More Obliging than Ash

Here are today’s Wonderful Words:

It’s hard to think of a wood more obliging to man than ash—a tree that supplies the handles for the very axes used to cut down other trees.

A Place of My Own, Michael Pollan, page 282

Background

A Place of My Own is a book about Pollan—a writer—building himself a writing room on his property. Near the end of the book, Pollan is looking for the right wood to build his desk. He lands on ash, and he shares a lovely explanation for his decision. This sentence is the pièce de résistance of the explanation.

What makes it wonderful?

I basically knew nothing about ash before reading this section. And by basically nothing, I mean absolutely nothing.

In less than two pages, Pollan provided a pointed history of the many uses of the wood.

He described its characteristics and its qualities.

Heavier than it looks. A cream color that wears to butter with use. A familiar feel in the hand because everyone has held ash before.

Whether it was a baseball bat or a hammer, a church pew or an oar, a ladder wrung or a hockey stick, they were all made of ash. It’s used so widely and commonly that you’d be hard pressed to live your life without interacting with the beautiful boards hewn from its trunk.

Man bends wood to his will, and some wood is happy to help. At least that’s how Pollan portrays it. Ash, then, is also a cannibal. It is the handle of the ax that bites its brethren, bringing it to the ground for man to use once more.

Let's get technical

If we look at this from a traditional sense, I don’t think there’s a technique here.

But one of the terms I’ve coined over the course of this project is experience translation. The best writers are translators. Not of one language to another but of one experience to another. They can compare the experience they’re explaining—something entirely foreign—to an experience you’ve had—something friendly and familiar.

Pollan could’ve told us he built his desk from ash—a meaningless description for most of us.

But instead, he described the wood to us in a way we’d understand. He compared its color to butter and cream. He told us how it’s commonly used—how we would’ve interacted with it. And instead of imagining his desk as a dead, dried slab of wood, we could picture how it looked and felt our fingers sliding along its serene surface.

That’s experience translation. And that’s how Pollan made me care about the type of wood he used for his desk.

You’re going to write about plenty of things your readers have never experienced—possibly plenty of things they’d never even care about. It’s your job to make those foreign experiences familiar. To translate your experience to theirs, like the literary version of a tour guide.

Happy writing,

Joe