> [!cite]- Metadata > 2025-05-13 21:42 > Status: > Tags: [[5 - Atlas/Tags/Character]] [[Fiction]] [[5 - Atlas/Tags/Voice]] [[Technique]] [[Language]] [[5 - Atlas/Tags/Animism]] [[5 - Atlas/Tags/Writing]] `Read Time: 2m 41s` ### **First Drafts: “Write the Footwork”** - In early drafts, writers are encouraged to lay everything bare-describe actions, settings, and emotions in full detail, even if it feels excessive or unrefined. This process allows the writer to discover the story’s sensory and emotional core before paring back in revision for concision and impact. - Revision is where you refine, cut, and shape the raw material, ensuring that every detail serves the story and maintains vividness without overwhelming the reader. ### **Animistic Detail: Bringing the Non-Human World to Life** - **Animism in writing** means attributing life, agency, or personality to non-human elements-trees, rivers, stones-so that the landscape feels alive and interactive, not just a backdrop. - Vivid animistic description transforms the environment into a character with its own presence and influence. For example, describing trees with “fluted muscle” or forests with “brains” underground animates the natural world and makes it a felt experience, not just a setting. - This approach draws from indigenous and animist traditions, emphasizing that the world is “full of persons, only some of whom are human,” and that fiction can re-enchant the world by restoring this sense of relationship and vitality. - David Abram’s _The Spell of the Sensuous_ is often cited for exploring how language and perception can reconnect us to the living world, making the landscape itself part of the story’s emotional fabric. ### **Emotional Conviction Over Statistics** - Stories that move readers do so through emotional conviction and sensory immediacy, not through abstract logic or statistics. Vivid, animistic description grounds the reader in lived experience, making the world tangible and emotionally resonant. - Even in genres like science fiction, a focus on animist logics and re-enchantment can challenge the dominance of rational, fact-based storytelling, offering instead a narrative that blends the rational with the magical and the material with the spiritual. - As one article notes, “good history writers use the same techniques as fiction writers,” making even factual accounts visceral and immediate by focusing on concrete, felt details rather than dry exposition. ### **Practical Techniques for Animistic, Vivid Description** - **Ground details in the present moment:** Anchor descriptions in the character’s immediate sensory experience to avoid info-dumping and keep the world alive - **Use metaphor and personification:** Describe non-human elements with active, bodily, or emotional qualities (“the river’s cold fingers,” “the mountain brooded”) - **Let setting evoke memory and emotion:** Connect the landscape to the character’s backstory or emotional state, making place and psyche interdependent. - **Prioritize felt experience:** Choose language that evokes sensation and emotion over abstract explanation or statistical fact. ### **Further Reading & Examples** - _The Spell of the Sensuous_ by David Abram (explores animism and language) - Works by Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, and Nnedi Okorafor (blend animist realism with literary fiction) - Articles on animist writing and vivid description from The Druid’s Garden and The Fifth World. **In summary:** Vivid description and animistic detail invite readers to experience the world as alive and interconnected, making stories more emotionally powerful than any recitation of facts. Writing “the footwork” in early drafts, then refining for concision and resonance, helps achieve this immersive, re-enchanted storytelling. --- ### **References** [Animism and Writing II: Embedding the Past in the Present | Tales by Steve Brady](https://bradytales.com/2020/09/20/animism-and-writing-ii-embedding-the-past-in-the-present/) [An Animist Primer for the English Language - The Druids Garden](https://thedruidsgarden.com/2023/07/16/an-animist-primer-for-the-english-language/) [The Fifth World: Animist realist](https://thefifthworld.com/about/animist-realist) [Unconventional writing techniques : r/writing](https://www.reddit.com/r/writing/comments/14uyino/unconventional_writing_techniques/) [Animism | Definition, Practices & Examples - Lesson | Study.com](https://study.com/learn/lesson/animism-beliefs-practices-thinking.html) [Animism — The Traveling Team](https://www.thetravelingteam.org/articles/animism-overview) [Introduction to Animism: Definitions and Core Practices for Nature Spirituality - The Druids Garden](https://thedruidsgarden.com/2022/07/14/introduction-to-animism-definitions-and-core-practices-for-nature-spirituality/) [(3) Meet Pulitzer Prize-Winning Stanford Professor – Richard Powers - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUDlpMN-f5w&ab_channel=DavidPerell) [[The Engines of Fiction]] [[The Three Collisions That Give Stories Their Tension]] [[Building a Character Onion]] [[Sculpting Voice with Register & Syntax]] [[Narrative Shape and the Tension Graph]] [[Dialogue as Performance]]