Here's an awesome beginning:
"Miss Willerton always crumbed the table. It was her particular household accomplishment and she did it with great thoroughness. Lucia and Bertha did the dishes and Garner went into the parlor and did the Morning Press crossword puzzle. That left Miss Willerton in the dining room by herself and that was all right with Miss Willerton. Whew! Breakfast in the house was always an ordeal."
~The Crop
And some cool dialogue:
"What you got there, Joe?" one of the men in the back called, "one of them goodgovermint boys?"
"Yeah, the barber said. "He's gonna make a speech."
"I've heard too many of that kind already," the man said.
"You ain't heard one by Rayber," the barber said. "Rayber's all right. He don't know how to vote, but he's all right."
Rayber reddened. Two of the men strolled up. "This is no speech," Rayber said. "I only want to discuss it with you--sanely."
"Come on over here, Roy," the barber yelled.
"What are you trying to make of this?" Rayber muttered; then he said suddenly, "If you're calling everybody else, why don't you call your boy, George. You afraid to have him listen?"
~The Barber
I hope it inspires me to write better short stories, something I may have some time to do this week, as I am on limited spring break, which means that school is done much earlier than normal. :-)
~Connor
2 comments:
'Tis indeed skillfully written. The dialogue especially, which illustrates what I was speaking of Saturday. It's considerably harder to write like that than it looks!
I've been meaning to ask you for some time, but how are you liking Reading Like a Writer?
Yes, and regional dialect may be even harder, although it probably wasn't so hard for O'Connor. I read that one of her professors was embarrassed when he met her, because her Georgia accent was so thick that he had to ask her to write down what she was saying!
Over all, I enjoyed it very much. Prose (the aptly-named author) was careful not to lay down any iron-clad rules of writing and instead generally let great works speak for themselves. I didn't agree with everything, of course, but I thought it was a good sort of... field guide, you might say, with a lot of examples of very good writing and good explications of the passages she quotes.
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