How my Cafeteria turned out to be an unlikely Writing Class

PaperTrue
PaperTrue
Nov 6 · 4 min read

“Sara sat in the coffee shop and sipped her drink.” Eh. I’ll end with this. I didn’t think that you could make sipping coffee any more detailed than this. I shrugged and showed my writeup to my writing professor.

“So Sara just sipped coffee? That’s it?”

I looked at her with the embarrassment of a novice, a really bad one at that.

She didn’t say anything except for a “Hmm” and waited for all of us to complete our writeups. Then she coughed and cleared her throat and told us to go to the cafeteria. “Try to really listen listen. Observe your surroundings. Pay attention to each and every sound, sight, anything that you eat and write it down. Take as long as you like, but come back in 20 minutes.”

I was excited. This was my first formal writing class and I was eager to impress my professor.

I closed my eyes and tried to listen to the sounds. Slippers clapping against the floor, someone whispered an inaudible question and snickered softly. Slurping of smoothies, gross. I strained my ears and tried to make out conversations. Tones. Pitches. All of these I wrote. Then I really looked at my peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich and chewed the creamy peanut butter mixed with tart, sweet jam sandwiched between two crumbly layers of wholewheat bread with more concentration than anything I had ever eaten before. The trees seemed greener, the clouds were wispier and filtered the sky, strands of golden and brown hair framed freckled faces and I felt I could see irises from a mile away.

Describing a trip to the cafeteria did not seem so mundane anymore. It became an exciting challenge, an opportunity to milk my environment and transform a simple, seemingly monotonous act of description into a vast space of endless possibilities. Whatever I wrote from then on became replete with the smallest details. It felt as if I was using every spare inch of my brain, and that was exactly the case as I found out much later.

This writing exercise helped me in the rest of my class and in other writing exercises and workshops that I was a part of. I found that I was better able to empathize with the world around me. I learnt to observe, to think about why something was really happening.

The sentence that I was stuck on earlier, the ending about Sara, could be written in so many different ways. The strongest and first sense that coffee assails is our sense of smell. “Sara deeply inhaled the strong aroma of her coffee, peppered with spicy cinnamon and faint, sweet vanilla.” I remembered my fascination with how smell can be evoked on paper and I was taken back to my favourite description of the filthy city of 18th century Paris in Patrick Suskind’s “Perfume” on the first page itself.

“Sara pushed aside strands of sticky brown hair as she carefully sipped her scalding latte”. Sara is sitting in front of me and I am an invisible presence, conjuring her out of thin air but still being able to see her. Or “Sara pushed away stray strands of hair from her forehead, tucking them behind her ear. The hot coffee, with the aftertaste of cinnamon and slowly dissolving grains of sugar, slightly singed the tip of her tongue, leaving a faint buzzing sensation. Her palms warmed after holding the snug cup as she sipped her coffee for the remainder of her time.”

Subconsciously, I touch my own tongue with my fingers, pleasantly surprised that it is perfectly alright.

I slowly began to understand why I liked certain books more intensely than others. When I read “Perfume”, I was forced to imagine the smells of things that no longer existed and was better able to imagine 18th century Paris. Details of touch, taste, sight hid in my favourite works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Shakespeare, Jhumpa Lahiri and Salman Rushdie. I found out that the description of rain in a particular book told me so much about the mood of a person than the person itself. Sunshine and peaches meant happiness, raindrops dripping off tiled roofs meant solitude and headlights in the snow meant loneliness.

My senses did not flare up when provoked, instead, they were constantly engaged in comprehending the happenings around me. I was able to write with depth and personal, observational insight instead of an outsider. I dissolved into my characters and the atmosphere instead of replicating them objectively. When I lived my own work, people who read my work lived vicariously through it. When I sit down to write now, I am reminded of a quote by Anaïs Nin: “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

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