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Have you ever found that synaesthesia has helped your writing?
For the most part, synaesthesia only ever enhances my writing. It’s a joy to have, particularly where the use of metaphor and simile are involved. I use the colours and shapes projected to create entire soundscapes in which my writing lives. A concept may come alive by association – a cloudy sky full of nimbus becomes a “gunmetal” sky, with its connotations of not only dark colouration but danger. Sentence structures can be simplified by the use of a synaesthetic metaphor, something we often use everyday without thinking about it, such as a “dark” mood, feeling “blue” or indeed, as Holly Golightly described having, “the mean reds.”
What's your favourite city?
London will always be my favourite city. From when I was twelve years old and first read a description of it in a children’s book, as a thin blue haze on the horizon, it’s entranced my senses. I look forward to every experience of walking its varied streets, full of old architecture painted over with modern faces. There’s so much grit and grime, beauty and elegance about a city that has muddled itself together over a layer of centuries, with much future still ahead of it. The people that walk its streets are as blood through the veins, conveying messages and stories of their own.
Standing in the middle of them is like listening to the whirling wind through conifers. I always come away from the Big Smoke feeling as though I’ve gained another facet of its personality, no matter how bright or how grim. It’s always a learning curve, an experience. Every sensory-perception adds a layer, which, over time, becomes familiar, such as the sharp elbow of cold air that always seems to lance up Euston road towards the station, ready to jab a traveller in the eye the moment they step out of St Pancras station.
The real inspirational point about London is that no one borough is the same as another. This makes for great juxtapositions of identity and imagery, all nestled up to one another and ready for a wandering writer to stumble upon them.
Rachael Spellman writes with the aim to colour people's minds with her perceptions. She lives in a city of ancient stones and new faces, both of which influence her style. She researches while out and about, always curious for a new situation, an old setting.