If you ever want to get better at anything skill-related, like writing, it’s always a good idea to study the greats that have come before you. Without question, I would categorize Alice Munro as one of these greats.
This week, I thought we’d take a look at the first four paragraphs of one of her short stories, “Thanks for the Ride,” to see what we could learn from it and steal for ourselves as writers.
(In case you would like to finish reading the entire story, “Thanks for the Ride” comes from Dance of the Happy Shades: And Other Stories. The collection includes fifteen stories, some of which come from as early in her writing career as 1968.)
The story begins:
My cousin George and I were sitting in a restaurant called Pop’s Cafe, in a little town close to the Lake. It was getting dark in there, and they had not turned the lights on, but you could still read the signs plastered against the mirror between the fly-speckled and slightly yellow cutouts of strawberry sundaes and tomato sandwiches.
In this first paragraph, Munro sets up characters and place. The last sentence gives us an inkling of tone, time, and place.
‘Don’t ask for information,’ George read. ‘If we knew anything we wouldn’t be here’ and ‘If you’ve got nothing to do, you picked a hell of a good place to do it in.’ George always read everything out loud–posters, billboards, Burma-Shave signs, ‘Mission Creek. Population 1700. Gateway to the Bruce. We love our children.’
Munro continues establishing character and place in this paragraph with sharp specifics.
I was wondering whose sense of humor provided us with the signs. I thought it would be the man behind the cash register. Pop? Chewing on a match, looking out at the street, not watching for anything except for somebody to trip over a crack in the sidewalk or have a blowout or make a fool of himself in some way that Pop, rooted behind the cash register, huge and cynical and incurious, was never likely to do. Maybe not even that; maybe just by walking up and down, driving up and down, going places, the rest of the world proved its absurdity. You see that judgment on the faces of people looking out of windows, sitting on front steps in some little towns; so deeply, deeply uncaring they are, as if they had sources of disillusionment which they would keep, with some satisfaction, in the dark.
Munro uses three lists in this paragraph to introduce an ironic, cynical, mocking narrator. Also, Munro establishes lines of tension here.
There was only the one waitress, a pudgy girl who leaned over the counter and scraped at the polish on her fingernails. When she had flaked most of the polish off of her thumbnail she put the thumb against her teeth and rubbed the nail back and forth absorbedly. We asked her what her name was and she didn’t answer. Two or three minutes later the thumb came out of her mouth and she said, inspecting it: ‘That’s for me to know and you to find out.’
This waitress personifies place in this paragraph. One of my past writing mentors, John Keeble, a very kind and wise man, often said beginnings and endings know each other.
By now, we can predict to some extent that the story will be about care. “Thanks for the Ride” is also an elegant, graceful example of introducing your narrator later on in the story.
However, let me just clarify that the kind of analysis we’ve done is not the kind of work that you should do while drafting. It would destroy any chance of entering a “creative trance” or “the zone.” This is the kind of thing that should only be done later on, during final stages of working on a manuscript.
It’s my hope that, as writers, if we love a particular story or book, we should slow down and study it to understand why we actually love that particular story or book. We can learn a lot from it!
Until next week, write your heart out.
Photo credit: orngejuglr / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
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