Day 276: Writing Exercise 1, Toni Morrison

I outlined a writing exercise I'm going to do this week in my previous post. The gist is, I'm going to pick a randomly selected author, and try to write something in their style. I won't be able to replicate a complete style across multiple books or anything, but I am going to pick an excerpt from a book of theirs that I've read and use that as a basis. First I'll do a short analysis and then try my best to incorporate the elements of their style that I notice into a sample of writing that I will include at the end.

Unfortunately for me, I got what is probably the hardest author on the list for my first go, Toni Morrison. She's known for having mastered the 'stream of consciousness' style, where thoughts just flow like water. Her stories freely move between current events, memories, inner monologue, and dialogue. They often have fantastical elements and a mystic feel to them. Here is one of my favorite excerpts from 'Beloved' that I think could be an interesting basis for a short story.

"Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”

“Can other people see it?” asked Denver.

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm—every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there—you who never was there—if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you."

I believe the idea here is that memories and events that occurred in the past are still available for people to access in the present. If you go to a place where something was or is, the memories that people collected there remain, waiting to be rediscovered. I'm going to take this idea and try to write a couple of paragraphs where a character encounters a memory like this.

As far as Morrison's style goes, there are a few points I want to focus on. One, the above passage is all dialogue, so I'd like to write some dialogue as well. Two, there's a certain rhythm to way the speaker, Sethe, speaks. Her sentences vary in length and purpose from line to line. Here for example:

Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear.

She says a couple of sentences that reinforce what Denver has asked. Then she makes a point of her own. Then she uses another short sentence to reinforce what was just said. Then she'll make a new conjecture in the next sentence, and answer her own statements with a short sentence. It goes, statement -> reinforce -> statement -> reinforce -> bigger statement -> several reinforcing statements, etc.

She'll often repeat or rephrase a word for clarification, as she does in the previous example. Here she uses dashes to bracket out a clarifying statement, giving a choppier flow to the dialogue:

Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays,

Other points I've noticed is that she's not afraid to start sentences with and, but, or oh, and has a looser relationship with grammar when Sethe is speaking than when she's narrating. She also tends to invert certain phrasing to evoke a more archaic style, as in the following:

every tree and grass blade of it dies

No contemporary speaker would phrase it that way, and maybe nobody would have phrased it that way in the past either, but it doesn't matter. It still gives a sense that this speaker is living in a different time. It gives the whole excerpt a more mystical feeling too. I'll try my best to replicate that, even that point is a little more slippery.

I can tell the passage is in past tense by the asked Denver dialogue tag, but I don't think it will make much of a difference if I go for mostly dialogue. I'll still put any narration in past tense for consistency's sake though.

Well, that's about all I can pick out. I think if I incorporate those points I mentioned I should get pretty close to the vibe in the passage. All that's left is to give it a go. I'm going to use Alder and Balder for names. I use these when I don't know what to name characters but I don't want to use A and B.

A dirt road could turn to a pile of dust in just a couple weeks if no rain ever fell, and Alder could hardly even recall the last time moisture had fallen on his head. He and Balder walked carefully, trying not to shuffle the dust around too much, otherwise it would fill every crevice in no time at all. Despite best efforts, their boots still kicked up a fine powder that left a reddish outline on his clothes, his hair, his mind. Or maybe it was the fine film on his glasses that gave the impression. Water had become so scarce he could smell it from miles away, like a trained hound. He caught a whiff of it then.

"You smell that?" Alder said.

"No," Balder said, "smell what?"

"I smell water." He stopped by the fence that once separated road from field. Now it only made an arbitrary line in the dirt. "It's right here."

Balder looked where he was standing, then off into the once-field, and beyond to a thicket of slowly drying trees. There was not a drop in sight.

"There's nothing to smell."

"Yes, there is. I can smell it. A field full of water, water everywhere, and grass, right here. Lots of people-- a whole crowd. Music too."

"Music doesn't have a smell. You've gone crazy."

"No, I mean I hear it. Like it's right there. A big crowd all clapping their hands along to the music. They're standing on grass. That's how I smell the water. Everyone is moving back and forth, like the wind's blowing them around, trampling on the blades and putting all that moisture into the air. It's muddy. I smell the sweat too. Someone's whistling along to the music right next to us. You don't hear that?"

"There's nothing to hear. Nothing to smell. The heat's got to you. Come on, we've got to get a move on before the Sun's up."

There's not much to this passage, but I think I got most of what I wanted. It's really hard to capture Morrison's style. I picked an excerpt of hers with plenty of dialogue to avoid the more winding, lengthy passages that really make her style what it is. I may try again on my own, but I don't plan on putting that on the blog, mostly to spare myself the embarrassment. Hopefully this was as entertaining an exercise for you as it was for me.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley