In my on-going pursuit of seeing how supple narration is achieved by writers who I admire, revere and devour, I was looking at Tom Perrotta.
What I can’t figure out is why my narrative sometimes reads more like the dreaded “telling”. I think it might be that my characters tend to get overly analytical and so I lose the sensory aspect of narration, disappear too far inside their twisted little heads.
Yet this passage from The Abstinence Teacher by Perrotta has an analytical bent, and it still flows smoothly, draws the reader in and summarizes his feelings and thoughts. Quite a lot from a short paragraph:
“She insisted she was fine, leaving him to wonder if the sadness was all on his side, if he was simply fishing for a sign that she wanted to stay with him a little longer. He couldn’t help feeling a pang of nostalgia for the child she used to be, the little girl whose moods were as obvious as the weather. In the past year, she’d gone all poker-faced on him, turning every interaction into a guessing game. It didn’t help that Tim could never quite decide whether this awkwardness was just the normal weirdness of adolescence setting in or something more specific to the two of them.”
Perrotta’s writing is lovely, isn’t it? This is what I aspire to myself, and I wonder: is it the word choice? the sentence structure? what? He, and other writers I admire, make it look as though it just flows fully formed onto the page, as though they’re just chatting breezily and I’m listening in. Can this be learned? I hope so.
cool, simple, not overdone, common feeling and emotion conveyed in a non-high brow way…very nice
It does appear to flow fully formed. I take comfort in one of my favorite quotes, Hemingway’s explanation of why he rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms 39 times …
Interviewer: “What was it that had stumped you?” Hemingway: “Getting the words right”