Aim for the “Extra” in the Ordinary
By Kathryn Craft | August 12, 2021 |
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
In 1999, when Janet Fitch’s debut, White Oleander, was chosen as an Oprah Book Club pick, Winfrey described Fitch’s prose as “liquid poetry.” In an interview at the time, which I’ve never forgotten, Fitch said something that she’s repeated during the free “Writing Wednesday” talks she’s been giving on her Facebook page since the start of the pandemic: that her constant goal, in revision, is to replace any wording in her draft that she’s seen before with something that feels fresh.
Clouds like cotton candy? Out. Heart-breaking sorrow? Out. In: a sky the color of peaches; sorrow that tastes like a copper penny.
Whether or not you write on the literary end of the fiction spectrum, we can rise to Fitch’s challenge of combining words in a way that creates a revelation for your reader. By “revelation” I’m not referring a big plot reveal, but to quieter moments that delight by lending fresh perspective to a situation the reader might already think of as familiar.
The books I’ve been reading this summer are full of great examples. While collecting them for this post, I happened to read a passage in George Saunders’ book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. Saunders writes:
Any of us who’s ever walked out of their house on a lovely summer morning knows the truth of that moment is more than just “I walked out of my house one morning in June.” In that sentence, there’s something missing, which is the “I” walking out of the house. That morning has to fall on a certain mind for it to feel like any kind of real morning.
While the point-of-view character may be enacting an ordinary moment, his specific perspective—formed by his goals, past experiences, passions, beliefs, prejudices, fears, distractions, capabilities and limitations—can inspire an extraordinary expression of it. This authorial effort deepens the reader’s appreciation for the character’s journey while helping her see her own life anew.
Here are eight everyday occurrences, common to so many novels, that have been transformed by an author’s caring evocation of their character’s perspective.
Childbirth
What can possibly be fresh about childbirth? It happens, on average, four-hundred thousand times per day. And the pain just…is. It’s hard to describe.
In Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell took on the challenge:
Her body is one of resilience, of power; she is all muscle beneath smooth skin. But this is something else. Something other. It laughs at her attempts to master it, to subdue it, to rise above it. It will, Agnes fears, overtake her. It will seize her by the scruff of her neck and plunge her down, under the surface of the water.
A mother’s limited patience
I’ve never thought in quite this way about the tripwire at patience’s end, but thanks to Hamnet, I’ll never forget it:
Before even realizing that her patience has slipped out from under her, like ice from under her feet, she is up, she is standing, she is gripping her son by the arm, she is shaking it, she is saying to him, “This whole scheme is nothing but foolishness.”
Note that this sentence contains no elevated language. It simply pairs patience with the notion of being slippery, something that could just as easily be done in a children’s picture book.
Death
Most of us have experienced this final loss; surely we’ve all read about it. In Hamnet, after her character Agnes buries a loved one, O’Farrell writes:
It is even more difficult, Agnes finds, to leave the graveyard, than it was to enter it. So many graves to walk past, so many sad and angry ghosts tugging at her skirts, touching her with their cold fingers, pulling at her, naggingly, piteously, saying, Don’t go, wait for us, don’t leave us here. She has to clutch her hem to her, fold her hands inwards. A strangely difficult idea, too, that she entered this place with three children and she leaves it with two. She is, she tells herself, meant to be leaving one behind here, but how can she? In this place of wailing spirits and dripping yew trees and cold, pawing hands?
By using her setting to draw the entire world into her character’s highly emotional moment, O’Farrell is able to build toward the image stated so powerfully in the last sentence.
Thanksgiving
In The Dutch House, Ann Patchett adds a revelatory twist to a Thanksgiving scenario that was standard in my youth:
The dinner was a huge production, with kids stashed in the den to eat off card tables like a collection of understudies who dreamed of one day breaking into the dining room.
This made me laugh aloud in delighted recognition.
Family dynamics
In this excerpt, Patchett delivers the sad truth about the family that lives in the Dutch House with one final, gut-punch of a word.
But my father surprised me, saying he would drive me to New York himself and let me come home on the train. Barnard was about two and a half hours by car. My father said we would pick Maeve up and the three of us would have lunch, then he would drive back to Elkins Park without me. It sounded so nostalgic when he said it, the three of us, as if we had once been a unit instead of just a circumstance.
Cooking out
In Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, revelation comes through use of a standard summer prop:
Kingsford charcoal, my father’s fuel of choice. When it came to grilling, anyway. The coals rustled out of the big blue-and-white bag onto the grate. Gravity had a design, tossing them in a certain arrangement. My father had his own laws, a precise concept of fire formation honed over the years. To people like you and me, a briquette is a briquette. Not to him. He seemed to analyze each coal individually, taking measure of its strengths, deficits, secret potential. The diamond in the darkness. He knew where they needed to go, recognizing the uniqueness of each cube and determining where it fit with the rest of the team. He assembled the pyramid meticulously, perceiving the invisible—the crooked corridors of ventilation between the briquettes, the heat traps and inevitable vectors of released energy, any potential irregularity that might undermine the project. The sublime interconnectedness of it all. He asserted his order. Built his fire.
An ended relationship
In Writers and Lovers, Lily King has her character reflect on the end of a two-year, international romance with keen insight:
Maybe the thrill of the relationship was the languages, that everything was heightened for me because of it, more of a challenge, as I tried to maintain his belief in my facility with languages, my ability to absorb, mimic, morph. It was a trick no one expected of an American, the combination of a good ear, a good memory, and an understanding of the rules of grammar, so that I appeared more of a prodigy than I was. Every conversation was a chance to excel, to frolic, to amuse myself and to surprise him. And yet now I can’t remember what we said to each other, Conversations in foreign languages don’t linger in my head like they do in English. They don’t last. They remind me of the invisible-ink pen my mother sent me for Christmas when I was fifteen and she had gone, an irony that escaped her but not me.
This is not a writing rule
Let me anticipate the FAQs.
“This sounds exhausting. Must I reach for the extraordinary all the time?” No—your book would be ridiculously overwritten.
“Can I get an agent without take the time to craft revelatory prose?” Yes.
“Can I get published without going to these lengths?” Yes.
“Can novels hit bestseller lists without doing this?” Yes.
“Then why bother?”
George Saunders has been teaching literature for the past 20 years at Syracuse University, so I’ll hand this one off to him first. He maintains that our readers want more than entertainment from our stories. They seek the richness they want from life itself: “An acknowledgment, in the prose, that all of this is too big to be spoken of, but also that death begins the moment that we give up trying to speak of it.”
Personally, I have another reason: it’s fun. Fun for the author, to see how the characters and world you’ve created can serve up fresh perspective on our crazy human existence, and fun for the reader, who will return to your books again and again for more of the same.
Choosing an excerpt from above, what specific character perspective comes across? How does punctuation use, word choice, and word order help build an impression? Did these examples engage your mind and heart in a way that made you want to keep reading? Feel free to share a moment from your own writing where you sought the extraordinary within a common scenario.
[coffee]
Kathryn Craft (she/her) is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her forthcoming book, Crafting Story Movement: Techniques to Engage Readers and Drive Your Novel Forward, draws from decades of experience as both a story consultant and a movement specialist/dance critic. Learn more on Kathryn’s website.
I’m reading Julie Carrick Dalton’s Waiting for the Night Song (finally) and she has this down beautifully. I’m barely into the book, chapter 3 or so, but it’s been a rich read. Part of me wants to get right back at my chapter one (start over) and imbue it with this kind of extra. But, I’ll be good and get through this revision and then get to imbuing. Great article as always, Kathryn.
I’m glad you’ve found inspiration in our friend and WU colleague’s book! And yes: draft now, imbue later. Thanks for stopping by, Lynn!
You have hit upon one of the hardest challenges in writing: finding just the right word or phrase. Often in that first draft I settle for a word or phrase that is less than perfect, figuring I will get back to it later. But, that leaves an awful lot to edit and hone on the second pass. And that is where the writer cannot simply settle for ordinary prose. The family dynamic scene from The Dutch House resonates with me, mostly because this is the genre I write. I was anticipating a very different trip to New York, but the conflict took place behind the scenes and Patchett reveals much about the father’s character and his love for his children. Kathryn, thanks for another insightful post,
It is hard, to be sure, Chris, you’ve got that right! I’ll often spend an hour on one paragraph in the final stages, but it’s a challenge I enjoy taking on. Certain books push me to want to write, and most of them contain passages like this.
Love this, Kathryn, as I am currently in revision and trying to do what you describe. I’ve read and loved Sag Harbor and Dutch House. I’ve read Writers and Lovers three times and am currently reading the George Saunders book. While it’s intimidating to see how wonderfully these works are crafted, the challenge to produce a sentence or two, a thought or two, in an artful, unusual way is indeed irresistible!
Irresistible—great word! Sounds like we have reading taste in common, Mary. And even if we can only pull off one sentence per chapter that lends greater vivacity to the commonplace, what a joy that would be for our readers!
Kathryn, I always stop my internet scrolling to slow down and read your posts. I am rewarded by your rich insights and practicality. I often refer to you when I’m teaching writing workshops. Thank you!
This was a total comment fail—let’s try again.
Oh wow, Jacqueline, what a lovely thing to hear! I hope our paths cross again in the not-too-distant future.
Richness. Sometimes in reading those excellent authors I feel almost sick from the unrelenting sweetness of their prose, as if I’d made a whole feast of only wedding cake, gorging on a whole bakery’s worth, and while my mouth demands more-more-more, my stomach is saying no-no-no, too much!
Moderation. Kingsford charcoal briquettes (I remember those) demand a microscope examination because they reveal much about that father. Not every details serves so essential a purpose. For me that’s the coffee spoon to use in measuring out the moments when just the right words should java-jolt our minds.
Character-shaping moments…details that reveal something we need to understand…why a place or time or object have special importance…those, to me, are reasons to delve. The right words are not bad but those words are best when they strongly serve the story.
I used Kingsford charcoal briquets just last night, and wondered if anyone could tell anything about me by the way I built the fire, lol.
Thanks for bringing up such great points, Benjamin. While we all have individual tolerances for such things, you are so right that moderation is key for most readers. We don’t want them glossing over—or even worse, giggling at!—those passages into which we poured so much loving imagination.
And those passages must serve the story, yes yes yes! Long, beefed-up asides that fail to advance the plot, deepen story-relevant insight, or enhance characterization are simply self-indulgent.
Thank you, Kathryn — I always read your posts and learn from them. I can well relate to Benjamin’s expressed concern, as well as fully appreciating and agreeing with your response. For me as a reader, highly creative metaphors and such will start becoming a distraction (rather than moving the story along) when they just don’t feel entirely honest. But in the examples you included, the selections on “mother’s limited patience,” “Thanksgiving,” “family dynamics,” and “ended relationship” especially came across to me as quite genuine as well as a true pleasure simply to read.
Yes there is a particular thrill in the simplicity of those examples, I agree, yet put forth a concept well worth thinking about. Thanks for reading, Thomas!
Just wanted to say I think you nailed the difference between passages that sing and passages that choke us. They have to serve a purpose, to tell a story within the story.
“Sing” and “choke”—evocative contrast, Beth! Thanks for it.
Oh wow, Jacqueline, what a lovely thing to hear! I hope our paths cross again in the not-too-distant future.
I just want to say “yes! yes! yes!” and thank you for this excellent “show and tell” about language, how words can take us deeper inside character, story, human relationships, life itself. The examples you cite work so well to illustrate your point, and also show how the books we read can teach us to be better writers. Thank you.
I’m happy to have inspired you with this collection of examples, Judy!
Thank you for sharing these tips and treasures with me, Kathryn.
As I read, I love to record my favourite quotes. I think the simple act of acknowledging them in this way has made me a more careful, more skilled writer.
I love the last paragraph in your article.
Even in a comment, wording can mean so much, as you show here, Leanne. “Treasures” evokes not one shiny gem, but layers of bounty—and that’s exactly how I feel when I read passages such as those I included in the post.
Thanks for this contribution!
Reading…it’s is the inspiration for writing. It’s the astonishment that the same words I might be using are combined in ways so different, so astounding that one reads the sentence over and over. And always a thank you, Kathryn. Hamnet is a jewel of a book. I own a copy and underlined the magic of many sentences. Patchett can bring my world alive–the Thanksgiving scene, the kids at the card table. To break that taboo, I ate with my grandchildren. After all, they are the future. Great post.
This: “It’s the astonishment that the same words I might be using are combined in ways so different, so astounding that one reads the sentence over and over.” It really inspires us to pay attention to our phrasing, doesn’t it?
I love that you sat at the kids’ table, and the meaningful imagery that provides. And I, too, was happy to spend time with Hamnet this summer.
Kathryn – thanks for a terrific post with some truly wonderful examples!
Like you, I believe readers delight in extraordinary writing even in non-literary genres. There’s a feature I used to know how to access in my Kindle, that showed how many readers had highlighted – and sometimes commented on – specific passages of books. It was fascinating to see this happen in my own book, and really validating when you see dozens or hundreds who were clearly moved by the same passage. And my stuff is NOT literary fiction by any stretch – it’s more the literary equivalent of a Hugh Grant movie. :)
Bottom line: extraordinary writing IS noticed and appreciated, so it’s something I think we should all strive for. Thanks for such a vivid reminder!
Ugh. My comment didn’t track again—please see below! I always appreciate meeting up with you in the comments!
Hey Keith, loved your response today and there is nothing wrong with a good Hugh Grant movie. Happy writing, Beth
Kathryn, your post reminded me of my mother–such an ordinary woman, yet extraordinary in the ways she showed her love, peeling and feeding us oranges (they were sweeter when fed by her own hands), taking me aside to reprimand me so that I might not be embarrassed in front of my friends, allowing me to read just one more chapter (which I quickly finished and started another–she told me she knew my ways but let me read anyway).
The example of losing patience is exactly how I feel but didn’t have the words for before. And I love that title: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. Must look it up. Thank you Kathryn for passing on that wonderful advice reminding us to polish our prose so that it’s fresh.
I always love your comments, Vijaya, which offer a small literary tour of their own. I love this description of your mother and her kind regard for you! “This reminds me of” is a great game to play for a writer.
Saunders’ book is a great way to geek out on literary analysis and to constantly consider the point of it all—I adore his commentary on the stories. Enjoy!
Hi Keith, I love your writing, Hugh Grant or no (but yes please), and find it very moving. I’m always impressed when authors (like you!) can pull off a delightfully insightful passage with simple wording.
Funny thing about “highlighters” when I’m reading the work of others: I ALWAYS underline different things than the general population of readers does! “1,258 highlighters” will go for the quotes that will work as independent memes; I tend to go for more character-specific stuff.
But like you, I thought it was fun to check out the highlighters in the ebooks of my own novels. After recovering from the fact that anyone would want to underline anything they found there, I enjoyed the rare inside peek into the minds of my readers.
Kathryn, another amazing article. I love how you use examples from recent novels to make your points. I have read the Saunders book, Hamnet, The Dutch House and Writers and Lovers, so the examples were reminders of those great books. I LOVE the charcoal briquets passage. The discussion in the comments about that passage was instructive for me; sometimes I will get carried away writing something fresh and nuanced only to view it as over-the-top, later on. It’s hard to know when it’s just right, but it’s helpful to know it must do some crucial work like revealing character or presenting a state of mind.
I am always inspired by your insightful and literary posts. Thanks for being a kind voice in my ear always urging me to do better.
Hi Sheree, our reading tastes are much the same (even though the books were very different!). Asking if any of the language is over-the-top is something you can always ask a beta readers, but if you get varying responses, just leave it if you think it works. Not all voices fit all readers! As you know, so much of reading is subjective, and as an art form, we want it to stay that way!
And thanks so much for reading, and for your kind words.
I am sorry to come to your fine post so late (and I’ll save most of it to savor later), but I’m curious about O’Farrell’s Hamnet. I haven’t read the book, but assume O’Farrell lets her readers know that Hamnet was Shakespeare’s son, one of the Bard’s three children, and that he died at eleven. Am I right?
Hi Barry, I tried hard not to include spoilers in these examples, but… O’Farrell was very clever in how she pulled off this book. While she never identifies Hamnet’s father by name, readers can add up who he is…as can you. ;)
Thanks for stopping in!
One more thing, Kathryn (sorry to again be WU’s grumpy old man). Your post takes aim–very effectively–at the issue of cliche. It’s a bad problem that’s getting worse, and is probably irreversible, like global warming. Many readers are made uncomfortable by the absence of cliches. We’re up to our necks in them, in movies, TV dramas and news shows. Some consumers of language are so accustomed to cliches that the extra “work” needed to take in something really fresh is unsettling. But the worst of it is how cliche-ridden so much thinking and expression has become in emotional and spiritual terms. That I think is what George Saunders is talking about.
The proliferation of types of media was bound to head in a repetitive direction, I suppose. And those trying to “belong” in the new clique of the social-media-acceptable are bending our lexicon with new waves of “it” terms I will never use (rest assured, you will never be my “peep”). So I get you, there’s plenty to feel grumpy about—although expressing it as “irreversible, like global warming” made me laugh out loud! So maybe we need not despair. As the world continues to spin, we’ll come up with new fresh pairings that will delight our readers and give them hope that maybe there IS something new under the sun. Thanks for the wording in your comment, that offers such a good example!
Great post, Kathryn–and delicious examples that remind us what we love about beautiful, effective writing!
Thanks so much, Tiffany!
What a revealing gathering of writing. Wonderful examples. Thank you.