Continuing our closer look at my Four Elements practice in writing, let’s think about Earth.

Earth is about the embodiment of the material world in writing: how we bring to life sights, sounds, tastes, smells, textures or touch – the slant of sunlight in November, the song of a robin, the anticipation of eating those fat beans stewing with bayleaf and onions in the pressure cooker back home. The smell of onions that will linger in every corner of the house for a few days!* The crispy – and soggy – leaves that your boots sink into.

Material objects often lie at the heart of a story too: a magic ring, or an inherited house, or a painting in the attic, or a gun over the mantelpiece. Objects can create a focus that serves up purpose and tension, and they can ground the writing in a concrete and specific reality.

These are earthly considerations in the FORM of our writing at a MICRO level: which tangible images and sense perceptions do we select for the characters and settings and objects that populate our stories, and which words do we choose to describe them and make them feel real?

The FORM that writing takes is also a consideration at a MACRO level. I recently blogged about Ursula Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory – what is the larger shape that contains the writing? And at a more detailed level, how might, for example, your book be organised into the narrative units of chapters? Or think about other forms, conceptual or more tangible: the Russian doll format of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, or the separate strands of a braided narrative, or the exchange of letters that makes up an epistolary novel.

Earth is also associated with ACTION: some physical gesture or action set in motion when we add the energy and purpose of Fire. Think about the acts of sex and violence that feature in so many stories, or more subtly the earthly gestures of a kiss or the signing of a contract.

As a writing experiment: bring some of these aspects of Earth together by writing a letter in response to the compassionate letter from the Water exercise Yours Compassionately.

Make this letter contain a material action as well as a material object that somehow serves as a focus to ground the writing: a thank you for a tangible gift, notification of an inheritance, the finding of a body, a ladder someone’s walked under or fallen off, a wrong envelope.

Importantly, think about the exchange created between these letters: what is sent and what is received? What is given, and what is taken?

*Update from tomorrow: the smell of onions lingering on the seal of the pressure cooker, and the tang of vinegar and the drying effect of bicarbonate of soda you’re using to try to remove said smell …