Big to Small and Back Again: Smack Dab in the Imagination by Dia Calhoun

Last week at Arch Cape on the Oregon Coast, I wrote in the daze of big ocean view. Waves crashed the broken headland just to the south. The house deck had bollards in front to protect the house from logs in storms and high surf. 

I'm used to writing by water. Back home, the Nisqually river, glacier fed from Mt. Rainer, runs thirty feet below my back yard. Although it's a big river and can run fierce and high, it's also an intimate, close-in setting compared to the ocean.

The dizzying shifting of my imagination between the big picture and the small informed all of my writing at the ocean. You know how it is. You are walking on the beach, looking out at that vast blue-on-blue of sky and wave, then suddenly you zoom in on a broken white shell or an odd, rust-red rock at your feet. Then out again. I tossed that shifting into my rough writing drafts and loved the juxtaposition effects. I'd like to try this with dialogue between two characters. 

If you do, let me know what happens.