Part 1
I never thought I would say this but my favourite extract is the extract from ‘The Order Of The Phoenix’. It must be after page 512(where I gave up). I like this passage the most because it is the one where the tingling sensations are the most tangible. It also goes out of its way to escape a certain mistletoe related cliché. I think that this passage is the one I can believe most, because it is not easy or smooth, it’s uncomfortable and clumsy, which I think are the two most befitting adjectives to describe love.
Part 2.
She put House Anthems- Live From Wigan Pier on. I sighed, mentally. I wish she didn’t feel comfortable enough to dance like an idiot in front of me. I wish she felt uneasy and nervous around me, at least nervous enough to consider something other then House Anthems-Live From Wigan Pier. To be honest I would prefer silence. She wouldn’t be able to pretend not to hear me.
‘Dance, dickhead’ she wailed.
‘Nah, I’m cool, thanks’.
I slumped onto the futon and mused, what a fantastic idiot. She turned back to the CD player and bent over to change to track ten. She danced through ten minutes of monotonous floorboard thumping. ‘ Cover your eyes, I need to change. I’m sweating like mad’. She obviously didn’t want me to cover my eyes, so why did I? It wasn’t like she would use it to justify turning me down. I peeped just as she was slipping into a hoodie. ‘Drink?’ ‘Yeah, Go on.’ She pulled a can of absurdly named cider from some sort of portal behind her closet, and threw it violently. I opened the can and foam went literally everywhere. Her lips curled and she laughed and tutted provocatively. She then without indication sat on my foamy lap
‘ I love you’ i gulped.
She jumped off my lap and paced, giggling, shuddering and thinking. She then turned and said:
‘I’m not and easy person to be with’
‘Ok, neither am I’
‘Yes you are, you’re perfect’.
With the realisation of what she’d just said she tore out of the house, leaving me in a puddle of Cider Oblivion foam.
In your analysis, I think you’re spot on. Life is not like, say, the poetic romance described in ‘The Great Gatsby’ (which Fitzgerald was well aware of – this segment is actually a narrator describing what, through his rose-tinted vision, he imagines Daisy and Gatsby’s courtship to be like). Instead, Rowling’s focus on the ‘uncomfortable and clumsy’ (achieved mainly through the slightly stilted and at cross-purposes dialogue) aspects of love makes this excerpt highly realistic.
ReplyDeleteI think your own attempt also achieves this high degree of realism. Like Rowling, this is partially achieved through having a good ear for naturalistic dialogue. This dialogue makes the characters really come alive. A quick note on layout, though: each separate utterance should be on its own line. So, your piece would read like this:-
‘Dance, dickhead,’ she wailed.
‘Nah, I’m cool, thanks.’
I slumped onto the futon…
I think your opening paragraph is particularly strong. It has a lovely, humorous tone, and tells the reader a lot about both the narrator and his wife in very few words. However, the idea of a woman putting on ‘House Anthems – Live From Wigan Pier’ and then dancing like an idiot made me think they were a very new couple; the woman trying to impress the man, or the two realising that they are not, in fact, that compatible. As such, I was surprised by the ‘five years into our marriage’ line – for me, they didn’t seem like a long-term couple. Things like the teasing ‘Cover your eyes’, and his dry response of ‘She obviously didn’t want me to cover my eyes’ also made me think they were a new couple, unsure of where they stood with one another.
The specificity of ‘a good ten minutes’ also threw me a bit – would someone really pace around a room in silence while their husband watched for this amount of time?
In conclusion, I thought that, like Rowling’s, your piece had a high level of realism. This was achieved through naturalistic dialogue, a good eye for details (such as the ‘absurdly named cider’), and through incisive characterisation achieved by the use of an idiosyncratic first person narrative voice. However, I simply did not believe that the pair had been married for five years. I think the piece would work far better if it were edited into a description of an early date between ‘him’ and ‘her’.
This is a really intriguing relationship. You seem to have a talent with representing people and relationships that are a bit unusual and unexpected (but always fascinating).
ReplyDeleteThe details are great, the piece is self-contained, the dialogue is natural, and I love the voice of the narrator. All in all, I'm very happy. :)
My biggest suggestion to you is to proofread. Sometimes your punctuation of dialogue is a little off, so some editing would increase the smoothness of everything. A lot of your commas are missing. For example: ‘ I love you’ i gulped.
Should be: 'I love you,' I gulped.
Great stuff. I especially love how the piece ends, with the girl running away and leaving the narrator with his cider.
Keep it up!!
Maria
Hello again,
ReplyDeleteI'm well aware that I'm beginning to sound like a broken record when I critique (and I use the word 'critique' loosely) your work...but I'm sorry, I just can't criticise your work; it's too good, and the fact that both Sarah and Maria found it so difficult to find anything to criticise is a fairly blatant testament to your talent as a writer. I don't exaggerate when I say that you would easily fit in on the third year creative writing degree that Sarah and I are doing.
There's not really much point in me going into your superlatives; my fellow moderators have listed them and I'm sure you know what they are anyway...but moreso than ever in this piece it is your flawless control of dialogue and characterisation...creating two completely different but equally believable characters.
Certainly I totally agree with Sarah that it works a billion times better with the pair on an early date...I can't imagine them as married so I assume you've edited out this scenario. The only line that I don't think works is, 'I'm not an easy person to be with', with sounds a little like a left-over line from the 'marriage scenario' and sounds very unlike something a provocative flirtatious clubbing girl would say. So if you could just find a way to retain the sentiment of the line but with a more subtle manner of conveying it then I would pretty much rate this piece as perfect,
Well done again,
Eoghan 'makes Sue Lawley look like a member of the Gestapo' Lavery