Mosaic Master
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From: Massachusetts
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Real Name: Lori Kanter
Writer of: Poetry & Prose
Referred By:Imhotep
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Time in Story Openings by Susan J. Letham
Question: I signed up for a writing class at college, and I love it. We do personal research topics. My personal topic is to research stories that start with time and practice writing my own time-based starters. Why is this important? And can you tell me how to best do this?
Answer: Personal research projects are an excellent approach to learning about writing for two reasons: they force you to read, and they force you to think about what you read.
- Find reading material
Pick up a pencil and visit a library or bookstore. When you get there, go to the fiction section and skim as many opening chapters as you need to until you have a selection of ten or so that deal with time. When you have a good selection, copy, type, or Xerox the openings so you can make notes and highlight passages on your copy. The first couple of paragraphs will usually suffice.
- Analyze your material
When you've done that, read the openings you selected. Take time to think about what you read. What kinds of time, time periods, and what events do the authors describe?
You'll find there are several categories of time you can use in an opening. Here's one of those possibilities:
- The passing of time: Aaron Elkins' "Skeleton Dance"
In the passage below, Elkins is trying to show that a long time has passed between two events: the events that led to bones being in the cave and the discovery of the bones. He does this by describing the process of decomposition and decay in one tightly written paragraph. The words are vivid and accurate but not emotional. He offers information, not opinion.
Read the excerpt once to pick up the story, then go back and read it again for analysis.
Once, the thing in the cave had been a man, but that had been long ago. As the years passed it had lain buried in the rich, red-brown humus, slowly decomposing, its nourishing organic wastes feeding successive generations of flatworms and beetle grubs. Then, as the soil settled and fissured, the blowfly larvae had come, followed inevitably by streams of ants and earwigs, and, later still, by the busy rodents of the valley: wood rats, field mice, and squirrels. Over time the protective covering of soil had been largely scratched and worn away, allowing most of the bones to be pulled apart and many of them hustled off to forest dens and lairs, there to be gnawed at leisure.
Aaron Elkins, Skeleton Dance (Morrow, 2000)
As you read, observe the way in which the author has used precise nouns: not vague and generic terms like "insects" or "insect life" but specific insect names like "flatworms and beetle grubs" and "ants and earwigs." Precise nouns create strong, explicit images in the reader's imagination -- exactly the images you want the reader to have.
The same is true of the verbs: the earth has not been "moved" or "disturbed," both of which are weak and fluffy descriptions, instead it has been "scratched and worn away." Those words offer the reader strong, active images. It takes effort to scratch something away and it takes time to wear it down, and precisely this passing of time was the main idea the author was trying to put across in this passage. In the same vein, the bones themselves have been "hustled off" and "gnawed" rather than "subjected to animal-life influences" or some other such euphemistic puff. The combination of both slow and active images creates interest and keeps the passage moving.
- Writing Exercise
- Think of processes that take a long time to complete, and write your ideas down.
- Choose one process from your list, and write about in the same style Aaron Elkins used in the opening passage of "Skeleton Dance," which you have just read.
- Don't limit yourself in your first draft, simply get your thoughts onto the page. In your later drafts, aim to whittle your word count down to around 120, the length of Elkins' example passage.
- If you want to, analyze the number and relationships of verbs, nouns, adverbs, and adjectives in the example, and compare the outcome to your own results. If your writing doesn't seem to work, look closely: If you find that you have more adjectives (and fewer nouns) than Elkins, replace your adjectives with specific nouns. If you find that you have more adverbs (and fewer or weaker verbs) than Elkins, replace your adverbs with strong verbs.
Approach each of your time openings in the same way, by asking yourself what, exactly the author is trying to describe in each one. Analyze the kind of words used. Then brainstorm situations similar to the one in the book example, and try to write your own examples using the opening you found as a model.
© 2003, Susan J. Letham
Susan J. Letham is a British writer, creative writing tutor, and owner of http://www.Inspired2Write.com . Sign up for classes and competent 1-on-1 coaching. Pick up your no-cost subscription to the monthly Inspired2Write Newsletter at: mailto:Inspired2Write_Newsletter-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Permission to reprint this article granted to L Kanter by Susan Letham, 24 March 2004
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