Give an account of your reading to us (why, where, how, what kind) and select one or two sentences that you think best reflect some of Janet Fitch's ideas.
Type the sentences into your comment so we can examine them carefully in next week's class. Also, if you like, please choose a really interesting (musically speaking) sentence for us to look at and imitate.
Link to Story Plots (the ones we didn't print properly last class)
Another version of the same plots with different, more easily understandable explanations.
TSA Writing Tips - THEMATIC PREMISE SHEET
TSA Writing Tips: No Nos (common plot problems)
Tennessee Screenwriting Association (home page for all above; lots to look at here)
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These days are like all days: I read a great deal, every day. Typically, I read the morning papers, both The Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail, on paper. Online, I browse The New York Times, The Guardian (UK) and, sometimes, if really interesting, I read an article. At the Times, I often read the most literate and interesting reader comments anywhere (recommended by other readers; often, a good comment will receive in excess of 1 000 recommendations). As a magazine subscriber, I read The New Yorker, Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly. I particularly enjoy the fiction and poetry published in The New Yorker. Recently, I finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s, The Crossing (also the author of The Road, recently made into a full length feature film). McCarthy’s writing is mesmerizing; I know of no other way to describe it. He’s a minimalist, not using punctuation much (other than the odd comma) and never using any quotation marks on dialogue.
To illustrate his unique style, I’ve gone back to The Crossing to find examples to show you.
Here is his description of winter trees:
Among the pale cottonwoods with their limbs like bones and their trunks sloughing off the pale or green or darker bark clustered in the outer bend of the river bed below the house stood trees so massive that in the stand across the river was a sawed stump upon which in winters past herders had pitched a four by six foot canvas supply tent for the wooden floor it gave. (71 words)
Here is a series of sentences describing the appearance of wolves:
He was very cold. He waited. He could see by his breath how the wind lay and he watched his breath appear and vanish and appear and vanish constantly before him in the cold and he waited a long time. Then he saw them coming. Loping and twisting. Dancing. Tunneling their noses in the snow. Loping and running and rising by twos in a standing dance and running on again.
I’m not a huge reader; although, I love books and like to visit the library to take them home. I want to read more often but the problem is that I read slowly. I try to read when I have spare time; which I haven’t had much of lately. If I’m on the run, I’ll usually read the local paper or the Province. I find biographies interesting and like to read about rags-to-riches stories. The last biography I read was “Scar Tissue” about Anthony Kiedis; the singer and lyricist for the band “The Red Hot Chili Peppers.” It was a very Interesting read and I found it hard to put down.
Two sentences in this book that expressed a pivotal realization for Anthony were…
I stared at the sky, and for the first time in my life, a voice went off in my head: ‘You have no power over what happens in your life.
You’ve taken your hands off the steering wheel, and you’re going wherever the drug world takes you.
First sentence is a good example of Janet Finches rule #7showing the protagonist being mentally active and realizing that he needs help with his drug addiction. Second sentence gives the reader a great analogy to explain the loss of control felt when in the grip of addiction.
I am a slow reader, and I don’t have a long-listing reading list. I don’t read full-length novels very often because of the shortage of my vocabulary. Here are a couple of novels I have read: The Great Gatsby, The Reader, Shanghai Girls, The Devil wears Prada, The Lady Raised High…… The most of the novels I have chosen to read are those that are adapted to movies—that is how I learnt their popularities.
I am recently reading a novel called To Kill a Mocking Bird written by Harper Lee. I like this book--especially the symbol of mocking bird—it really matters to the theme. The another reason I like it is because it is written in a perspective of a 6 year old girl. There are lots of interesting dialogues which match one of Janet Fitch’s writhing rules(No.8). However, it is very hard to find an example of rule No.1—the music of words. These days I have been like a crazy bug digging into my collections and Internet resources trying to find some musical sentences but I couldn’t find any. I bet this kind of writings can only be found in poetry or in Shakespeare’s works. Anyway, here is what I found from A Tree Grows In Brooklyn by Betty Smith. I found it somehow matches the reputation of musically written sentence.
The one tree in Francie's yard was neither a pine nor a hemlock. It had pointed leaves which grew along green switches which radiated from the bough and made a tree which looked like a lot of opened green umbrellas. Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenement districts.
When I read the second sentence out loud, I found this 27 word long sentence includes 3 clauses. I wonder why it is written like this. there must be a reason for that. To make a flotation of the sound? Or to draw an image one by one from specific to general? I really don’t know.
Except this dazzling sentence structure, the meaning of these words is easy to catch. These lines come from the first chapter of the novel. Before knowing anything about the plot, I can see the very descriptive setting. I see the shape, the color, the unique image of a tree which must be related to the theme, and the place where the tree grows. Besides, the author uses several literature elements such as simile, metaphor, personification, imagery, sensory language, compare and contrast. Those make the writing more impressive. Although I haven’t read this novel, I can smell something about the tree, the place, that might be very important to the plot. I am going to read this novel after my reading of To Kill A Mocking Bird.
When someone asks me, "Do you like reading?" I always hesitate before replying. I love reading in my language because I fell comfortable; I would much enjoy readying in English only if my language ability of English is equal to Chinese.
Reading English novels for me now is more like a snail slogs up on an uneven slope because of my lack of vocabulary and the usage while along the journey, there is a myriad of marvellous scenes, so I still try to pick something interesting to study. Recently, I've been reading "The Glass Castle," Jeannette Walls' biography. Before starting it, I could hardly imagine how the pair of ideal and nonconformist parents—a alcoholic gambler father with encyclopedic knowledge in mathematics, astronomy and electrics, and a self-centered artist mother with teaching degree but unwilling to work—raise four children by constant movement, from Arizona, Phoenix, California, Virginia, sleeping in the truck, bedding down on the desert under the stars, that make their kids have a tough but uniquely adventure childhood. It really draws my interest.
I found that Walls uses a great deal of dependent clauses and varied verbs and senses to detail her expressions. In the beginning of the story, she vividly describes her mom revealing her emotion of memory that as well illustrates my image of the character:
Mom's gestures were all familiar—the way she tilted her head and thrust out her lower lip when studying items of potential value that she'd hoisted out of the Dumpsters, the way her eyes widened with childish glee when she found something she liked. Her long hair was streaked with gray, tangled and matted, and her eyes had sunk deep into their sockets, but still she reminded me of the mom she'd been when I was a kid, swan-diving off cliffs and painting in the desert and reading Shakespeare aloud.
In the story, many landscapes are emotionally described too. For an example, she tells about the Battle Mountain:
Nothing about the town was grand except the big empty and, off in the distance, the stony purple Tuscarora Mountains running down to the table-flat desert.
Wall also describes an ancient Joshua tree on the side of road in San Francisco, adding her personal negative emotion and imagination:
It stood in a crease of land where the desert ended and the mountain began, forming a wind tunnel. From the time the Joshua tree was a tiny sapling, it had been so beaten down by the whipping wind that, rather than trying to grow skyward, it had grown in the direction that the wind pushed it.
I thought the Joshua tree was ugly. It looked scraggly and freakish, permanently stuck in its twisted, tortured position, and it made me think of how some adults tell you not to make weird faces because your features could freeze.
It's really an amazing story. What would be the value of Walls' parents brings to her and her siblings? I'm going on the rest of story.
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