Writing Exercise: Develop Your Craft by Alternating Perspectives
If you want to improve your writing technique then—just like building physical strength and endurance—exercise. One of the books I read for school, The Art of Fiction by John Gardner, offers many writing exercises. One is to take a simple event and describe it using the same characters and setting in five radically different ways (changes of style, tone, sentence structure, voice, psychic distance, etc.).
The event: A man gets off a bus, trips, looks around in embarrassment, and sees a woman smiling. Below are my five radically different attempts to describe this event. How would you write this scene? Email it to me!
The man, draped in purple velvet—who wears velvet in the summer in Los Angeles?—large enough to play offensive line for the Raiders, and maybe he does play for the Raiders, stood when the bus stopped but the bus didn’t stop completely—it inched closer to the sign in fits and starts—and now the purple man, holding a mobile in one hand and Infinite Jest in the other and no hands on a railing or seat, caught his right foot behind his left and I saw it in slow motion, the world just kind of paused, as he fell forward just tumbling down the bus aisle and I saw him choose—yes, I swear he chose—to drop the mobile and protect the book and not vice versa and he crashed—you’d think it was another earthquake—right on his right shoulder with the novel tucked in his other arm like a football and suddenly I recalled my mother, night after night, reading me fantasy stories before proclaiming the night was over and gently placing the closed book in its proper place on the shelf, never a scratch or mark or scuff. I smiled at the purple man and I believe he felt my mother, too.
In 1987, the National Football League Players Association went on strike and men across the league, like the Raiders’ Jacob Breele, understood the day would come when football would be over, not just for a season but for permanence. So men like Jacob began spending time learning new skills like public speaking and writing. Some men, like Jacob, even visited their first library, checked out their first book, and read their first complete novel. Some men, like Jacob, became so engrossed in their new skills that they forgot that Los Angeles buses were notorious for false stops and Jacob, well known for his false start penalties on the gridiron, fell flat on his face clutching the monster 1,079-page book he adored, smiling at the woman across the aisle thinking that this penalty hurt less than his previous ones.
They thought they owned it all: mansions, bank accounts, sports cars, Sundays, our children’s awe. One word came to mind amid all that greed and gluttony: karma. When the football players lost their jobs to the scrubs, it all came crumbling down on them and commoners could only smile at their supposed suffering. The day star lineman Jacob Breele fell on the city bus, toppling over his own huge body, all Maya could do when their eyes met across the aisle was smile.
Chairs made of brown, faded plastic, stiff as redwoods. Grimy windows locked shut, barred shut, or never able to open to begin with, some so graffitied they lacked all transparency. Air so thick with racism it was equally cloudy. A large, disturbed man covered head to toe in purple velvet falls attempting to exit the bus and all the woman across the aisle can do is laugh at him. Southern California Rapid Transit District, 1987.
Beginning in the womb, our lips stretch, curl upwards at the ends, and we smile. After bruising and tumbling as toddlers, we cry, and then we smile. After heartache in adolescence, we curse the world and the boy or girl who ripped out our insides, and then we smile at the next one we see at lunch. After graduating college, we think, where did those 22 years go?, and then we smile and rejoice with our friends over our accomplishment. After losing our job because our employer thought it could skate by with replacement staff, we wonder where our place is in the world, and we fall over and over, we fall over our savings and our possessions and even the very bus we ride for transportation, and then we smile because we can still pick ourselves back up.
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Appearances
I'll be signing books at the Spring Jewish Food and Heritage Festival on April 17 at Congregation Sons of Israel, in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, from 12:30 - 3 p.m. See the festival's flyer for information on purchasing tickets. Synagogue address: 209 E. King St., Chambersburg, PA.