Early November.
Driving in New England during this season has been the best. Streets and roads, broad or narrow, all have trees on the sides leaning in. Pennsylvania has trees, but they were more blended into the background. Here, while clustered alongside the roads, each tree seem to have its own character represented in its height, color, degrees of slant, and the movements in the wind.
Driving to the company in the morning has been an autonomous yet nice-to-have event added to my daily routine in New England. Day by day, I see New England diving into its fall, what they called “the best season.” A lot of times I wish I was the shotgun rather than the driver, so that I could take a time-lapse film for the record every morning, collect 20 minutes of raw data every day, and compress them into some 30-second mini film, which will eventually contribute to a beautiful collage I make about time, traveling through space, and my new life back to being on the road.
One day something starts to be different. When I hit the gas and speed up as I merge into the highway from a local street, I see the scattered yellow leaves on my windshield dashing toward the back my car, following the trail my car carved out from rubbing against the cold air.
The leaves are taking off from my windshield.
Some of them are still stuck under the wiper blades, but I can see how hard they are trying, how bad they want me to speed up again and give them that momentum to take off.
The next morning, I see a white sedan on the road driving in front of me, with yellow leaves taking off from their windshield coming my way.
“I guess it has just started its journey then,” I mumble.
When I thought this short piece was ready to end…
And I could start to work on the most exciting part of blog writing — picking a nice image that escalates the writing. I decided to ask my friend Melody for help. She would first read my draft above, and I’d send her a few photos so that she could tell me if any photos bring out my blog post even more.
Below are four photos I sent:
After a few minute, Melody went like:
“Of course the upper left and lower right! What are the other ones even about?”
I explained: “Um I felt like speed was the main theme of this piece! I guess I didn’t make that come through.
Melody: “Well maybe I was wrong, but that was not super obvious to me. By the way, do you have a photo that’s sunny? Why is this photo so…not sunny? It just doesn’t match with what I see in your writing.”
I followed up: “You mean like this photo?”
Melody: “Yeup.”
Me: “Excuse me. I have more work to do then.”
After my quick chat with Melody, I realized that I was in trouble:
Only after my first user/reader testing? Alarming enough. How did I even fail to make it clear that I was describing…rainy scenarios?
I decided to trace back to my initial inspiration of writing the piece and see if I could find where I started to assume that the readers knew I was talking about rainy days.
- It was the fall. Leaves were red and yellow.
- I parked under trees. Leaves fell on my windshield.
- It rained. Leaves were drained and stuck on my windshield.
- I drove the car out with wet leaves stuck all over my windshield.
- I sped up on the highway and leaves started to take off.
- Since then, when I saw cars in front of me that appeared to be an aircraft carrier where leaves took over and roared toward me, I would know that this car parked under the tree for a long time and had just started its journey in the wind.
There! A six-step story.
And I forgot to mention the rain throughout.
One of the most important things that made my story the story.
I am thinking about other images that might work well with my writing now. How about this?
