“The Star” Write Up by Ash Haq

Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star” opens with the line, “It is three thousand light years to the Vatican”, which immediately pulls the reader in by meshing a pair of opposing subjects, astrophysics and religion, in a compelling way. This juxtaposition continues to carry the entire plot. Also, the beginning says a lot about the narrator immediately, as the Vatican is the first landmark on earth that comes to his mind.

So in theory, many components of this plot would be stereotypical for sci-fi: a team of scientists from earth travel through space and discover new worlds. However, what sets it apart is the narrator: basically a Jesuit priest on a spaceship. As you can imagine, that causes lots of internal conflict as he grapples with the way that the science in front of him contradicts Christianity, which was previously all he’d known. At some point we have all had to compare and contrast the two, and this common debate is portrayed here in a surreal and speculative way.

The first few passages mainly exist to show the dual nature of the narrator’s alliances. Again, it is established that he is grappling with this problem when he refers to the crucifix on his wall as an “empty symbol”, questioning his faith for the first time in his life. Obviously the crucifix is a symbol, but so is the Mark IV computer that it hangs above. They represent religion and science laid side by side in the narrator’s mind. Additionally, the other scientists are amused by his circumstances.

Another way Clarke makes the story more memorable is through imagery. One really powerful example is,

Even if the pylon above the Vault had been destroyed, this would have remained, an immovable and all-but eternal beacon calling to the stars.

This passage shows how the universe operates on a much smaller scale than we imagine, and the narrator’s discovery that the trivial events that consume our lives are practically insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

Something else that’s pretty important is the description of the children playing on a blue beach in another galaxy before that planet was destroyed. It humanizes them so we understand that we are just as vulnerable to the volatile whims of the universe.

The narrative structure of the piece helps convey the theme. The priest varies whom he is talking to throughout the story. Sometimes it seems like he is thinking to himself, sometimes he addresses an unnamed “you”, other times St. Ignatius Loyola (the founder of the Jesuits), and finally he directly addresses God. This shows the escalation of his train of thought, which culminates in a direct statement of the theme:

Whether that race has done good or evil during its lifetime will make no difference in the end: there is no divine justice, for there is no God.

Some people will disagree with this message obviously but that’s okay.

Also, if you didn’t catch the meaning of the last line: the star of Bethlehem was actually the Phoenix Nebula they’d been studying. So the “star” that accompanied the advent of Christ, a symbol of new life, turned out to have destroyed a planet with civilizations in their prime. The irony of this situation is what closes the story.

I think something we can all take away from this piece is the way the author uses imagery. He chooses which phrases will resonate with the reader and only uses those, which is important for any writer to learn how to do. Also, I like how he was able to come up with a situation that literally sounds like a joke and take the plot to interesting and poignant places.

 

“The Hippies” Write Up by Dante Rose

The article “The Hippies” by Hunter S. Thompson is an extremely captivating meditation on a culture that once existed and the purpose it served (or didn’t) at the time. Throughout the article Hunter S. Thompson repeatedly states the Beat Generation directly leads into the Hippie Generation and the two movements share many parallels. He also states his opinions on the Hippie movement, both negative and positive and isn’t biased or condescending, he just told it how it was, he really paints clear and vivid picture here, and by using direct quotes from two polar opposite sides of the spectrum allows the reader to naturally form their own opinion (if one hadn’t already previously had an opinion on the matter). The pacing and style of this article is crafted masterfully and his wit and critical thinking and reflection are what really drives the piece and elevates it to such a high level. Everything he says ends up tying together in flawless cohesion. The way he talks about hippies isn’t making them out to be some kind of caricatures, it’s all laid out very human and very true. It’s great because Hunter S. Thompson was a prominent counterculture icon, yet he constantly criticized and questioned movements he was widely perceived to be involved in heavily. The world needed him to offer a different perspective and really think critically of what they’re doing and what they believe. He was actually really fucking smart and people just try to put him in this little box and be like: “oh was that that guy that like did all those drugs and shit?” No one really talks about how great of a writer he was, and this piece is a prime example of to how elegantly he could manipulate the human language and come at you with some thought provoking and revolutionary ideas.

“Small Pale Humans” Write Up by Edward Clarke

Daniel Spinks’ “Small Pale Humans” was quite enthralling for multiple reasons, the first and foremost being the exquisite, unique, and frequent characterization. This story pits us with a main character who talks calmly of attempted suicide, leaving his ever-faithful wife, a character who speaks proudly of nearly hitting pedestrians in a parking lot at 47 miles an hour, a character who discusses ecstatically his dangerous, nearly-fatal, daily driving techniques, while still wanting to throw up when a drive-thru cannot complete his order, as well as seeming to love his wife incredibly in his own way. The character and his thoughts show so much about him, and all his failed exploits, his little moments of sadness like the crying while eating the Arby’s sandwich that it kind of skips over quickly, quietly, the story itself seeming embarrassed of his tears. This inspires such sympathy and pity in readers because that can easily be related too. Spinks also used imagery, less frequently than characterization, in wonderfully unusual and appropriate metaphors throughout the piece, most of which also serve as more characterization for the main character.

During my brief study of this piece, I realized that one thing I really admired about it was the author’s ability to make the story quite chaotic at one’s first glance, yet have it become wonderfully deep and beautiful as the reader studied it further. I sincerely wish to be able to develop this skill.

“Dentists Without Borders” Write Up by Thomas Graham

David Sedaris is an essayist who writes from personal experience. In this piece, however, he had more of a point than his other pieces perhaps have; and this point was well chosen because it pertains to something that effects all of us, which makes it more interesting to the reader so that we have more of an investment and interest in his story. Sedaris begins “Dentists Without Borders” with his antithesis about government healthcare plans; how the main argument with American healthcare was its effectiveness, claiming that European and Canadian healthcare systems were extremely unsatisfactory, to say the least. However, Sedaris refutes that argument with an anecdote about his life in Paris, where the healthcare was genuinely phenomenal.

There is a flip side to this serious note on healthcare; Sedaris seems to love to entertain; and I personally think he’s a very funny man, but that’s just my opinion, as well as the opinion of millions of other readers. This entertainment comes from his personality and his portrayal of other characters, or at least that is what I chose to track as I read “Dentists Without Borders.”

Firstly, Sedaris’ personality shines through with his exaggeration. He states that people seem to believe that Canadian healthcare is “genocide” and that European healthcare patients “languish on cots waiting for aspirin to be invented.” This can only be seen as exaggeration. As an American, I don’t think that Europeans wait for aspirin to be reinvented. However, that doesn’t mean that I can’t appreciate that Sedaris is trying to be funny, and at least in my mind he certainly succeeds. Additionally, Sedaris states that he wishes for his medical tests to have more gravity so that “for [his] fifty dollars, [he] wants to leave the doctor’s office in tears.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to cry at the doctor’s office. I’d rather be assured that I’m healthy. Therefore we know that once again Sedaris is joshing us, and once again we cannot help but laugh, at least a little.

Another point of Sedaris’ personality is revealed through his own thoughts and opinions. In the story, Sedaris becomes worried that a benign fatty tumor is really serious cancer. I know we’ve all had that feeling. Where there’s a slight discoloration on our upper lip and we automatically think it’s cancer, just like George from Seinfeld. This makes the piece a little more relatable to a wider audience, because we all know the feeling of when we think we have cancer even though it’s really nothing malignant. Also it’s a little funny to see in someone else the reactions we have to certain things, something slightly satirical. At another point in the piece, Sedaris questions if he saw “a diploma on his wall,” referring to his doctor whose first name might be “Doctor.” This sort of paranoia is a little more grounded because there’s been an unlicensed doctor taking care of him, and that’s the sort of thing that undermines his argument a little. Therefore, one might argue that his argument is more about the success of France’s dental healthcare and not just medical healthcare, but that’s left open to the reader, because you could also argue that Sedaris is alive today, so who can say that European healthcare is all that bad after all?

Finally, Sedaris establishes humor through his interpretation of other people. He gives his doctor something of a blasé attitude, for example his doctor says, “I don’t know. Why don’t trees touch the sky” in response to Sedaris asking him if his tumor will grow much bigger. That isn’t something you would want to hear from your doctor, but the way Sedaris presents it makes it humorous. Sedaris also gives his periodontist’s assistant Dr. Barras an interesting attitude. When Sedaris complains about the gaps in his teeth, Dr. Barras tells him he just has “Good-time teeth.” Dr. Barras kind of brushes him off, while normally in an American facility the doctor might try to take care of that because they would get paid more. But in Europe the medical profession seems to be a bit more carefree. This plays right into Sedaris’ hands. He tells us what people think about European healthcare, and he even gives it some validity, but by the end Sedaris tells us that he wants to go back to his doctors even if he doesn’t need anything done. Yes, medical professionals in Europe might not be as professional as they are in America, but they still get the job done without you having to pay $300, and their attitudes are fun.

In conclusion, there are many things to be gleaned from this fantastic piece. First we learned that a nonfiction piece can have a political point and that we shouldn’t be afraid to speak our minds based on our own opinions and stories, so long as they’re truly founded and aren’t just for the sake of chaos. Then we learned the importance of characterization and its key role in creating an interest for the reader. A plot can be interesting, but a lot of the time it’s the character that makes the story. If this piece were written by some journalist it might not be so interesting, but with Sedaris’ personality in it the story became extremely interesting and a good read. Additionally we learned how to properly balance the serious point of the story and the jocular way in which it is submitted to us. Finally, we learned that this sort of interesting story makes it have the capacity to make more change. Why would a person read a story if it’s uninteresting? Therefore any story that’s trying to make a point about society should be interesting, and that way people will want to read it and might take heed.

“The Bet” Write Up by Jeylan Jones

In the captivating short story “The Bet” by Anton Chekov, a wealthy man holding a party gets into a heated debate about human rights with one of his guests. This leads to them making a bet, or as many said in Chekov’s time, a wager. A man younger than himself bet that he could spend 15 years in solitude with only simple things like cigars and writing letters to entertain him. He was, however, not given any contact with the outside world. He couldn’t see people, receive letters from them, etc. the stakes a whopping $2 million. The man thrives for almost all 15 years before dropping out because he found humanity stupid and didn’t want something as frivolous as money.

What I found particularly compelling about this story was not only the outrageous yet realistic plot, but the balance between quantity and quality of details. He spends not too much or too little, but just enough time on each detail before moving on to the next description, which is very numerous. He has a lot of details in his piece and instead of having a few details and stopping to examine every little point, he goes the less poetic route and incorporates many details and only spends about a sentence on each, which to many, makes it feel a lot more like a short story. Basically, the more abundant fine points described fairly well in the story gave me more of a complete picture than describing a few things to the point of exhaustion.

I also find the dynamic “young, ambitious, male antagonist” character an interesting archetype. This is a particularly intriguing character because he’s an antagonist who isn’t so much as casted as mean or evil but simply going against the main character, who, in fact, seems to be the cruel one, similar to the 2004 movie “Catwoman.” On that note, I would like to point out how refreshing it is to see the story from the point of view of a character who is a total Jefferson (jerk). The main character is 95% of the time made out to be a selfless hero, and the villain evil, but Chekov’s story was unique because the protagonist was the mean one and the antagonist seemed like a normal young man.

What can I find to imitate or use in my own writing? Good question. I can learn to duplicate the density of his content. Like I said, Chekov is very good at fitting the right details in the right places and knowing how long to drag them out before starting a new thought. This makes the piece flow more gracefully and evenly disperse description throughout the story. I’d like to work on that instead of focusing on one point and merely brushing against parts just as important like I sometimes do.

“The Things” Write Up by Olivia Elmers

The entirety of Peter Watts’ “The Things” is brilliantly done, but the best part is inarguably the main character itself.  One of the hardest parts of creating a character is making the end result interesting and possible to empathize with.  This is easier with character types people are already used to, such as heroic protagonists who share a reader’s values, and it’s especially difficult to accomplish with characters with completely alien mindsets and histories.  And yet, even though the protagonist of “The Things” is a literal alien who doesn’t believe in individuality or stasis, Watts manages to make the reader understand how its mind works and even empathize with it to an extent despite how divorced (hopefully) it is from the way someone reading it thinks.  The first person perspective is the main factor behind that, but also helping it along are the nonlinear chronology which shows the progression of the main character’s understanding of the world it’s stranded itself in rather than the progression of the physical story, how the story is told nearly entirely through the alien’s thoughts with barely any intrusions from the outside world, and the way Earth is glimpsed only through the alien’s point of view—in seeing the alien trying to understand how Earth works, it’s possible for a reader to understand the alien in turn.

“Dark Matter” Write Up by Angelica Atkins

In the story “Dark Matter” by B. J Novak, I highlighted imagery and characterization. The story is driven by the character and the choices he makes, and while the author doesn’t use that many images, the ones that he does use are interesting in their context. Everything that does happen happens in first person, so the images he does note are the ones that are important to him.

I’m sure you all read it, as it is only four pages and highly entertaining. The plot is entirely driven by the main character (he doesn’t get a name), which I thought was interesting because I usually have outside of the narrator drive the plot. The first thing I thought of while reading this was that the character is my soul animal, as he has a sarcastic outlook on life and sees right through people.

This brings me to characterization. The first thing I got was that the narrator was condescending to the other people on the tour of the planetarium, and that he could see right through the scientist leading the tour. He can tell the scientist knows more because of the “smirky little smile on his fat smug face” which is an image as well. It’s not a great image, but I could picture it. He wants to know more, so gets the scientist alone and forces him to spill. He (the narrator) is very driven, and when he wants something, he gets it. He’s very driven throughout the four pages that I got to know him, and as I said before, he completely drives the plot.

Now onto images—the few that I got described the scientist, his office, and the stairs. The images play in with the way the story was told, as I cannot imagine this character going into a long-winded description comparing something to the sea and so on. The way he tells it, if he went metaphorical it would stick out like a splinter. The images that he does give describe the fat, smug scientist, the stairs, and the doorknob. It feels like it was spoken aloud at a party for laughs and someone wrote it down. I liked that he noticed the doorknob, which I have repeated three times now, it must be important, but the fact is that it isn’t, which makes me love the story even more. It’s the only good color that’s given, which I liked. The other images are the scientist’s smile and his fat hand, which show how self-important the narrator sees him as.

What I really loved about the piece was that it was rather like a fable in that the character chooses friends over the secrets of the universe. The factor that makes this not a children’s story is the language, although I think we can all handle that now. What I want to take away from this piece is the character motivation, that the character has to make a choice and may or may not be happy about it. I also like the continuity—the character is always in character, the situation is not fantastic, and the character stays human. His motivations are always clear, something I need to work on for my characters.

“Butterflies” Write Up by Hannah Wolfe

I feel like many of us take our parents for granted. Even the very idea that the person who is taking care of you and raising you is not of your flesh and blood is a foreign idea to many of us, myself included. That’s part of why Roger Dean Kiser’s “Butterflies” is so interesting; it explores an aspect of childhood that is shrouded by mystery in many ways, and with mystery comes automatic intrigue. There are also a lot of long-winded sentences, which pull us in and don’t let go until we’ve accidentally read an entire page. And by that point, we need to have some kind of conflict resolution, so we read until the end. And even after the end, and even after we know how the story ends, it still grips us, and it still leaves us wanting more.

The sentence structure mentioned above felt very childish to me, but in the sense that it made the voice of the narrator more authentic. It also gives the story a very confused and flustered tone, which is what the narrator felt during this time in his life. He also brings up the house parent and the orphanage a lot. The orphanage is only portrayed as a place where people’s souls go to die, and people who live there become cruel and stone-like. The house parent is only shown as murderous towards the butterflies, which are the only thing the narrator casts in good light. There is no other hand, no concession. This is also characteristic of a young child who lacks the intellectual development to fully understand counterarguments, so it is believable to us that we would see a “biased” view of the institution and its workers. These techniques all help portray Kiser’s ultimate purpose, which is to symbolize the way that orphanages affect the lives of young children. This idea of the ruination of innocence and just general violence against those who cannot defend themselves is enough to drive strong emotions into anyone. This all sums up to a story that is poignant and shocking, and makes us reevaluate the way we view our parents. It serves to remind us that even when we think we are the most hopeless beings on Earth, there is always someone who is suffering worse.

This story had a great ending, one that wasn’t cheesy or melodramatic; it was just heartbreaking. I think writing something that is genuinely sad is very hard to do, because I often feel like the writer is too close to the emotion to know what it feels like to someone who has not experienced it firsthand. Kiser, I felt, did a wonderful job of making us feel empathy for this child who we did not know, who was growing up in conditions many of us have probably not experienced. That, the skill to write something truly tragic, is the main takeaway I have from this story. I also thought that the symbolism in this story was artfully done. It was subtle, and even when he said it outright, is was almost too subtle to catch. I think it’s really important not to be obnoxious to your readers, and heavy handed symbolism is a quick ticket to losing the audience. Kiser, however, teases us with these beautiful images and symbols and refuses to tell us what they mean in an obvious or unimportant way. That’s very admirable to me, and I think that it’s one of the story’s biggest strengths.

This story is structured somewhat chronologically with moments of reflection in the beginning and fifth paragraphs because it is a story about a specific event in the narrator’s life that changed the way he viewed the world. It gives us an idea of what his state of mind was at the time versus what he thinks now, and plants a seed in the back of our mind that asks, “What has crushed this man’s spirit?” while we read. He uses the image of the butterflies resting on his arms and head to show us that both he and the butterflies are spots of innocence in the narrator’s corrupted world, and also uses the image of the butterfly with the broken wing to show that destruction of innocence, be it by the narrator’s mistake or the house parent’s cruel hobby. There is also the powerful image of the boy being pounded over the head with the “butterfly pieces” (which I personally would have used as the title for this piece), which portrays that his innocence will be what does him in.

Ultimately, the narrator represents the orphanage’s destruction of who he was as a person through the death of the butterflies, paralleling their beauty and serenity to his own, and letting the audience know that for both him and the butterflies, the orphanage was a bad place to live.

Intersecting Character Arcs Plot The Leftovers

I haven’t watched the series adaptation yet, so I have no idea how many seasons I might be about to spoil…

Tom Perrotta’s novel The Leftovers (2011) has five focal characters, four immediate family members–two parents, Laurie and Kevin, and their near-grown son, Tom, and daughter, Jill–and a woman, Nora, one of the Garvey family’s fellow Mapleton citizens. Nora serves as a foil to the Garveys, having lost her husband and two young children in the catastrophic event that occurred prior to the novel’s beginning, in which millions of the world’s citizens disappeared in a Rapture-like event that would seem not to be the Rapture from the number of sinning nonbelievers who vanished.

The Garveys have all remained in tact following the non-Rapture–at least physically. But the family itself has pretty much fallen apart. The main action of the book occurs three years after the non-Rapture. Laurie has run off to join the Guilty Remnant, a cult-like group that refuses to carry on with life as usual in the wake of what’s happened. Kevin has become mayor of the small town, trying to restore normalcy through the very activities his wife has fled. Jill, a senior in high school, slips from stellar student to party animal when her new friend Aimee moves into the house. Tom, away at college when the non-Rapture happened, has also joined a cult-like group that differs from the Guilty Remnant in that it follows a single leader, Holy Wayne, whose pregnant teen wife Tom is charged with protecting once Holy Wayne is arrested for having sex with teens.

The book, with five main characters, is notably divided into five parts, though these aren’t individually given to each character. Instead each chapter flits between the main characters’ points of view, switching at section breaks, representative of the ongoing influence the characters have over one another, and the entanglement of their fates.

Kevin begins dating Nora, who finds herself unable to emotionally invest in him, and so Kevin increasingly takes solace from a questionable developing friendship with Jill’s friend Aimee, who, once she’s drawn Jill into sufficient delinquency, abandons the party scene for a job and maturity. Jill, clearly the one suffering the most from her mother’s absence, hangs out with friends she doesn’t emotionally connect with and is eventually persuaded by a former teacher to swing by the Guilty Remnant’s headquarters to see how she likes things there. Tom falls in love with his pregnant charge Christine as they travel across the country together disguised as “Barefoot People” and await the birth of an alleged prophet. The Guilty Remnant, whose members work in pairs, partners Laurie with Meg, whom she forms a strong bond with and is eventually ordered to kill as part of a G.R. tradition in which a martyr situation is staged to call the public’s attention to the fact that things ain’t ever gonna be the way they used to be. Nora, following the flameout with Kevin, decides something is irrevocably broken inside her and to change her identity and appearance and move away.

As per standard Perrotta fare, what initially appears to be merely character-driven vignettes showing us what life would be like in the wake of such an odd incomprehensible disaster, making us ponder how our actions and reactions define us and how we ourselves would react if put to such a test, is actually tightly plotted. The threads come together in a bow that’s pretty much as neat as it can be without being too neat. The plot trajectory could be described by a passage from the last chapter, when Kevin’s playing a softball game:

It must have been a towering shot, because it seemed for a second or two that the ball had left the earth’s atmosphere and wouldn’t be coming down. And then he saw it, a bright speck streaking across the sky, arcing downward. He lifted his arm and opened his glove. The ball dropped into the pocket with a resounding smack, as if it had been heading there the whole time and was happy to reach its destination.

And just as that ball is reaching its destination, so are the plot threads. While Kevin is at that game bumming out about Aimee’s having moved out that day, Tom, whom his dad hasn’t seen in probably a year and whom Christine has left with the baby after Holy Wayne finally plead guilty to his crimes, swings by and leaves the still nameless baby on his father’s front porch. Nora then discovers the baby when she comes by to leave Kevin a note telling him she’s leaving forever. Meanwhile, Jill is on her way to her very first “sleepover” at the Guilty Remnant when she hears a gunshot–Meg killing herself when Laurie is unable to pull the trigger. Laurie gets in a pickup car that speeds off, and in the next scene we see a car stop in front of Jill. But it’s not Laurie’s. It’s two stoner acquaintances of Jill’s from school whom she refused a ride from early on in the novel in an effort not to skip a chemistry test she winds up being too late to take anyway–a scene that seems trivial until you realize later that this was Jill’s last-ditch effort to cling to her old pre-tragedy self, the moment she realizes it’s too late and she can’t anymore. (This is the dilemma all the characters are facing to one extent or another, the organizing principle dictating what scenes we’re getting: attempts to salvage and/or discard their pre-tragedy identities.) This time, Jill accepts a ride from them, choosing not to go down the path her mother went down to the Guilty Remnant. And finally, in the last scene, Kevin returns home from his game, the big question being what he will or won’t find on the porch. He finds Nora, holding the baby. And the last line:

“Look what I found,” she told him.

Perrotta’s treatment of this plot embodies the difference between literary fiction and fiction designed purely for mindless entertainment. In the latter, the plot trajectory would have been dictated by the discovery/revelation of what actually literally happened with that whole non-Rapture. We would have gotten some explanation about where the disappeared had gone, or where they had gone would wind up becoming directly relevant to the plot in some way–like someone coming back from the beyond, or a followup catastrophe occurring. The question of what was the unifying factor in those who disappeared would likely be answered or at least broached. But none of that is what this book is about. It’s about how we live our lives in the face of the unknown, how we get out of bed every morning when we know in the backs of our minds that the eventual price for being able to do so will be death. Really, the characters in the novel have just entered a more extreme version of our own circumstances. The non-Rapture event merely presents them with more unignorable evidence of the plight we’re already in–that we’ll all disappear one day, and we have no idea where we’ll go when we do. A plot that actually answered that question wouldn’t be true to life. It would be an escape from it.

-SCR

“The Pelican Bar” Write Up by Talis Bradbery

So for the story “The Pelican Bar” by Karen Joy Fowler, I focused on setting and images. This story is full of images as it is constantly describing how Norah is feeling and exactly what’s going on. The journey the character takes is much wider than the amount of places or relative locations mentioned and described in this story.

So for the people that DID NOT read the story, the first thing I want to say is that YOU SHOULD READ IT. This story’s plot and the things that that occur really make you question your life choices and the way you handle certain situations. I wouldn’t say it CHANGED my life, but it defiantly made me think. So the second thing I will say is that this story’s plot is AMAZING. The main character Norah, encounters so many situations that question who she thinks she is and who she really is. The journey she takes and the experiences she endures are quite rough and cruel, but she learns.

Now onto the topic of setting. The setting was obviously a HUGE part of the story, and every place in the story had a really deep effect on Norah and she took in her surroundings and voiced her opinion on them. Obviously the main place in the story is an old motel, but the Pelican Bar is a more emotionally connected place to Norah, and that’s what she looks forward to when she eventually gets out. After she gets out, after 2 years, the first place she goes is to the ocean which could represent the “warm embrace” that she got from her parents when she got out, which burned her wounds and rashes, but she knew it was helping. I still think that the Pelican Bar was her only destination and since she had been ruined as a person, she had nothing and nowhere else to go. The Pelican Bar represents home in this story and is her “secret” which she kept for so long. The Pelican Bar is the story.

So now onto Images, which are everywhere in the story, making me want to throw up, but they are crucial for a GREAT story, and they are very prominent in this story. For some reason the line, “They seemed to think there was water in the pool, fresh fruit at lunchtime,” stuck out for me and the author included selection of details like these and it really built up the story. This helps the story in ways most authors cannot achieve and sets all sorts of tones and themes.

There are many ways I could incorporate this author’s writing techniques and fluidity of writing into my own. The tone of this story was deliberately created like this, and a lot of times with my writing, the tone just comes naturally as I write, and I would love to learn how to control that exampled. I would love to, over time, learn how to incorporate those small details that really build a story and make it unforgettable. So many of the details of the way she was living, the description of the other people there and the setting really put you in her shoes, and I would love to be able to do that with my writing. I think that sometimes my writing can get vague and uncontrolled, but this author was able to stay on topic and make it super cool and flowy.