So, for those intrepid souls who truly do wish to be great novelists, I propose an exercise:
- Take down your favorite novel, the novel that once you’d finished reading it you clasped to your chest almost prayerfully and thought, “Why oh why can’t I write like that?”
- Go through it and mark pages with post-it notes. It’s better if you also have a pen and notebook for note taking.
- Come back here and post a passage. Tell us how that passage made you feel, how it helped you to see the action and the world of the book, and how it helped you to know the character. Use the most descriptive language you can bring to bear to show how that novel affected you.
Any takers? I wonder.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.
I adore beyond measure this complete passage, but
and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor takes my breath away like nothing else in literature. I also think this passage is a good indication of the story that follows.
I have read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby ridiculous000000 (<---that's my way of writing out the number for infinity) times. I hold the novel up as a template for all novels.
The passage I picked? Because it gives me delight...it is filled with frenetic movement with a soft landing at the end. It is my temperament, my moods, my prison...all caught up into one little passage. The passage tells me that there will be chaos in the story to follow...but a beautiful chaos. It will be a chaos that I will not get lost in, not completely. It will be a welcome chaos...one I can snuggle up to without fear of losing myself.
This makes me know, most importantly, the narrator. I know almost nothing about Nick at this point, but the way he draws this scene as he walks into the decadent Buchanan house and sees the ladies idling...it makes me want to cry. I immediately knows he is passionate about all things. I know that he will be flowery, curt, unstable and a bastion of stability. I know that he will be a filter for a glorious chaos...and I sense, already, that he will not stick to it. He is apart and enveloped, all at once.
Nothing about the novel that follows this particular passage has ever let me down, no matter how many times I read and reread it. It is, for me, the apex of story. For me, I'm not completely convinced those curtains still aren't blustering about that room once I read the last sentence. "
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Yes we do!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And so do those gloriously vain young women. All the chaos happens just as the blustery room promised. And yet, the women land...they balloon slowly to the floor, untouched, unmarred...and yet, just a little sadder.
This is the novel experience I want to capture.