A Master of Repetition

My first encounter with the writing of Gary D. Schmidt has left me awed and a bit envious. In Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, he creates a gripping coming-of-age story, a tale of love and injustice that can change the lives of the children who read it. And he does it with enviable artistry, much like Cat Weatherill, whose work I wrote about earlier.

For a review of the story, see my book blog. Here I’ll focus on his style.

Schmidt is a master of repetition and the rhythm it creates. I love the way he uses both repetition and variation in this passage. Each successive sentence grows longer as it echoes and expands the one before it. 

“Pitch one,” she said.

          So he did. The first was too high and fell short. The second was too long and lobbed over her head. But…the third went somewhere in the middle, and Lizzie, Lizzie of the steady eye and firm hand, Lizzie Bright Griffin swung and hit the stone dead center. In fact, every time Turner pitched her a stone within shouting distance, she hit it dead center—no matter how high the arch, no matter how straight the descent.

          Here Schmidt uses a series of three phrases to provide information about a character. The repetition of words and the vivid, concrete language convey in one sentence the work of a lifetime.  

[Turner] took Reverend Griffin’s hand. He wasn’t surprised that it was strong, but he was surprised by how he felt every scar that ridged the man’s palm, every cut drawn through by a quick and sharp pull on a fishline, every slit opened by an accidental knife.

(I’m reminded of Robert Newton Peck’s advice in Secrets of Successful Fiction to always show our readers the hands of our characters.)

At one point Turner needs desperately to see Lizzie, and he goes to the edge of the river  in hopes of finding her. Through repetition and use of numbers Schmidt captures perfectly the thoughts and actions of a child forced to wait as his hopes diminish. And don’t miss that wonderful metaphor at the end of the paragraph:

He waited to see if Lizzie might come around the point. He counted waves and told himself that he would leave after twenty-five had tumbled in. After that, he skipped rocks and told himself he would leave after he skipped one seven times. (He did it with the eleventh stone.) After that, he counted fifty gulls—except they came almost all at once. And then, with nothing left to count, Turner climbed back up the ledges, with a pile of loneliness on his back as heavy as nightfall.

Other great rhythmic passages:

He was almost whistling when he climbed the steps to the front porch. He was whistling for sure when he opened the door and went in. But he wasn’t whistling when he saw his father, who took two quick strides toward him, opened his hand, and slapped it flat and hard against Turner’s face.

Blue days, as the tide washed away the twin footprints Lizzie and Turner left along the beach. Blue days, as they walked among the sharp-edged mussels, prying open their blue-black shells to tickle their orange tendons. Blue days, as they sprinted against the sea breeze and chased the gulls until Turner finally, finally, finally touched a tail feather. Blue days, as they dangled their legs over the granite ledges and felt the gigantic continent beneath them.

In the next passage repetition holds together a montage of the main characters:

It rained all night, and Turner up in Phippsburg and Lizzie down on Malaga Island lay in their beds in the deep dark, their arms up behind their heads, listening to the play of the drops on their roofs. The drops played long after Turner and Lizzie had fallen asleep, and they played while Turner’s mother and father lay still and unmoving in the dark, and they played while Lizzie’s granddaddy sat quietly at his door, an unlit pipe in his mouth. They played across the coast all through the night, until the soft new day shrugged itself awake, tried on amethyst and lavender for a while, and finally decided on a pale yellow.

And did you notice the personification in the last sentence? That’s another favorite technique of Schmidt’s, one he often uses to describe a sea breeze that is Turner’s constant companion, enticing him to choose freedom over convention and presaging his choices and his fortunes. This probably wouldn’t work in an adult book, but here it’s charming:

The sea breeze, wearing its overcoat, followed him all the way until he closed the door on it. Then it tipped up into the sky and spread out, looking for a maple it could scorch or a beech it could blanch. It found the maple and went about its business, so that if Turner had looked out his front door, he might have seen the maple just past First Congregational shiver some and then coldly begin to burn into reds.

          Finally, in a passage that illustrates the heart of the book, Schmidt unleashes a deluge of vivid, action-filled verbs, often in participial (-ing) form, to make his readers feel the freedom that gives life meaning:

Two of them grabbed Turner’s hands. “Fly with us!” cried one. And they pulled him up and suddenly he was flapping his arms and running down the beach, and Lizzie was flapping hers and running alongside them, together in the midst of the swarm, and calling and calling and running and running, plashing through spent waves, cavorting up the granite ledges, wheeling around stands of pines. And when they were too spent to flap and screech anymore, they collapsed on the point, and Lizzie’s granddaddy waved them to his door. Inside, there was bread and chowder in cracked white bowls, and they all….took the food and sat on the rocks, sun-warmed and briny, and Turner could not tell if it was the scent of the chowder or the sea that filled him, and he knew that he was late again for his own dinner and he did not care.