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September 12, 2008
...God’s Love Seemed Lost Upon Him
I know this piece is six months old, but it’s been floating a while for me and when I started looking for something to talk about it seemed a good choice.
I’ve no idea who writingstatic is, and can’t remember where I discovered him/her, and maybe it’s better that way. 16 Ways to Make Your Blogjuice More Palatable tells us that we should be selling an identity along with our site, but for fiction writers that’s surely just a distraction.
So there are two hums coming off this piece for me: power and compactness. Power being the theme, compactness being the delivery. There’s an impression details carefully culled from the full passage of childhood, looked back at from a distance. I like that the father’s drink is Power’s. I don’t know if that’s an accident.
It’s kind of perfect. The boy becomes a man by his father’s example. Sports beats academics. Physicality is strength. His other gifts are worth nothing when held against what his body can do for him.
His father “read no further than the back five pages (and as the years progressed, ten, then thirty) of the newspaper.” So the changes in the kid mirror changes in the greater world. The “great ancient shady trees” are reduced to weak saplings, easily destroyed by the emerging power of the new generation. Unrecoverable.
And it’s rushed. It’s ten or fifteen beautiful details crammed into 500 words. Some of my favourite writing online shows this. This is what I mean when I talk about it assuming a new format. Novels wouldn’t sick this much on us in such a short space. Short stories are longer. Its closest analogue is maybe freeform-poetry?
There are parts I might have tightened slightly, to smoothen its flow. But it’s always the way, isn’t it? Anyone could level the same criticism against everything I’ve ever written. Honestly, I didn’t realise how flipping considered every note of this was until I started to break it down, sentence by sentence. It’s a sobering thought.
