[writing log] September 2024, part 2 of 2

"My grandma has begun commentating on the lawn care guys like a sports announcer. 'He's got the hedge trimmer now!' You see why I'm struggling to get work done."

Here’s the back half of September 2024. Important highlights include my family trip to small-town Missouri, ongoing craft analyses of Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, notes on a Backstreet Boys documentary, and spinning my wheels about Heavy for Hire.

If you want to get caught up, here’s the first half of September’s writing log:

[writing log] September 2024, Part 1 of 2

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Craft concept & process index:

• simile — 9/17, 18 — Specifically the use of similes in Demon Copperhead and how much narrative weight they carry.

• unreliable narration — 9/18 — The way Demon’s false beliefs about himself help develop his character arc.

• first-person reflective — 9/18 — Where the point of telling is in the present and the narrator has knowledge of all the events thereafter. This allows the reader access not only to the events of the past, but what the present-day narrator thinks about those moments. This is in contrast to a story where the narrator is narrating in the present and have no idea what will happen next.

• cheek-biter sentences — 9/18 — Any sentence that exists only to pace out dialogue and how to make them do more work than that.

• backstory — 9/19 — The function and purpose of rendering a character’s past; when it works and when it doesn’t.

• working outline — 9/20 — A narrative, color-coded outline I update while drafting.

• discard document — 9/20 — A place to put old ideas and plot points; not the same as a trash document.

• two layers of logic — 9/22 — The amount of explanation/motivation needed (potentially) to suspend disbelief.

• big mind & small mind — 9/26 — Separate brain states where it’s easier to plot and develop the larger picture (big mind) versus when it’s easier to make sentences and render small details (small mind).

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[Tue] September 17, 2024

Currently I'm reading Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (I'm just going to shorten it to DCH), a bildungsroman inspired by David Copperfield. So far it hasn't really added anything new to the genre, but who cares? A voicey coming-of-age story is an extremely easy sell for me. White Oleander and The Goldfinch are two of my favorite books, and those both do very similar things.

Anyway, in DCH I'm really admiring the way similes are working. For example,

It was that fall type of day where the world feels like it's about to change its mind on everything.

And,

Coach Winfield came down the stairway like something dumped out of a bucket.

At Tin House in 2017, I attended a lecture by Anthony Doerr where he did a close read on the way Flannery O'Connor uses similes. That made me see them a lot differently, as a device that complicates and thereby adds meaning to a particular image. By likening, they can also explain the unexplainable. There are some experiences and feelings that can't be rendered directly, and so a simile can clarify. For example, if you say a light bulb flickers like a lightning bug, that gives a more distinct image than just a light bulb flickering.

There are also a lot of emotional right hooks in DCH that just take me out:

I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it's a feeling you keep having, even after that's no place anymore. Probably if they dropped a bomb and there wasn't any food left on the planet, you'd still keep feeling hungry too.

And the dialogue slays, too (note this is taking place in the '90s):

"I just like what clothes I have, okay? I'm good. Can we just go?"

"You're good. This is the look you're going with, then. Color-blind scrub opens up a can of Wayne's World."

Haha, funny line, right? Then a few paragraphs later, one-hit KO:

I didn't feel like explaining how you get used to people looking at you like trash, so it's hard to care what kind of trash you put on the trash every morning.