor Memoir: Labyrinth Write Through #9

This time, while walking the memoir labyrinth, deliberately open your mind to the colors that appear when using your senses. Spend time thinking about how color affects each of your five senses, one at a time. And then expand your thoughts into combining, for example, taste with smell or sight with touch, which will give you the opportunity to add appealing sensory layers to your writing in imaginative ways. This exercise will show you that what you need to do to make a short, true tale come alive is well within your grasp. It’s yours for the taking, if you’ll simply write down what you have visualized.

Mom, Dad, Uncle Joe, Grandmother Sophia – they are or were colorful people, true? When you think of them, you think of them in color, so now write about them in color. To make your story come alive, use your senses in the context of the color of their character and their actions.

Colors trip sensory responses in all of us, and sensory responses are tied to every hue imaginable. It’s your job to invite the colors in.

• What colors come to mind with when you see you mother’s angry face or when you dissolve into her warm smile?

• What colors come to mind when you feel your father gently pat on your cheek or when you cry out as his belt hits your bottom?

• What colors come to mind when you smell your wife’s perfume or when you get a whiff of the sneakers she just took off?

• What colors come to mind when you taste that horrible stew your grandmother made or when you gobbled up her famous strawberry shortcake?

• What colors come to mind when you hear your husband talk about the sexy, new girl at the office or when you listen to him whistle while he works on the screen door you’d asked him to fix?

Now that you’ve had some fun using your senses to add color to your personal thoughts, apply what you’ve learned when you write your bio-vignette. The people whom you’re writing about – do them justice by capturing their character in living color. Add details that describe them, the scenes, and the events vividly through colorful characterizations that put oomph and vitality into the flat facts.

In her novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison has her characters ponder color this way:

Her past had been like her present — intolerable — and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color. “Bring a little lavender in, if you got any. Pink, it you don’t.” And Sethe would oblige her with anything from fabric to her own tongue.

Do write your bio-vignette using colorful, sensory details – become a Technicolor TellTale Soul – but spend thoughtful time on the memoir labyrinth first.