::mslexia workshops::

The Blank Page #12
a writing workshop with Margaret Wilkinson

THEME: COLOUR

INTRODUCTION

LIKE SMELL, colour evokes. That red party dress I once had, lined with red crinoline netting that itched. The colour, the itching and the time in my life are one in my mind. Using colour to stimulate writing is a natural. This is an opportunity to go really wild.

Even the names of certain colours are exciting: jade, malachite, verdigris, sea-water, dun French nude, burnt carmine, mummy, snuff, carnation, Persian earth, methyl orange, Schweinfurt green. What’s the difference between olive, moss, pea and sap? Just thinking about that makes me want to write something. What exactly is Manchester brown? Paris white? Naphthylamine black? (These colours come direct from my Roget’s Thesaurus. But you could make up your own colour names, then describe them.)

Imagine a dress of dead leaf brown. Who would wear such a garment? Who would sit on an iron red settee? Would the cushions be hot - or hard? Picture old blue and new blue fighting; a child with a sulphuric ribbon in her hair. What would happen in the alabaster room? The terra rosa room? What about coupling a colour with an emotion? How is blue anger different from red anger? Can you write a paragraph describing green anxiety; pearl white despair; orange sympathy; beige passion?

For more inspiration, have a look at the following poem:

'Mussels' by Selima Hill
(Bunny, Bloodaxe 2001)

What look like mussels
soaking in the sink
is a pair of soiled
electric-blue pyjamas.

Sometimes Selima uses an object she’s picked up on one of her rambles to focus her writing. The precise colour of the object is very important and becomes emblematic by being selected and placed on her desk (see Debbie Taylor’s interview with Selima Hill in Issue 6 for more about her method of working with colour).

An object is partly defined by its colour. If you change its colour you change something fundamental about it. In Hill’s poem it is the colour, not the object that’s essential. In fact, the object shifts.

For Selima Hill, colours are like a language she’s built up over the years. Individual colours have specific secret meanings. They are used like hieroglyphics. This latest collection is tinged with blue throughout.

EXERCISES

What I like about this first exercise is how it expands into a second exercise and potentially, through development of the ideas and byproducts, into a finished piece of writing.

#1
Rant or rave about a colour
Pick a colour you hate and a colour you love. For your rant, write with haste and passion, listing all the reasons you despise the hated colour and all the horrible things that are that colour. Then, in your rave, praise the colour you love and all the delightful things that are of that hue. Write quickly and with feeling.

Next, underline the single most interesting line or phrase in both your rant and your rave. Envision a tabloid newspaper photo, home snapshot or painting with this line as its title or caption. Write a description of your photo or painting as if you were looking at it right now.

#2
Add a colour to a piece of prose
This exercise has a way of expanding a piece of already written prose, adding imagery, detail and perhaps plot. Look at a short story or poem you’ve already written and decide, impressionistically, what colour the opening few paragraphs might be said to be. Now find two objects that are that colour and see if you can add them to the story. For example: I’m writing a piece about a girl who is taken to visit a chicken farm. The opening is yellow. Things that are yellow (from anywhere, not necessarily from the landscape or events of my story) might include: urine, old paper, sand running through an hourglass; acid, amber, peanut shells; a gold ring, champagne, a jaundiced face, a canary. Taking a risk, I might add the least likely two objects to my story to see what happens.

#3
Colour your senses
Pick a colour - such as pale pink - and note what it feels like to the touch, what it might taste like, smell like, sound like. Try to keep your responses concrete.
Pale pink feels like a pillow.
It tastes like pudding.
It smells like a nylon stocking.
It sounds like milk boiling gently.
You can swap these responses around for even more surprises:
Pale pink feels like pudding and smells like a pillow.

#4
Personification
Turn a colour into a character. Now answer the following questions, in first person, as if you were the colour.
Yellow, what are you holding in your hands?
Describe the expression on your face.
What clothes are you wearing?
What’s worrying you?
What sound reminds you of your past?
What’s your most treasured possession.

#5
Give a colour a voice
Invent monologues for different colours. Or dialogues. If the colour red could speak, what would it say in conversation with a butcher, a widow, a child? What would green say to a cat, an old man, a factory worker?

#6
Unlikely connections
Put two objects that are the same colour, but don’t belong together, in the same landscape. For the colour grey, for instance: ash and doves. See if you can invent and explore unlikely colour connections.

Finally: a gentle reminder. Be wary of adjectives. Writing sensually with rich imagery is not license to over-use adjectives (see The Blank Page, Issue 10).