Category Archives: Commonplace Book

“The work took hours, which was partly why Jimmy Quinn was so late waking up the next morning, but only partly. Eileen Quinn once observed that getting Jimmy up for school was more like performing a resurrection than providing a wake-up call; never a willing early riser, Jimmy hated mornings even in space” (Russell, p. 147).

This passage from Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow illustrates one of the challenges I at times have trouble negotiating in my own work. Clearly, Eileen Quinn is Jimmy’s mother based on the context, but the moment I saw her name, I assumed that she was his wife, since he is a grown man on a space mission. Like all readers, I bring my own perceptions and expectations to the moment, and a Jesuit mission trip to find the alien source of a deep-space signal screams hetero-colonizers to me—until eight words later, when Jimmy stops being the guy who loaded up an asteroid spaceship and instantly becomes a tousle-haired and irritable grade-school sleepyhead. It’s not often that I pay careful attention to the exact moment my assumptions in pleasure reading get upended, especially on something so small as a passing perception by a character not otherwise involved or even present in the scene. But this is flavor that helps the reader identify (or not identify) with Jimmy Quinn, and is a useful thing for a writer to do, especially when developing the reader-character connection.

All of which brings me to the challenge. I think sometimes my tangents take too long. The one above is a clause connected to its relevance by a semicolon. Mine seem to go on for paragraphs and incorporate dialogue, etc. They almost feel like early Ellen Degeneres skits, where the point gets lost in a succession of distractions and tangents until it re-emerges at the end (which is great to watch). I’m just not sure that it’s a good idea to fall down rabbit holes the way I sometimes feel like I do. Now granted, in my current WIP, the rabbit hole stories are designed to reveal or enhance the relentless broken eggshell world the protagonist and his siblings inhabit. A good day can turn on a dime, and even the best memories get tainted. This is essential to understanding why the protagonist is a mess. But I think I’m going to have to do it in a more compact way in the future, and certainly attend to whether or not the reader can follow the narrative as I continue to revise.

“When Sutty went back to Earth in the daytime, it was always to the village. At night, it was the Pale.

Yellow of brass, yellow of turmeric paste and of rice cooked with saffron, orange of marigolds, dull orange haze of sunset dust above the fields, henna red, passionflower red, dried-blood red, mud red: all the colors of sunlight in the day.”

This is the opening paragraph and a half of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Telling, part of the Hainish Cycle. What makes the passage work for me is the minimal use of adjectives and adverbs to describe this nighttime scene. The adjectives and adverbs: dull, orange. That’s it. Nouns used as adjectives (especially through prepositional phrases): brass, paste, rice, marigolds, haze, sunset, henna, passionflower, dried-blood, mud. And more to the point, all of these are earthy and distinct to a culture. Brass, turmeric, rice, saffron, henna all evoke Indian cooking in this village. The rest: paste, marigolds, dust, have, passionflower, blood, mud, all evoke an earth-bound, natural connection, and with blood and mud, a certain level of desperation in the village. What follows is that all these things are indeed so in Sutty’s life—even if only metaphorically because she’s an Observer for the Ekumen.

Note also that this is a nighttime scene. LeGuin tells us at night it was the Pale (note the capital), and summarizes the scene as daytime colors. For the sky to look like this in a village, there must be fire very close—it’s certainly not the peaceful sky most of us get to enjoy in the evening. Now how would that look?

Inkwell blackness. Black of yowling feline beyond the alley fence, of the alley itself. Black of chimney soot, of crusty syrup in a too-hot pan. Black of pen caps, binderclips, stapler and three hole punch. Purple of grapes, of eggplant. Purple of Gardeson’s Sunday stole. Purple of hyacinth and iris. He stood from his desk, cracked his back and fingers, and stepped into the evening.