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.