Flight Lessons
This past year, one of confinement, has also been a year of discovery. I know I’m not the only one who’s found that staying home has offered the opportunity to engage with my immediate surroundings at a granular level.
Always an enthusiastic observer of the mundane, I was surprised by many new and intriguing observations in 2020: Squirrel parkour, the roof-shaking enthusiasm of my gaming neighbor, and the yodel of the World’s Loneliest Chihuahua, to name a few.
The most fascinating revelations have come from my honeybees. I’ve been a loyal, if not terribly attentive, backyard beekeeper for years. However this year my hive observations were uninterrupted by travel, houseguests or over-commitment to local activities. Not a day passed without a visit to the hive.
As I witnessed the bees’ extraordinary daily labor, I couldn’t help but think of parallels to writing. Here are four lessons this writer learned from the bees during this year of staying home.
Undertaker Bees
Honeybees live an average of six weeks and die in the harness. Nearly every morning this summer, I watched the worker bees—in this role called undertaker bees—ferrying the bodies of the dead that had died the night before and dropping them into the nearby strawberry patch. It was quite something to watch, this slow beautiful flight that seemed almost processional.
The writing life, like hive life, includes daily clean up. We are always rewriting, scraping away, subtracting and pruning. When I sit down in the morning to look at what I wrote the day before, I’m looking for the dead and dying in my work: flabby scenes, boring dialogue, and long-winded descriptions. I try to take out a bit of what I know doesn’t belong and chuck it in the proverbial strawberry patch.
Bee Waggle
One of the most enthralling things I witnessed at the hive this summer was the magical bee waggle—a dance performed by a forager bee to communicate the news of a desirable nectar stash. A series of spins and buzzes, the bee waggle conveys distance, flight angle, and quality of the nectar. The waggle often occurs inside the hive unseen by the human eye, so it was a delight to witness it when I opened the hive to do a maintenance check.
The bee waggle got me thinking about the importance of body language in communicating emotion between characters. If a character is angry, what is their posture? If someone is vulnerable, where does their gaze go? How does a character telegraph a moment of emotional collapse with shoulders, chest and hands? Even if these details don’t make it into a final draft, it’s helpful to imagine what the character is telegraphing with the body.
Orientation Flights
One of my favorite new habits this summer was watching the afternoon orientation flights from my hive. During these practice voyages, the younger bees completed short flights away from and back to the hive, setting their internal GPS to find their way home once they graduated to foraging work. I could set my clock by this event, which happened between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. every day.
In writing, it’s similarly useful to consider the home port for each character. What are they looking for? Maybe it is belonging and human family. Perhaps its freedom and independence. Or it could be the chance to try on many selves along the way to becoming. Identifying each character’s sense of home helps writer their stories in a way that rings true.
I’d love to hear from others: What did you observe this year in your day-to-day? How have your observations infiltrated your writing? What new habits do you hope to hang onto?
Want to chat about writing or honeybees? Contact me.