Writing Exercise #4: The Old Age of Nostalgia

Mark Strand, The Old Age of Nostalgia

Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined future , of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was charged with a purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, and one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by the high, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, so many and so long ago, still come back, briefly, like fireflies of a summer night.

Exercise: Give your character the memory of an old love to yearn for.

First, take a couple of minutes and type out this Mark Strand prose poem so your mind absorbs the rhythm of his sentences. Next, put this longing for the excitement of new love into the memory bank of one of your characters and weave at least three beautiful, specific details from nature (as Strand did in the words in bold) into this memory.

Your character can be the mother or father of a teenager, remembering the passion s/he felt for a baby when the baby was first born; the character can be middle aged, remembering the passion s/he felt for the person s/he lost his/her virginity to; the character can be on his death bed (as Busk was in Scott Cheshire’s short story, "Busk’s Cutting Board)", remembering how he felt when he first saw his future wife bowl for the first time. Implanting a yearning for ancient love and the memory of a forgotten passion into your characters’ “minds” will help make your made-up characters seem utterly human.