Atmospheric Fear

I am trying to cultivate new interests and following on from doing both available creative writing courses with the Open University I keep trying to develop my interest in writing poetry and scripts: radio, film and stage.
The tutors and course writers on both courses didn't agree on everything, but one thing they did all agree on was the importance of the writer's notebook.  I thought I would give that idea some thought.

Notebooks are indeed wonderful things. Repositories for ideas, quotations, snatches of conversation, interesting facts, new words heard or read or otherwise discovered, character traits, metaphors, similes, other figurative devices and examples.  This list is endless.  When you think about it, how could you hope to ever be a writer of fiction or poetry without one, or many? Impossible surely. If you go about your life with a mind closed to the colours and the shapes that surround you - or pop up randomly and everywhere. If you aren't receptive to the possible ideas and themes in news articles or travel, or mindful of  interesting nuggets of information disguised inside the mundanities of everyday life. If you do not hear with interest yet another new word or an old word used differently, then perhaps the notebook isn't for you because it's unlikely that you'd want to be a writer. but for the rest of us they are vital.

I have several so at last I have done something right.  The one I'm going through at the moment (notebooks are like the diary allusion quote about always having something interesting to read)   and one is a specific file of what I consider to be interesting words, rarer words, words found in dictionaries of local dialect,words sprung from thesauruses from Roget's to Turd Words: others drawn from books, glossaries and lists of neologisms. Some of them are more appropriate to poetry I admit - but others have been useful in life writing and fiction.

Looking through this notebook today has reminded me of some of these words: Fuscous caught my eye. Dark or dusky. Definitely one for the winter's evening poem. It's accurate and evocative in its own right - but has the added advantage of being descriptive of a bird: the Fuscous Honeyeater, a dark grey bird found in Australia. Fuscous Grey could be considered as similar to Dylan Thomas' Crow black or Kingfisher blue.

There are other grey and gloomy words to consider when writing this non existent drab filled poem: tenebrous is a good start - and under its entry Merriam Webster really goes to town:  caliginous, stygian, crepuscular, fuliginous, are the most interesting to me. Caliginous and fuliginous are hardly ever seen, though both do appear in my notebook.

There's some good misty terms too: Glaucous is defined in my notebook as a pale yellow mist. Fulvous as a dull brownish yellow. These have to be worth remembering if i ever dip my uncertain toes into horror genre writing. Glaucous in particular looks as if it would reward the writer when looking for a synonym for pale yellow eyes (of a vampire? a werewolf?) Fulvous may be better in depicting the atmosphere.  I can see dangers here though - Gothic horror can sometimes seem cheesy and dated and words like that might be perfect in an Edgar Allen Poe short story, but not in modern fiction, even if writing in a particular period prior to the ubiquity of electric lights and mobile phones (how on earth do you pull off old fashioned chillers in today's period settings?). Probably still good for poetry though.  I still think interesting, shocking, surprising words inserted into poetry helps provides the kind of vitality a poem needs to set itself apart from the rest.

I can already see a few more horror words that I might want to use during a Halloween piece (we are approaching the end of October after all) that can be added to those already mentioned.  Grume: clotted liquid - think blood and gore. Fleer: to laugh lecherously (unpleasant word with unpleasant overtones) Guttering: That thing that candles do when icy stabs of wind slip through the window frames and act like ghostly breath. Again - lose the electricity - you need to be back 100 or 50 years at least. Gelid means icy cold. lie the silent pants on your neck as you watch the candle guttering. And finally scroop - a grating creaking sound.  Is there a better word to end on?