{"id":92880,"date":"2013-12-02T21:04:33","date_gmt":"2013-12-03T04:04:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lookingcloser\/?p=92880"},"modified":"2013-12-02T21:23:30","modified_gmt":"2013-12-03T04:23:30","slug":"can-you-do-better-than-it-was-a-dark-and-stormy-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lookingcloser\/2013\/12\/can-you-do-better-than-it-was-a-dark-and-stormy-night\/","title":{"rendered":"Can You Do Better Than “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night…”?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>The temperature is falling fast. It\u2019s windy. There\u2019s snow in the rain that\u2019s splatting against the windows of my house.<\/p>\n

What is your neighborhood like on a dark and stormy night? If you were asked to describe it, what would you write?<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how a writer\u2019s description might begin:<\/p>\n

On a rainy winter evening, under the streetlights, young men in raincoats and hats hurry home through the howling wind, grumbling, while old folks cower under umbrellas on their way home to their cozy homes where their families and dogs and flat-screen TVs are waiting for them.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As the beginning of a story, that would be acceptable, I suppose.<\/p>\n

But one writer wasn\u2019t content with that. Read the beginning of his story. Read it out loud.<\/p>\n

It was six o\u2019clock on a winter\u2019s evening. Thin, dingy rain spat and drizzled past the lighted street lamps. The pavements shone long and yellow. In squeaking galoshes, with mackintosh collars up and bowlers and trilbies weeping, youngish men from the offices bundled home against the thistly wind\u2014<\/p>\n

\u2018Night, Mr Macey.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Going my way, Charlie?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Ooh, there\u2019s a pig of a night!\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Good night, Mr Swan.\u2019\u2014<\/p>\n

and older men, clinging on to the big, black circular birds of their umbrellas, were wafted back, up the gaslit hills, to safe, hot, slippered, weatherproof hearths, and wives called Mother, and old, fold fleabag dogs, and the wireless babbling.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now we\u2019re talking.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, I shared the opening pages of this story with fifteen young, aspiring writers in a college writing course. The only thing I love as much as writing is teaching. My wife Anne co-taught this course with me. We had the honor of serving as Writers in Residence at Covenant College in Georgia during Autumn Quarter. It was a fiction writing course, but the class that we had imagined was about how to improve and enrich fiction writing by practicing the disciplines of poetry. So we needed the expertise of a poet, and Anne brought her insights to meet that need.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Covenant College \u2014 Lookout Mountain, Georgia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I asked the students to pick out their favorite words and phrases from the first few pages of this story, and to highlight the lines that sounded most musical, the most biscuits-and-gravy delicious. What is a \u201cthistly wind\u201d and how is it different from a \u201cwhistling wind\u201d? What do we learn by reading that they had \u201cmackintosh collars up and bowlers and trilbies weeping\u2026\u201d? What is a trilby, anyway, and what does it mean that it\u2019s weeping?<\/p>\n

Then we turned our attention to the opening paragraphs of the students\u2019 own stories. How much else might they reveal by rewriting them? How might they draw us in for a fuller, more sensual, more suggestive experience? We encouraged them to focus fiercely upon particularity \u2014 particularity of details in that specific time and place, and particularity of dialect and dialogue. We urged them toward particularly unexpected vocabulary that might make the ordinary seem strange and somehow new.<\/p>\n

You can tell, reading about that \u201cpig of a night,\u201d that the author has experienced nights just like it.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s why Dylan Thomas composed such a smashingly specific and savory paragraph to start off one of my favorite short stories, \u201cThe Followers.\u201d<\/p>\n

We also talked about the sounds in Thomas\u2019s story, about the momentum of that paragraph that builds like a clunky old car trundling down a bumpy, rainslick road. Most of us associate musical prose with children\u2019s stories \u2014 with Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein and writers of whimsy and wit. But why should we ever stop enjoying language that snaps, crackles, and pops?<\/p>\n

Just listen to this reading of \u201cJabberwocky\u201d by Benedict Cumberbatch.<\/p>\n