Heroic Storytelling

Last month I was asked to lead a workshop on style in children's writing. It had been awhile since I wrote for children or read their books, so I assigned myself time in libraries and bookstores pulling kids' books off the shelves and scanning their pages at random for beautiful writing. Immersed in the magical world of kidlit, I felt like the ten-year-old I used to be, the one who read ten books a week during the lazy, unscheduled summers of childhood.

One of the books I plucked off the shelf simply because of its lovely title was Snowbone, a heroic fantasy by British writer and storyteller Cat Weatherill. Her energetic writing demonstrates the power of simple but vivid verbs to bring a story to life so well that modifiers become unnecessary. Here's an example describing a fire that has broken out on the deck of a pirate ship:

"It spat and clawed like a flaming tomcat. It pounced on the shattered crates. Mauled the decking. Snapped the bones of the ship. It hissed and growled. Whipped an angry, fiery tail till the hold fizzed with sparks. Then it crept forward on its belly and started licking at the remaining crates."

Glints in the Sand

Reading Phyllis Theroux's The Journal Keeper feels like strolling along a beach, my breath slowing as I take in the horizon, my skin warmed by the sun. Every once in awhile something glistens in the sand ahead or pricks my bare foot. I stop to look more closely and find a shell or a stone whose beauty I'd almost missed. I  slide it into my pocket to take home for closer examination.

"What I continually fail to note," she writes, "...is the heart-breaking, light-filled brilliance of the world I swim through like an unappreciative fish every day. Let the record show that I am grateful." 

Looking at these sentences under my desk lamp, I see--no, I hear-- that it's not just the reminder to see the beauty around us that captures my attention. It's the repeated vowel sounds--assonance again--humming their melody under the words: filled and brilliance; swim, unappreciative and fish. Who knew that the syllable prec could ever rhyme with fish?

The Music of Words

"The corpse without hands lay in the bottom of a small sailing dinghy drifting just within sight of the Suffolk coast. It was the body of a middle-aged man, a dapper little cadaver, its shroud a dark pin-striped suit which fitted the narrow body as elegantly in death as it had in life. The hand-made shoes still gleamed except for some scruffing of the toe caps, the silk tie was knotted under the prominent Adam’s apple. He had dressed with careful orthodoxy for the town, this hapless voyager; not for this lonely sea; nor for this death.

(Unnatural Causes - P.D.James)

Another great opening scene, this one by the British writer who uses murder mysteries to explore the depth and range of human emotion. The description is simple, precise, and elegant.