Hello. In the city where I live, corrupt businessmen have started to encroach on some leafy streets to construct commercial buildings. They have cut down trees. Take a look at this photo: I was trying to describe this cut down tree. This is what I have: The tree had stood stoically against the relentless onslaught of black smoke belching form cars. The tree had shaded the filthy street. The crows that once nested on her tired branches had already left the city. Her leaves were gaunt and sickly. She didn't scream when the bastards put the merciless saw on her trunk. The tree was cut down, her thick, intertwining roots dead. But it's not enough for me. I need to write more but don't know what else I can add. Do you have suggestions?
A few things. - Don't try to write poetry here. A more straightforward description would be better. - Avoid using the word "had" whenever possible. It isn't always avoidable, but generally if you can find a workaround, that workaround will be more interesting. Like, "Nesting crows, now homeless, have no reason to return." or something like that. - It's weird that you're calling the street filthy like that. Kinda distracting when the topic is supposed to be about the tree. Maybe make a better transition from the first to second sentence. Like, "Not long ago a tree stood there, stoic against the fumes of automobiles as they polluted the street." Something maybe to that nature. Think of narrative like peanut butter. It needs to spread smoothly over the bread, with one topic transitioning into another. Your anger is making your narrative aggressive. Readers tend to feel emotion more strongly when the author is stark with his own emotion, allowing them to decide how they want to feel for themselves. Right now, all I feel is your anger.
Little time to offer rewrite suggestions but you could add it was more than just car exhausts that assaulted it. Trucks, vans, and buses would have played their part. Dogs and drunks would have peed at its base. Squirrels and parasites bit at its bark. The elements too, dry hot summers, wind and rain... you’ve got a lot to play with. Then, as mooted above, away from the assault, there’s the sadness of its loss.
There was decades of smoke on her bough. The exhaust of all the vans and trucks and cars roaming the street below. She had withstood icy winds, sizzling summers, gusty autumns. She was tired.
Who are you writing this for? Is it a newspaper article? A letter of protest? Are you writing for an environmental magazine? Is it a piece of literature, aimed at a poetic or fiction-reading audience? Who are your intended readers? Your intended audience should determine the tone you use, I reckon. I mean you could be incredibly pragmatic as well. Mature trees soak up carbon dioxide, which is particularly important in maintaining a healthy urban environment and helping to clean polluted air. Cities should be making every effort to preserve the mature ones they already have, and city planning should encourage building AROUND them. People should be attempting to plant more trees, not cutting the existing ones down.
Honestly, these days I try to write about every phenomenon in my surroundings. But I like to imagine I can use that in a novel. I mean fiction writing. Literature? I would love it but I'm not quite there yet.
Well, I was aiming at whether or not you were trying to respond in a political sense to this particular event, or just musing, in general, on the loss of trees, or this particular tree. As you're going the literary route, then by all means, get poetic. How do you see a tree? As having anthropomorphic qualities? As being a companion to us humans? As being an alien being? It's fun to recall what a tree would have experienced, during its relatively long life. There are trees around that 'remember' the late Middle Ages, for example. Many trees that remember back a couple of centuries. If left alone, many of them will easily outlive us. So we're looking at radically shortened lives for these beings, if they get cut down for convenience's sake. If you observe a mature tree very closely, even in an urban setting, you realise that many different life forms actually live on or beneath the tree, in either a symbiotic or parasitic kind of relationship. Other use the trees for shelter or for defense (they can escape from predators by climbing or hiding in them.) Birds perch in them, build nests in them, as do some mammals. Insects hover around them, gathering nectar when the trees are in flower. Things like slugs and snails and earthworms make homes from the fallen leaves, if the leaves are left in place. Trees are aware of sunlight, and strain to reach it if it's cut off from them. They respond to temperature changes. There is some evidence that they are sentient, in ways we don't quite understand. Apparently they can 'communicate' with each other, relaying news to each other of threats, etc. A tree, unlike non-plant life forms, can't move away from where they are rooted. How do you think this inability to 'escape' might affect their psyche? It's kind of blinkered to assume they don't have a psyche, of sorts. It's been proven that plants can react to things they like or dislike ...including even individual people. There is lots to think about. Try to get away from clichés, and really allow your imagination and empathy to throw up some unique ideas. Explore the notion of 'treeness.' Then explore how treeness is impacted by such a destructive act.
As an ecologist with a special love of trees and as someone who writes on this topic directly and indirectly quite often, I can tell you I'd much rather these atrocities be inferred than explicitly stated in purple prose. I say this because I'm rather bored of poetic language discussing trees as old and withered or having sickly leaves. It's been done a million times before. I don't think your example was bad, I just think it could be more unique. You might try discussing the human mindset that can lead to such behaviour. Look up anthropocentrism and, importantly, anti-anthropocentrism. Think about how humans shoot themselves in the foot by not understanding the ecosystem services trees provide. I'd probably be inclined to take a sarcastic and cynical approach aimed at humans rather than dwelling on the leaves and roots of a once-living tree. My two pennies for you.
My advice to you would be not to add, but to subtract. Most of your adjectives strike me as either trite or unnecessary. Trees are stoic by nature; onslaughts are seldom anything but relentless. How can branches be "tired"? And so on. Take to heart the advice of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
