Give me one example of fine craft

I don't know which Ray Bradbury story this sentence was in, but the mental picture it evoked was absolutely perfect, and yet the verb is the polar opposite of what one would expect in a description of an aircraft taking off:

"The helicopter sank straight up."

James Baldwin's short story Sonny's Blues. It's beautifully written and he says more in this one story than some authors say in entire novels. Here's my favorite passage:

And, while Creole listened, Sonny moved, deep within, exactly like someone in torment. I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.

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I save all my favorite quotes from books I read, so I have a million of these. Some choice excerpts:

From Dylan Thomas's "Under Milk Wood":

I am a draper mad with love. I love you more than all the flannelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merino, tussore, cretonne, crepon, muslin, poplin, ticking and twill in the whole Cloth Hall of the world. I have come to take you away to my Emporium on the hill, where the change hums on wires. Throw away your little bedsocks and your Welsh wool knitted jacket, I will warm the sheets like an electric toaster, I will lie by your side like the Sunday roast.

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Have you ever read a better declaration of love? If someone said that to you in a marriage proposal or something wouldn't you throw yourself at them? God, it's GREAT!!!!!

From Richard Brautigan's "So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away" :

I knew what he was going to do. The words had barely escaped his mouth when I had it all planned out. What was to form an eternal breach between him and his parents and eventually lead him to doing three years in the pen for stealing a car and then a marriage with a spiteful woman ten years older than him who had five children who all grew to hate him, causing him to gain his only and ultimate solace in this world by buying a telescope and becoming an extremely incompetent but diligent astronomer, was to work to my brief advantage.

“Mommy, where’s Daddy?”
“Looking at the stars.”
“Mommy, do you hate Daddy, too?”
“Yes, child. I hate him, too.”
“Mommy, I love you. Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because you hate Daddy. It’s fun to hate Daddy, isn’t it?”
“Yes, child.”
“Why does Daddy look at the stars all the time, Mommy?”
“Because he’s an asshole.”
“Do assholes always look at the stars, Mommy?”
“Your father does.”

He had his telescope in the attic and he was always confusing his constellations. He could never get it quite straight between what was Orion and what was the Big Dipper. For some strange reason he couldn’t accept that the Big Dipper looked like a big dipper, but at least he wasn’t in jail for stealing cars.

He worked hard and gave his wife all his money and she went to bed with the postman every chance she got. It was barely a life but being always confused about the Big Dipper gave it a fingernail-clipping continuity and meaning. “How could it be the Big Dipper if it looks like a big dipper?” was the way he approached it.

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Brautigan is my favorite author and this passage explains why... He is hysterically funny and at the same time so sad. I love how his stories always have an underlying, gentle melancholy to them. He strikes a perfect balance.

From William Faulkner's "Go Down Moses" :

-; summer, and fall, and snow, and wet and saprife spring in their ordered immortal sequence, the deathless and immemorial phases of the mother who had shaped him if any had toward the man he almost was, mother and father both to the old man born of a Negro slave and a Chickasaw chief who had been his spirit's father if any had, whom he had revered and hearkened to and loved and lost and grieved: and he would marry someday and they too would own for their brief while that brief unsubstanced glory which inherently of itself cannot last and hence why glory: and they would, might, carry even then remembrance of it into the time when flesh no longer talks to flesh because memory at least does last: but still the woods would be his mistress and his wife.

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GOTTA LOVE FAULKNER. I feel like his writing unfolds almost like poetry, it seems so dense and incoherent at times but it is essentially distillation. I love how he communicates ideas in fragments that eventually come together, it makes his work feel so raw and emotional.

One Soldier's War by Arkady Babchenko. It's the war memoir of a Russian soldier drafted to Chechnya, then when the second war in Chechnya breaks out he volunteers because it's all he knows. I can't remember whether it was written in English or just lost nothing in the translation, but it's breathtaking either way. Easily beats out any other war novel, war memoir, etc I've ever read, both in terms of impact and beauty. Just... Damn.

Fuck me with a spoon, I love this book. It feels like such a short little book although, looking at my copy, it's not- just feels like it. Yet it goes way beyond typical horrors-of-war, people-are-jerks fare. He covers damn near everything. The systematic bullying between older recruits and newer, the bureaucratic nightmare that is the Russian army, the habit he develops at one point of going into this one empty house and vividly imagining he's home from the war in there... Jesus, I loved it so much I could just sit here all day and re-tell the whole thing if I gave in to temptation.

I read One Soldier's War four years ago and I still haven't forgotten a word. It's just that good.

And the ending. Fucking hell, the ending is just the most simultaneously disheartening and encouraging thing I've ever seen. If I told you, it wouldn't do it justice. Hell, my first time I skipped to the ending and read it after the first chapter, but the significance didn't hit me until I actually read through to it. I mean, the ending makes all the shock the rest of the book put you through worth it without ever trying to make up for it, if that makes any sense. The author never once apologizes or compensates for the horror, but he rewards.

Margaret Atwood is elite, of course. Here's the opening of Oryx and Crake.


So, we start with two (!) cliches: waking up and dawn (or close enough to it, at least). There's nothing inherently wrong with them, but they usually coincide with stories that start too soon—a tension-less exploration of the characters' status quo. But this opening, as we'll soon find out, is everything but tension-less.

The second sentence continues the narrative, a stately procession of participle clauses, one after another, smooth and fluid, one of Margaret Atwood's stylistic pets, a top-notch Best In Show pet at that. Everything seems normal, at first. The tide grounds us in a near-ocean locale. Mundane. But wait, "various barricades"? Why are there barricades? More than one of them, too! That's not mundane at all. My curiosity has been piqued. My Reader Magnet is tugging me forward.

"[R]hythm of heartbeat" is the first life-related metaphor. Why is this significant? We'll find out soon enough. There's also the onomatopoeic wish-wash, the repetition of it. The sentence's rhythm would be worse with only one.

The last sentence of first paragraph is another huge curiosity-piquer. Why would he like to believe he's still asleep? I want to read on and find out. And note the wording: not "He wishes he was still asleep," which is typical woke-up-too-damn-early fare. o like to believe (!). Why? What happened?

In the next sentence, the glow lighting the haze is not only rosy (an above-average adjective) but also deadly. Poetic juxtaposition of strikingly different qualia/impressions. The sentence after that is the second where still plays an essential role—what still exists, what he wishes still exists, vs. what doesn't exist anymore. It still seems tender, but many beautiful things don't anymore. Why? The text has upgraded my dinky refrigerator Reader Magnet to an industrial strength Reader Magnet.

We follow that up with a sentence with the adverb improbably, which further strengthens the undertones of disbelief and surreality. The first -ly adverb so far. She has a great feel for which type of -ly adverbs to use; hers are never purposeless, and often poetic and unexpected (one of my favorites is wordlessly ). Also, we have five colors in two sentences. Note the juxtapositions and the order in which they appear: grey, rose, dark (silhouette), pink / pale blue. Dark, light, dark, light. Dead, alive, dead, alive.

Reefs made of rusted car parts and jumbled bricks and rubble? More curiosity. What happened? Some sort of disaster, most likely. What type of disaster? I want to read on and find out.

We end with our second life-related metaphor: holiday traffic. As a metaphor, it's nondescript on first read, but we'll soon come to learn what makes it striking here: there won't be any more holidays, there won't be any more traffic. Besides, holiday traffic sucks. And you have to be in dire straits to have a nostalgic tone about something that sucks.

I would suggest Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories. (His book A Single Man was made into a recent fine film with Colin Firth)

Two reasons, one, it's a stellar example of what has been termed "invisible writing" where the craft is such that you hardly notice the narrator. You simply read along and forget it's a book -- it's just a story about interesting people and an interesting time. Subtlety in writing, like most things, is damnably difficult.

Two, if you want tho see how description can be sharp and alive, without ever being overblown, Isherwood is a master of both places and people:

‘Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the ironwork of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.’

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For people, read the first two pages here

Isherwood makes his characters come alive in an instant -- you may know nothing about them, but you are instantly convinced these are real people.

And finally, here's a pretty good (short) literary take on the book:

http://literaryminded.wordpress.com/tag/the-last-of-mr-norris/

I can't quote it, BUT, The Lake, a short by Ray Bradbury in The October Country, is one of the most perfect stories of sadness and loss I have ever read.....possibly my absolute, all-time favorite story.

The entire book is a treasure, and that's coming from someone with all the nostalgia and romance of a turkey vulture.

Edit: Here is an actual excerpt, the first couple paragraphs:

The wave shut me off from the world, from the birds in the sky, the children on the beach,my mother on the shore.

There was a moment of green silence.

Then the wave gave meback to the sky, the sand, the children yelling.

I came out of the lake and the world waswaiting for me, having hardly moved since I went away.I ran up on the beach.Mama swabbed me with a furry towel.

"Stand there and dry," she said.I stood there, watching the sun take away the water beads on my arms.

I replaced them withgoose-pimples.

I didn't truly have an appreciation for wordcraft until I read Frank Conroy's Body & Soul, a novel about a talented boy who is lifted out of his Third Avenue, New York neighborhood in the 1940s.

Using few words to convey much, Conroy immersed me into not only Claude's life but what it felt and sounded like to be at Third Avenue in the forties. I came away with an appreciation for places and events I'd never experienced, wishing I truly had. Conroy's characters haunted me long after I'd finished.

DreamWeaver said:

I don't know which Ray Bradbury story this sentence was in, but the mental picture it evoked was absolutely perfect, and yet the verb is the polar opposite of what one would expect in a description of an aircraft taking off:

"The helicopter sank straight up."

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It's an excerpt from I Sing the Body Electric.

And the Apollo machine swam down on its own summer breeze, wafting hot winds to cool, reweaving our hair, smartening our eyebrows, applauding our pant legs against our shins, making a flag of Agatha's hair on the porch and thus settled like a vast frenzied hibiscus on our lawn, the helicopter slid wide a bottom drawer and deposited upon the grass a parcel of largishsize, no sooner having laid same then the vehicle, with not so much as a god bless or farewell, sank straight up, disturbed the calm air with a mad ten thousand flourishes and then, like a skyborne dervish, tilted and fell off to be mad some other place.

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Cyia said:

It's an excerpt from I Sing the Body Electric.

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Thanks! Guess I remembered the word picture/description and not the exact sentence . It's amazing to me how perfectly that verb describes the action of a helicopter.

This description of a cold winter evening in London, from Dickens's Christmas Carol:

Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct them on their way. The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there.

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Gawd, the bell's frozen head? I shiver in my Southern California ranch-style house whenever I read that.

There's a piece of young adult fiction that I've been in love with for a while now, and I hardly ever read from that genre anymore.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness has some of the most beautiful descriptions that I've ever read. I wish I had a copy of the book in front of me right now, but his descriptions of the main character first meeting the monster sent chills down my spine. And then there's the whole plot with the boy's mother who is seriously ill. My god, I rarely cry when it comes to books, but this one made me break down.

Then there's the artwork by Jim Kay that just solidifies this book as brilliant. There's this perfect binding of illustrator to the material that I can't get over. Gah. Just go out and read it.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, and one of my favorite passages in literature for how sly and clever and *mean* it is while being perfectly genteel:

Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE the opening from Erin Morgenstern's Night Circus. I think it's the best ever. Seriously, I can't recall ever reading another opening that is crafted so nicely.

(But, ugh, I hate her because I don't think I can ever write something so good.)

I like how her simple, elegant prose is nevertheless so effective at creating atmosphere. Simple without being dry. Poetic without being purple. Evocative without being forced. Writers often focus on sight, neglecting other senses. This short opening incorporates sight, touch, sound, smell (and arguably taste).

When I read it, I feel completely immersed in this curious, surreal world. I'm intrigued by the circus. It's mysterious, and it draws me in. At the same time, I'm a little scared. My skin is a tad tense. My heart beats slightly faster. There is something alluring yet ever-so-slightly spooky about how the circus shows up. I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

And I can't wait to read more.

This is how it starts:

The circus arrives without warning.

No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.

The towering tents are striped in white and black, no golds and crimsons to be seen. No color at all, save for the neighboring trees and the grass of the surrounding fields. Black-and-white stripes on grey sky; countless tents of varying shapes and sizes, with an elaborate wrought-iron fence encasing them in a colorless world. Even what little ground is visible from outside is black or white, painted or powdered, or treated with some other circus trick.

But it is not open for business. Not just yet.

Complete excerpt of the opening is here: the-night-circus-erin-morgenstern You should read it. It's actually pretty short. It'll take you like five minutes.

It's funny how I do not like most of these at all.

Just goes to show how subjective it all is. I don't enjoy the sound or rhythm of most sentences unless they add emotional weight to what is being said. It's is why I love words like "slosh" but have no patience for the long, abstract sentences that so many "great" writers are praised for. I find them tedious to read through and they don't move me. Writing that doesn't make me experience emotion is dead writing to me. I can't be alone, considering how so many people are averse to this kind of writing (where the writing is given just as much importance as the story itself, rather than devoting itself entirely to the story).

But I digress.

These are from Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind:

“Go out in the early days of winter, after the first cold snap of the season. Find a pool of water with a sheet of ice across the top, still fresh and new and clear as glass. Near the shore the ice will hold you. Slide out farther. Farther. Eventually you'll find the place where the surface just barely bears your weight. There you will feel what I felt. The ice splinters under your feet. Look down and you can see the white cracks darting through the ice like mad, elaborate spiderwebs. It is perfectly silent, but you can feel the sudden sharp vibrations through the bottoms of your feet.

That is what happened when Denna smiled at me.”

“When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.”

“My parents danced together, her head on his chest. Both had their eyes closed. They seemed so perfectly content. If you can find someone like that, someone who you can hold and close your eyes to the world with, then you're lucky. Even if it only lasts for a minute or a day. The image of them gently swaying to the music is how I picture love in my mind even after all these years.”

“I also felt guilty about the three pens I'd stolen, but only for a second. And since there was no convenient way to give them back, I stole a bottle of ink before I left.”

I love how his writing is clean and clear. It's less about the writing itself than the meaning he is conveying. I like writing that gets out of the way, and when I have to sit down and think about what a writer is trying to tell me they've completely failed to impress me. It defeats the purpose of communication. I don't read books to see the words, I read books to see what the words are trying to get across.

I think this is where a lot of people clash, though, because it's honestly a matter of opinion. Some people want story, some people want certain kinds of writing, some people want both. I know what I like, and so I use that as a standard. I'm firmly in the everything-must-serve-the-story-unless-it-has-a-mindblowingly-good-reason camp (and "sounding good" isn't a good enough reason if the author waxes poetic for paragraphs at a time). So what's "fine craft" to you will really depend on this, I guess

From Bernard Cornwell's "The Last Kingdom."

My name is Uhtred. I am the son of Uhtred, who was the son of Uhtred and his father was also call Uhtred. My father's clerk, a priest called Beocca, spelt it Utred. I do not know if that was how my father would have written it, for he could neither read nor write, but I can do both and sometimes I take the old parchments from their wooden chest and I see the name spelled Uhtred or Utred or Ughtred or Ootred. I look at those parchments, which are deeds saying that Uhtred, son of Uhtred, is the lawful and sole owner of the lands that are carefully market by stones and dykes, by oaks and by ash, by marsh and by sea, and I dream of those lands, wave-beaten and wild beneath the wind-driven sky. I dream, and know that one day I will take back the land from those who stole it from me.

OK, so what did I like? Well this is First Person narrative and I was not sure I would like this PoV style. But the way Cornwell weaves the story made me a fan of this style.

Also, the opening paragraph set the tone and time period without getting into world building yet. You feel it with the mixture of sentence lengths, language and words chosen. By the end of the first paragraph I had a pretty good idea what this story would be about, vengeance and redemption. But as I learned, the story is so much more, as is Uhtred.

The story is set around 980 AD and Cornwell wove a history lesson within the story, without the history intruding on the story. This was a bonus to me. I ended up reading all 6 from this series and two addition series by Cornwell, each done in a different style. He has not disappointed me...

... a paragraph, from the conclusion:

And you, Russia of mine—are not you also speeding like a troika which nought can overtake? Is not the road smoking beneath your wheels, and the bridges thundering as you cross them, and everything being left in the rear, and the spectators, struck with the portent, halting to wonder whether you be not a thunderbolt launched from heaven? What does that awe-inspiring progress of yours foretell? What is the unknown force which lies within your mysterious steeds? Surely the winds themselves must abide in their manes, and every vein in their bodies be an ear stretched to catch the celestial message which bids them, with iron-girded breasts, and hooves which barely touch the earth as they gallop, fly forward on a mission of God? Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes—only the weird sound of your collar-bells. Rent into a thousand shreds, the air roars past you, for you are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to give you way!

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"Dead Souls," Gogol
(Among other things, nationalism has always appealed to me.
I love my own country, and am thrilled to witness others who feel similarly about theirs.)

Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower:

But this thing (This idea? Philosophy? New religion?) won't let me alone, won't let me forget it, won't let me go. Maybe.... Maybe it's like my sharing: One more weirdness, one more crazy, deep-rooted delusion that I'm stuck with. I am stuck with it. And in time, I'll have to do something about it. In spite of what my father will say or do to me, in spite of the poisonous rottenness outside the wall where I might be exiled, I'll have to do something about it.

That reality scares me to death.

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I love this book for many reasons, but the principal one is the voice. The protagonist is a teenage African-American girl, coming of age during what is essentially the beginning of the annihilation of civilized society. Won't give away any more, as there be spoilers.

From The Wind in the Willows.

'Oddsbodkins!' said the sergeant of police, taking off his helmet and wiping his forehead. 'Rouse thee, oh loon, and take over from us this vile Toad, a criminal of deepest guilt and matchless artfulness and resource. Watch and ward him with all thy skill; and mark thee well, greybeard, should aught untoward befall, thy old head shall answer for his -- and a murrain on both of them!'

The gaoler nodded grimly, laying his withered hand on the shoulder of the miserable Toad. The rusty key creaked in the lock, the great door clanged behind them; and Toad was a helpless prisoner in the remotest dungeon of the best-guarded keep of the stoutest castle in all the length and breadth of Merry England.

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Sometimes it's just a well-crafted sentence that expresses an idea pithily.

Fritz Leiber said:

Women are apt to develop toward each other strange animosities, in which the best interests of the man involved are totally ignored.

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Horror: The Long Walk - Stephen King (possibly as Richard Bachman). My favorite King books are all about humans behaving badly: Misery, Running Man, and Thinner as well as this one.

Mystery: The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler. It can be argued that both Christie and Doyle turned out a better over-all catalog than Chandler. He just nailed it with this one.

Thriller: Mona - Lawrence Block. It's a page-turner like no other book I've read.

Adult / Erotica: Vox - Nicholson Baker. The whole novel is a conversation on a phone sex line, so it's almost all dialogue.

Literature (to be read in a snooty voice): The Stranger - Albert Camus. It's a masterpiece of efficiency, barely even qualifying as a novel.

What I love most is prose that does several things at once while being fairly straight to the point - builds atmosphere, sparks emotion, shows character and tells story, all while being simple (or fairly simple, at least.)

I like prose with a strong voice and a distinctive style. People talk about 'invisible narrators' but I find them aneamic and alcking in magic. I want to feel the magic and wonder of new worlds and new thoughts.

There's lots of books I like that do this well - The entirety of The Haunting of Hill House, a lot of moments from Terry Pratchetts Nation - but the couple I have on hand are these.

Call me Isobel. (It's my name.) This is my history. Where shall I begin?

Before the beginning is the void and the void belongs in neither time or space and is therefore beyond our imagination.

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- Kate Atkinson, Human Croquet

Bottles of all shapes and sizes, some filled with clear liquid, the rest used to store body parts, stood on shelves. One bottle was filled almost to the top with eyeballs. They seemed alive to David, as though being wrenched from their sockets had not deprived them of the capacity to see. Another contained a womans hand, a gold ring upon it's wedding finger, red varnish flaking slowly from its nails. A third contained a brain, its inner workings exposed and marked by coloured pins.

And there were worse things than those, oh much worse...

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John Connolly The Book of Lost Things.