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| Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch |
Which is not to say that, sometimes, things shouldn't go -- phrases, plot-lines, characters, dialogue, or what have you, everything needs to be coolly assessed, preferably by the light of a new day. Or, perhaps, they should just go somewhere else; my friend Larry Millman, a veteran writer, assembled his prose darlings into a book of poetry, Northern Latitudes. But just as often, I fear, people do toss out their babies with their bathwater. There exists a perfectly fine, expertly crafted variety of fiction that is, though free from any visible flaws, dead on arrival at the reader's eyes; some call it "over-crafted," others "workshoppy." Irregularity, exuberance, and a sprinkling of oddities are part of what make great fiction great, from "Call me Ishmael" to "Reader, I married him."
So I'd like to start out our class by sharing some of them. Send your darlings here, by posting them in the "comment" window below; I'll do the same. Select something from a single phrase or sentence to a short paragraph; don't tell us anything about the context of the passage (including whether you later decided to murder it or not). And let's see what we can tell about one another from these collected moments of exuberance.
The dark-haired boy shifted uncomfortably in his seat while he waited for the bartender to hand him his cocktail. He reached for the glass with purple-painted fingernails, and suddenly something clicked in Ace’s mind. 'Could he be the musician here?' Ace contemplated, turning his body around to look at the vacant piano and then back to the boy next to him.
ReplyDelete“Open the padded envelope. It is from her.” And the line goes dead. He just stares at the phone. He gets up and slaps at the mail until he comes to the brown package. Inside is a dvd. He puts it into his laptop and lays back on his bed.
ReplyDeleteI had never before beheld the Death of any being, although on many Occasions I had feared for my own, or that of other Creatures. That humans, and Animals as well, were all such expiring things, reaching our Date at some moment we could neither know nor postpone, came as a strange shock to my Awareness; like a mark of punctuation in the middle of a Sentence, it at once divided my own life into two Dependent Clauses. For knowing this, I knew myself, and was thence expelled for ever from my own Garden of Innocence. No Angel bearing a sword did I see, nor an Angry God to escort me out; about me I had only a few of my fellow-exiles, none of them any Wiser than the other in the face of this, our strange and common Fate.
ReplyDeleteHis size 7 Reebok's wheezed on the violently creaky floorboards. His American cookie cutter light blue pupils struggled to adjust to the silent black. It seemed like the walls whispered to him, 'turn back', but he knew it was made up. His mom always told him that, "when your brain has nothing to keep it busy, it makes things up." Everyone knew the old Drake Academy was haunted, but that was little kid stuff... right? Besides, Johnny and Tommy Jenkinson were outside, and if he walked right back out, they would call him a 'pussy' at recess tomorrow. Even Clara Duncan would think he was a wimp! And she just started sitting next to him in math class! No, he was going to do this. His hand searched for a wall, but it found something soft, well, kind of soft. It was coarse fabric and whatever it was attached to was heavy but gave when he tugged it, it came closer... No... STEPPED closer... An uneasy feeling stemmed from the back of his neck, and he broke out in goosebumps.
ReplyDeleteCaleb Buffum
ReplyDeleteI remember one second of that day, a second so steeped in fear that years later its taste still saturates my thoughts. The headlights swooping upon me, screaming tires heralding my doom. The steel behemoth met the side of my broken down corolla, shattering the doors, the windows, and my spine.
Grace Baldwin
ReplyDelete"That's how revenge works, Danny. Just like when a Honey Bee stings you, it dies too."
His neighbors to his right were a group of men that seemed to all work together. They were hearty men who worked over their eggs in a slow and deliberate manner.One of the men lit up a cigarette. Stanley watched with mild interest as the smoke moved towards the ceiling. The fumes touched the ceiling and scraped the floor. Stanley realized from the smell how long cigarettes had been part of this establishment. He glanced at the window. The sun bounced off the center of town and he saw people sweeping the front of their stores and greeting each other.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Diodati
ReplyDeleteThe lawn was by no means natural, or even living. Roughly seventy pieces of mismatched sod were laid on top of the sand with no real precision or order. I can imagine that in their greenest glory they made this property look something like an oasis.