Amor Towles Part II - Using Towles as a Model

Back in June I did close readings of passages from Amor Towles' Lincoln Highway. This month is the challenge of using Towles' prose as a mentor passage, and modeling my own writing from it. 

First, here is Towles' passage:

... the drawers were cluttered with all sorts of things that had no business being there, like an old alarm clock, a half deck of cards, and a scattering of nickels and dimes.

After scraping up the loose change (waste not, want not) I opened the bottom drawer with my fingers crossed, knowing it to be a classic stowing spot. But there was no room for a bottle in there, because the drawer was filled to the brim with mail.

It didn't take more than a glance to know what this mess was all about: unpaid bills. Bills from the power company and the phone company, and whoever else had been foolish enough to extend Mr. Watson credit. At the very bottom would be the original notices, then the reminders, while here at the top, the cancellations and threats of legal action. Some of those envelopes hadn't even been opened.

I couldn't help but smile. 

There was something sort of sweet in how Mr. Watson kept this assortment in the bottom drawer -- not a foot away from the trash can. It had taken just as much effect to stuff the bills inside his desk as it would have to consign them to oblivion. Maybe he just couldn't bring himself to admit he was never going to pay them.

... Outside, I heard the wheels of Mr. Ransom's pickup turning into the Watson's drive. The headlights briefly swept the room from the right to the left as the truck passed the house and headed toward the barn. I closed the bottom drawer of the desk so the whole pile of notices could remain safe and sound until the final accounting.

My goal is to replace noun for noun, verb for verb, etcetera, to stay parallel to the original passage but not identical; I'm not recreating Towles' scene, but using his sentence structure for my own ends. So, "The drawers were cluttered with..." becomes "The quiet was broken by..." and visual images, "old alarm clock, half deck of cards..." are replaced with auditory ones, "distant dogs barking, white noise of jet planes..." In a few places, I just couldn't make my syntax match Towles', and I had to take liberties, for example, replacing a couple of idioms, "waste not, want not," and "I couldn't help but smile." Nevertheless, I hewed pretty close to the original.

In my passage, as in Towles', one character learns about another by looking through personal possessions: in this case, the characters are from my novel in progress, The Book of Suggestive Coincidence. In this scene, Destiny Dollar, sneaks into the room of a renter, Justin Case, to steal a peek at the mysterious notebook her never lets out of his sight. After handwriting a draft, I did some revision for coherence and style, so making my version diverge even further from the original, especially the third paragraph. 

... the quiet was broken by all the sounds you mostly never notice, such as distant dogs barking, the white noise of jet planes, and the passing of cars and trucks.

After  pushing shut the open door (and three Mississippis) she crossed the bedroom floor hopscotch fashion, stepping over where she knew there were squeaky boards. But there was no need to hunt for the notebook, because it had dropped wide open from his hand to the floor.

It took hardly two pages to realize the notebook was full up with Crazy. Diagrams and timelines and notes about random people and freak accidents and missing doo-dads and family curses and whatever else was loopy enough to enter his noggin. At the bottom of the page, she saw his fevered calculations, his arrows and his underlines, and heading it, the cryptic summaries, the scribbled exclamations. Most of the contents couldn't be deciphered.

She could hardly hear herself breathe for her heart beating.

There was something more than a little scary about how Mr. Case never let these jottings out of his sight - never more than an inch out of reach. He'd put as much work scrawling this jumble of nonsense as if he'd compiled a volume on accounting. It must be that he just couldn't stop himself from writing stuff no one else could understand.

From the street, she heard the squeaking of brakes rounding the corner. Yellow flashed under the window shade, as the school bus went by the house to the end of the street. She lay the open notebook on the floor below the bed so the writings of Mr. Case would be there and waiting when he woke up.

No masterpiece, but I do like the way I described how loud trivial noises can seem when you sneak into a sleeping man's room; it's good to be reminded that descriptions don't do much unless they show how characters perceive things. I also like the informal colloquial feel of moving "hopscotch fashion."

Also, whether any of this makes it into my manuscript or not, I'm definitely going to need a scene where Destiny gets a look at Mr. Case's mysterious notebook, so this was a good warm-up. All in all a profitable exercise.

If you want to join in the fun, I'd love to see your attempts to emulate the above passage posted in the comments section.

Until next month, then, so long.

Amor Towles, Part I, Studying Amor Towles

In three novels, Amor Towles has established himself as a storyteller of remarkable skill and breadth. His most recent work, The Lincoln Highway, is a big-hearted cross-country trip full of comedy, adventure, and sometimes wisdom. The the pacing is so strong, you find yourself hating to see it over in the last few pages. 

Lincoln Highway employs a shifting point of view, perhaps the most dangerous thing a novelist can attempt, dangerous because to the novice it looks so temptingly easy. "If I run out of steam on one character," you tell yourself, "I'll just switch to another." Many and many a would-be Faulkner, however, has run aground, unable to keep the character's voices in balance while moving the narrative forward. More often than not, a garrulous loud-mouth of a secondary character, stages a mutiny and capsizes the whole thing before it leaves the dock. 

We're going to look at how Towles uses first-person and close third-person points of view to characterize Duchess and Woolly. The art to characterization, as all other aspects of the writing craft, is leave the reader something to do. The reader must be able to infer more about the character than is revealed on the page, and in the case of first-person narration, more than the character knows about himself.

Duchess is a charming snake -- likeable and charismatic as he is dangerous and unpredictable -- with a sense of retributive justice almost admirable in its impartiality. What makes entering the consciousness of a character like this so tricky is the risk of sacrificing all the charm and leaving nothing but the snakiness, or vice-versa. And yet Duchess is perhaps the richest and best developed character in the novel. You love him, you just wouldn't want to know him.

In this passage, having escaped a youth detention center, he searches someone's house hoping to find a bottle of booze.

... the drawers were cluttered with all sorts of things that had no business being there, like an old alarm clock, a half deck of cards, and a scattering of nickels and dimes.

After scraping up the loose change (waste not, want not) I opened the bottom drawer with my fingers crossed, knowing it to be a classic stowing spot. But there was no room for a bottle in there, because the drawer was filled to the brim with mail.

It didn't take more than a glance to know what this mess was all about: unpaid bills. Bills from the power company and the phone company, and whoever else had been foolish enough to extend Mr. Watson credit. At the very bottom would be the original notices, then the reminders, while here at the top, the cancellations and threats of legal action. Some of those envelopes hadn't even been opened.

Amor Towles

I couldn't help but smile. 

There was something sort of sweet in how Mr. Watson kept this assortment in the bottom drawer -- not a foot away from the trash can. It had taken just as much effect to stuff the bills inside his desk as it would have to consign them to oblivion. Maybe he just couldn't bring himself to admit he was never going to pay them.

... Outside, I heard the wheels of Mr. Ransom's pickup turning into the Watson's drive. The headlights briefly swept the room from the right to the left as the truck passed the house and headed toward the barn. I closed the bottom drawer of the desk so the whole pile of notices could remain safe and sound until the final accounting.

Duchess' petty theft, "scraping up the loose change," is followed by unexpected lyricism as he reconstructs the story of a man's downfall by different strata of unpaid bills in the bottom drawer, the phrases themselves clumped like stacks of letters: "the original notices, then the reminders, while here at the top, the cancellations and threats of legal action." The last sentence expresses a kind of muted wonderment, "Some of the bills hadn't even been opened." And then, as if after a pause for thought, his reaction summed up in a five-word paragraph, "I couldn't help but smile."

For a nickel-and-dime thief he has quite a way with words. (His father, we later learn, was a failed Shakespearean actor.) Duchess is a cynic and an opportunist, but not just a cynic and opportunist. At the end of the passage, he closes the drawer, not -- he tells himself and the reader -- to avoid being caught rifling Mr. Watson's possessions -- but so that the unpaid bills could remain "safe and sound until the final accounting." The reader sees through the rationalization -- no first-person narrator is ever 100% reliable -- but it isn't just rationalization. The two contradictory elements of Duchess' character, his opportunism and romanticism, are captured in that one phrase. We see that Duchess is putting on an act to cover up the shabbiness of his behavior, but he does it with such flair and charm, and seeming sincerity, we can't help but be beguiled.

Duchess' companion, Woolly, as the name implies, is wooly-brained, something of a man-child. A foil for shrewd, smooth-talking Duchess, Woolly is disingenuous and naïve to the point of simplemindedness. 

Though generous in terms of length, Towles' novels are impressively efficient. Rarely is there a wasted motion. This passage, in which Woolly admires a Howard Johnson placemat with a street map of local attractions, simultaneously reinforces a sense of time and place with an artifact of bygone Americana, introduces a minor plot twist which unfolds in the following pages, and in a two sentences puts us fully into the character's head. 

Towles' notebooks while writing Lincoln Highway.
One with original title, Unfinished Business

It was just the way the pirates used to draw their treasure maps. They shrunk down the ocean and the islands until they were very small and simple, but then they added back a big ship off the coast, and a big palm tree on the beach, and a big rock formation on a hill that was in the shape of a skull and was exactly fifteen paces from the X that marked the spot.

Towles presents Woolly in third-person, rendering private thoughts with Free Indirect Discourse; that is, instead of a filter such as, "To Woolly the placemat seemed..." or "The placemat reminded Woolly of..." Woolly's impressions are presented directly, in Woolly's limited childlike vocabulary, "big ship... big palm tree... big rock formation." 

Both Woolly and Duchess have a romantic streak, but while from a drawerful of bills, Duchess visualizes the sad and lonely reality of a farmer's personal downfall, Woolly sees in a placemat a call to adventure. And while the images Duchess paints are always at least half self-serving, everything from Woolly is whole-hearted and sincere.

The paragraph has only two sentences, but as sure a sense of rhythm as in Duchess' passage. As if it were a treasure-map itself, the second sentence leads us past a series of landmarks unmistakable to anyone who's ever played pirate -- starting from the "big ship off the coast" we come to the beach indicated by a lone palm tree, then the rock formation "in the shape of a skull" and then the "fifteen paces" -- suspense building in us in spite of ourselves -- until in a series of one-syllable words, packed tightly together, winds up the sentence with lip-smacking emphasis: "the X that marked the spot."

Woolly and Duchess are designedly as different as can be, but in these passages Towles uses the same tools to depict each of them. First, a poet's intuitive grasp of word choice, structure, and rhythm. Then, a careful attention to the ordering of details -- the layers of bills in the desk drawer, the order of landmarks on the pirate map. And lastly, the character's perceptions of the world around him, perceptions which tell us more about himself than he realizes. We stand apart from the character and see him as he is unable to see himself, but at the same time are within the character, feeling what he feels, and are charmed into empathy.

Which is a lovely thing when it happens. 

Next month, using one of Towles' passages as a model, I'll try drafting an original scene.  Stay tuned. 

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Elizabeth Strout, Part II, Using Strout as a Model

This month's passage proved especially challenging to emulate, and not just because of the sophistication of Strout's prose. Like Jack in Olive, Again, Roy in my novel in progress, The Book of Suggestive Coincidence, suffers from self-recrimination. (Does a novel exist without such a character?) If I wrote about Roy, however, the gravitational pull of the original passage would be too great to overcome. What I don't want, is to re-do Elizabeth Strout. What I do want, is to get down into the writing and try to learn how it works and how it was done. 

Fortunately, I already have a passage which, like Strout's, uses a lot of repetition, a natural technique for interior monologues because our ruminations - or mine, at any rate - endlessly chew the same cud. 

Throughout, I try to replace verb for verb, noun for noun, etcetera, making my scene as different as possible from the original. So for "Jack sat on the bench for a long time," I wrote, "Justin turned on the radio for some distracting music." 

First, here's Strout's passage: 

... And that was that! That was that.

Jack sat on the bench a long time. People walked by, or perhaps no people walked by for a while, but he kept thinking of his wife Betsy, and he wanted to howl. He understood only this: that he deserved all of it. He deserved the fact that right now he wore a pad in his underwear because of prostrate surgery, he deserved it; he deserved his daughter not wanting to speak to him because for years he had not wanted to speak to her -- she was gay; she was a gay woman, and that still made a small wave of uneasiness move through him. Betsy, though, did not deserve to be dead. He deserved to be dead, but Betsy did not deserve that status. And yet he felt a sudden fury at his wife -- "Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty," he muttered.

In my version, Justin Case reflects unfavorably on his previous therapist, "Dr. Brad." 

Annemarie wanted him better. They all wanted him better.

Justin turned on the radio for some distracting noise, something to listen to, or perhaps not to listen to for awhile, and he tried lowering the emergency brake, but it refused to lower. He had just one insight: that he saw right through Dr. Brad. He saw right through the Native American chic of the Navajo blankets on his office wall, he saw right through it; he saw right through Dr. Brad's always trying to offer sympathy because after the accident, Justin had not wanted sympathy from anyone. Dr. Brad was a phony, he was a phony quack, which predictably made a big impression of sincerity on Annemarie. Annemarie did not see through Dr. Brad. Justin saw right through Dr. Brad, but Annemarie did not see through his act. And then he had a fluttery suspicion of Annemarie and Dr. Brad. "Oh, screw 'em both," he said. 

I wrote the above without consulting the original passage in my manuscript, which follows.

Justin didn’t like Dr. Brad. He didn’t like his smooth hands or soothing voice. He didn’t like the way he said Justin’s name every sentence. He didn’t like how he told his patients to call him Dr. Brad. He didn’t like the faux Native American/Santa Fe decor with the hokey dream-catchers and the Navajo-Rug wall-hangings and the ugly silver and turquoise Kokopelli figures, like Dr. Brad wanted you to think he was some kind of shaman. He didn’t like the box of kleenex he kept ready in case someone cried.

When I compare them, I see how sing-song the original is. We almost expect Justin to say, "I do not like him, Sam I Am." This makes us take Justin less seriously, which oddly, suits me fine because my tone is more satiric than Strout's.

I think I'll stick with "saw through" instead of "didn't like." "Hate" is too strong, and to say Annemarie did like Dr. Brad is too limp. The contrast between Annemarie's and Justin's attitude, which I discovered from emulating Strout, does a lot to characterize all three characters. Justin's "fluttery suspicion," leads to the expletive, "Oh, screw 'em both," which like, "Oh, Jesus Christ," may have a double meaning.

Why not try your own hand emulating Strout's passage, and paste it in the comments?

Until next month.

Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer

 

Just finished - long overdue! - Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer. Whenever I read a prescriptive craft book, such as Save the Cat, my first reaction is, "Yes! That's right! This is so helpful!" but then a gloom quickly settles and I feel confined. I want to create Guernica, and I'm handed a paint-by-the-numbers set. Which is why I much prefer books of this sort.

Prose does offer concrete advice, but then immediately searches for authors that successfully violate it. It reminds me a little of Pete Hein's little rhyme, "Take no advice at any price, that's what I call good advice." And yet the book is wonderfully liberating, inspiring, and encouraging.

Perhaps her signature advice is observe. Observe everything - gestures, details, conversations. And not least, be an observer of what you read. Study it, learn from it.

I wish I were as well and broadly read as Prose. She has read so much I haven't, and everything I have read, she's read multiple times.

Highly recommended.

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

 

Just finished Patricia Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction.

Highsmith, if you're unfamiliar with her, wrote what are popularly termed "thrillers;" her most famous works are Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Really, though, what she produces are psychological portraits, particularly portraits of profoundly disordered minds, or ordinary minds that become disordered. 

Her novels are free of gore but are profoundly disturbing because they present a dark and amoral world and the capacity for evil in all of us. Her tone is a sense of creeping and well-justified paranoia. Graham Green called her "the poet of apprehension."

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction is not a craft book per se, and if you're looking for tips and techniques, you should probably look elsewhere. But Highsmith's candid, matter-of-fact exploration of the writing life is bracing and encouraging. She doesn't put on airs about herself - her most frequent adjective to describe her novels is "amusing" and yet she is clearly dead serious about her commitment to quality writing. The book is a fast read and includes a "case study" of The Glass Cell, a novel I recently reread and particularly recommend.

Elizabeth Strout, Part I, Studying Olive, Again

Nancy Zafris

I want to begin this post by acknowledging my dear friend and mentor, Nancy Zafris, whose death in August of last year left a hole in the heart of everyone whose life she touched -- and there were many.

At the Kenyon Writers Workshop Nancy taught us a concept she called, "plant, return, deepen." The idea is that beginning writers, and even experienced ones in early drafts, tend to dump all the exposition and backstory on the reader in one fell swoop, leaving the narrator -- and worse yet, the reader -- with nothing to do. Instead, the art is to plant a clue, a hint -- an image that will serve as a touchstone -- then return to it later, with a little addition - and then yet again to deepen its meaning. Novels such as To The Lighthouse and The Sound and the Fury not only use this technique, but are veritable embodiments of it.

Another thing Nancy shared with us was a grudge against the way some writers attempt to use scenery as a replacement for emotion. As fiction editor for the Kenyon Review, she was annoyed by endings where the protagonist looks out over a line of trees, or breaking waves, or whatever, as if that would fill in for an epiphany that the writer was too lazy or unskilled to provide.

When I think of writers who exemplify what Nancy taught us, Elizabeth Strout tops the list. Strout's most recent book is the New York Times Bestseller, Oh, William! but in this post, I'm looking at a passage from an earlier novel, Olive, Again, to explore how it employs setting in an epiphany as well as demonstrates the concept of "plant, return, deepen."

The chapters in Olive, Again function much like short stories. In the first chapter, "Arrested," Jack Kennison visits the Maine seaside:

Elizabeth Strout

Summer had opened itself, and while it was still chilly in mid-June, the sky was blue and the gulls were flying above the docks. There were people on the sidewalks, many were young people with kids or strollers, and they all seemed to be talking to one another. This fact impressed him. How easily they took this for granted, to be with one another, to be talking! No one seemed even to glance at him, and he realized what he had known before, only now it came to him differently: He was just an old man with a sloppy belly and not anyone worth noticing...

From the lyrical "Summer had opened itself," the description moves spatially from the blue sky with its seagulls down to the docks and sidewalks, and finally to the young people with their "kids or strollers" who "all seemed to be talking to one another." Here, Strout inserts Jack's surprising response: "This fact impressed him." She dwells just long enough on the physical setting to lead us naturally into Jack's consciousness. 

Had she started with the young people and their children talking naturally to one another instead of the sky and weather, the effect would have been more abrupt, instead of stealing up on us by degrees as it does, and indeed as it does on Jack himself. 

The first passage plants images and motifs -- "kids or strollers," "talking to one another," the "sloppy belly" and Jack's awareness that no one "even glances" at him and that he is not "worth noticing" -- which Strout returns to in the following passages:

A couple emerged from the door on one apartment; they were his age, the man also had a stomach, though not as big as Jack's, and the woman looked worried, but the way they were together made him think they had been married for years. "It's over now," he heard the woman say, and the man said something, and the woman said, "No, it's over." They walked past him (not noticing him) and when he turned to glance at them a moment later, he was surprised -- vaguely -- to see that the woman put her arm through the man's, as they walked down the wharf toward the small city...

.. Now he sauntered down one of the wharfs where condos were built, and he thought perhaps he should move here, water everywhere around him, and people too. He took from his pocket his cellphone, glanced at it, and returned it to his pocket. It was his daughter he wished to speak to.

After being "surprised - vaguely" at a couple's physical intimacy, and comparing his belly unfavorably with another man's (a return to the belly image from the earlier passage) Jack walks down a wharf, seemingly without purpose, though in reality, the story is nearing the crux.

Even before Jack puts the cellphone back in his pocket, we feel his hesitancy in the inverted syntax -- "He took from his pocket his cellphone" -- as if not wanting to admit what he's up to -- holding back the word "cellphone" until the last. Another inverted sentence follows, made even more awkward by passive voice -- "It was his daughter he wished to speak to" -- reflecting his own reluctance and awkwardness. The themes of  children, parents, communication and intimacy  return, and previous descriptive details turn out to be not incidental but integral. Always gratifying when there are no wasted motions.

What follows is the story proper, when Jack calls his estranged daughter. (Spoiler: it does not go well.) After the call ends, Strout returns briefly to the setting, using it reinforce theme and emotion instead of as a stand-in for them. Also, Strout calls back a final time, some of the images she has planted and returned to, this time deepening them.

... And that was that! That was that.

Jack sat on the bench a long time. People walked by, or perhaps no people walked by for a while, but he kept thinking of his wife Betsy, and he wanted to howl. He understood only this: that he deserved all of it. He deserved the fact that right now he wore a pad in his underwear because of prostrate surgery, he deserved it; he deserved his daughter not wanting to speak to him because for years he had not wanted to speak to her -- she was gay; she was a gay woman, and that still made a small wave of uneasiness move through him. Betsy, though, did not deserve to be dead. He deserved to be dead, but Betsy did not deserve that status. And yet he felt a sudden fury at his wife -- "Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty," he muttered.

The more you consider the two opening sentences of this passage, the more astonishing they become. The finality of "That was that" is emphasized by its simplicity and repetition, but then the sentence itself is repeated, the second time without an exclamation mark, as Jack downshifts from the immediate anger after the call, to a sense of resignation.

In the second paragraph, another daring sentence choice, "People walked by or perhaps no people walked by," a description that describes nothing. What makes this effective, is that instead of a bald statement such as, "Jack was unaware of his surroundings," this non-description shows us the unawareness. Moreover, it deepens an image planted earlier; whereas in the first excerpt, passersby didn't look at Jack because they were engaged with each other, Jack's inability to notice others now is because of his overwhelming isolation.

Having used repetition within repetition -- "And that was that! That was that." -- Strout repeats "deserved" seven times in the following paragraph. The intervals are highly irregular -- near the beginning of a sentence, in the middle, near the end, at one point separating two iterations by a single word, and then with two full sentences between one and the next -- refusing to fall into a predictable rhythm, and yet there is an unmistakable beat, like a man pounding his thigh with his fist. Jack almost seems to savor the karmic judgment the universe has dealt him. Now instead of Jack's "sloppy belly," the far more humiliating reality of his incontinence rises in his consciousness. 

There's a puzzling, somewhat jarring, word choice, that "Betty did not deserve that status." Partly, perhaps, the euphemism suggests a lingering unwillingness to face an unpleasant reality. Partly, maybe, the off-puttingly unemotional term "status" implies Jack's own off-putting lack of emotion. I think, however, that Strout's specifying a particular aspect of death. "Betsy didn't deserve to die," calls to mind not death itself, but the emotional and physical pain at the end of life. "Betsy didn't deserve death," sounds as if she'd been sentenced to the gas chamber, and still draws our attention to the act of dying. Referring to being dead as a "status" confronts us not with dying, but the state of being dead, the state of nonbeing. This is what Jack thinks he deserves: not to die, per se -- in any case, everyone dies eventually -- but not to exist.

Finally, he mutters, "Jesus Christ," profanity but at the same time an invocation of the man who offers forgiveness to all by a man unable to forgive himself.

To create something that is so artful, and yet so seemingly without artifice is a real accomplishment.

Next month, I'll attempt to model my own paragraph on of Strout's.

See you then.

PS - Strout's new novel, Lucy by the Sea, is available for pre-order.

Welcome to Conspicuous Force

The Robert Louis Stevenson quotation above is the premise for this blog. 

Every writer I know began by imitating a favorite story. As we mature, we gain self-confidence, exploring personal themes and developing unique styles. We feel embarrassed by our juvenilia, and sometimes even by the once-beloved authors who inspired it.

Nevertheless, I can't imagine an artist so proficient that he or she has nothing to learn from others. And one of the best ways to learn - if not the best - is imitation, just as athletes study other athletes, and actors, other actors.

When I was a college sophomore, long before entertaining dreams of being a writer, I was so enamored of Faulkner's The Unvanquished, I copied an entire scene - when Granny washes Ringo's his mouth out with soap - replacing word for word to create a science-fiction version. Ringo became Ognir, Granny, the Agrynn, "cogitate" for think, "ambulate" for walk, etcetera. 

Frankly, the result was unreadable; nevertheless, it taught me worlds about Faulkner's writing.

For years, I forgot about my experiment until as a teacher, I came across the concept of "mentor sentences," having students analyze exemplary writing and create new work using it as a model.

A popular mentor sentence is from Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings:

His room smelled of cooked grease, Lysol, and age.

There's a lot to unpack in this little gem. Parallelism, of course; the past participle "cooked" helping isolate a very particular smell; the brand name Lysol characterizing a certain era and lifestyle; and "age," which seems a non sequitur until we think about it. 

The next step is modeling a new sentence as faithfully as possible on Angelou's, without copying it.

Her green bean casserole tasted like canned soup, Velveeta, and 1957.

Admittedly, it doesn't hold a candle to the original, but how much even this short example can teach us, and what a wonderful opportunity it offers to refresh our sentence structure and word choice and break out of the sort of creative ruts we all fall into.

I've since retired from teaching, but for my own self-instruction, I've moved beyond mentor sentences into mentor passages. 

Admittedly, my results are often awkward and ill-fitting. Writing from a model is a little like putting someone else's overcoat on, or, more accurately, putting someone else's overcoat on a horse. Rarely if ever do I get something that I can use "as is," but always, always, always I learn something about my craft from such sedulous imitation. Even better, I see overlooked potentialities in the project I'm working on. 

This blog will share my process.

For two months, I'll focus on selected excerpts from a single author - beginning in April with Elizabeth Strout's Olive, Again. The first month, I'll do a close reading, analyzing sentence by sentence to discover as much as I can about the author's choices. The  second month, I'll write a passage of my own modeled on the original.

My hope is that not only will you read this blog, but contribute.  As we follow in the keystrokes of some truly amazing writers, I invite you to share what you've created and discovered.

Do you have a favorite book or author who influenced your writing? Why not tell me about it in the comments?