Copying a Master

As things turned out they need hardly have bothered, for by this time, the "Dawn Treader" was gliding over a part of the sea which seemed to be uninhabited. No one except Lucy saw anything more of the People and even she had only one short glimpse. All the morning on the following day they sailed in fairly shallow water and the bottom was weedy. Just before midday Lucy saw a large shoal of fishes grazing on the weed. They were all eating steadily and all moving in the same direction. "Just like a flock of sheep," thought Lucy. Suddenly she saw a little Sea Girl of about her own age in the middle of them—a quiet, lonely looking girl with a sort of crook in her hand. Lucy felt sure that this girl must be a sheepherdess—or perhaps a fish-herdess—and that the shoal was really a flock at pasture. Both the fishes and the girl were quite close to the surface. And just as the girl, gliding in the shallow water, and Lucy, leaning over the bulwark, came opposite to one another, the girl looked up and stared straight into Lucy's face. Neither could speak to the other and in a moment the Sea Girl dropped astern. But Lucy will never forget her face. It did not look frightened or angry like those of the other Sea People. Lucy had liked that girl and she felt certain that the girl had liked her. In that one moment they had somehow become friends. There does not seem to be much change of their meeting again in that world or any other. But if they ever do they will rush together with their hands held out.

I stumbled onto this passage entirely by random chance. My women's writing group—fresh from the triumph of hosting our first, highly-successful writing conference—is now becoming more focused in our writing, which has led to our Fearless Leader actually doling out assignments between meetings! (The better to focus our efforts, my dears.) Our first assignment (part one) was to locate a paragraph of writing by one of our favorite authors, copy it, and explain why it was so good.

Having had little difficulty arriving at C. S. Lewis as one of my greatest favorites of long-standing, I had similar ease in selecting a work from which to make my one-paragraph pick: The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader", my favorite in the classic series The Chronicles of Narnia.

But selecting a single, excellent paragraph to discuss ... that was something more of a challenge. What paragraph to pick? Much as I would like, I did not have time to spare re-reading the entire book—besides, there would be far too many wonderful options from which to choose. I thought of various scenes, and spent a little time debating the merits of this one or that one, but then I flipped through the book and randomly (?) stopped on page 202, which, in my battered old copy, happens to be the beginning of Chapter XVI, aka, "The Very End of the World".

If you're not familiar with the book—and if you're not, by golly, you should be! Go read it! GO READ THE WHOLE SERIES!—you should know that it's not at all the Armageddon-esque chapter that the title may make it appear. Actually, you may have gathered that from the excerpt, which I have just now decided to leave oddly situated at the top of this here blather, rather than relocate it more towards the interior, which would likely make more sense.

Anyway, it's a lovely, descriptive chapter, largely—and strongly—detailing all of the marvelous trimmings of a physically flat world, as our heroes explore the outer-most edge of it. And as the second paragraph in the chapter—the one I selected—shows, C. S. Lewis has a remarkable gift of being able to tell stories within a story, rendering what is a very small part of the WHOLE story—and, strictly speaking, not a "necessary" part—as vivid and beautiful a memory as the story itself.

It's an under-rated skill, perhaps, but a vital one, I think. A story—any story—is not a self-contained system, after all ... it's not a unit unto itself. A story is a viewpoint, and it intersects other stories in too many junctures to possibly do justice to them all, but likewise, an occasional sidebar can make the whole story ever so much more intimate, full, and enriching. And it at least hints at the fact that there are so many other viewpoints that could be equally enthralling, if only there were time and space to include them all.

It's like if you're on your way to the grocery store—hardly "The Very End of The World", but bear with me—and you're stuck in traffic and the baby is screaming and you can't stop thinking about the fact that your lovely new house has been horribly damaged by water because that jackass of a plumber managed to fuck up the piping to the washer, and then because he WALKED OUT during the test run, the resulting water damage from a full load's worth of "test" laundry is probably going to result in you having to get the floor of the laundry room (aka, the ceiling of the guest room) redone, and then you turn your head out of traffic and out of the chaos of thought and nap-resistant child, and you see this old woman cradling a bouquet of daffodils and smiling ... smiling like those flowers meant more than anything right at that moment ... and then, you realize, you are smiling too ... just a little, but a true smile nevertheless!

That sort of detail, albeit not strictly necessary to telling the main story—or, anyway, the story you set out to tell—is VITAL. It's something C. S. Lewis is so incredibly good at, and it sucks the reader in more deeply, and the more deeply the reader is involved, the more real the story feels. You can be skimming over the sea of a flat world—a FLAT WORLD—and looking at Sea People and it STILL feels more real, because of the connections that we are accustomed to making in the daily stories of our own lives are also to be found within this story ... connections of detail, people, and yes, even digressions. ;)

One thing that bothered me, though, as I was re-typing my chosen paragraph, was the way that C. S. Lewis seems generally opposed to the use of commas. I, myself, would have included so many more throughout that paragraph, that it occurred to me to wonder why—which, I have to say, made me clearly see the reason that our Fearless Leader had very explicitly said to COPY the paragraph; copying has a way of focusing attention to the details of writing not unlike the way that the details of the story have a way of focusing attention to involvement.

It seemed to me, as I considered why C. S. Lewis would choose not to put a comma after, say, "As things turned out" or "Just before midday" or "Suddenly", that this, too, was another technique by which he entrapped his reader in his creation. When I read the sentences in question without typing them, they do not scream to my editing sensibilities about missing commas—that only happens when I'm typing them out. When I'm READING, I'm moving faster because those commas aren't around to slow me down. I'm not speed-bumped by the time of day, or delayed by the information conveyed by "Suddenly"—everything moves along quite quickly, despite the length of the paragraph, until I get to the point where C. S. Lewis wants me to slow down:

And just as the girl, gliding in the shallow water, and Lucy, leaning over the bulwark, came opposite to one another, the girl looked up and stared straight into Lucy's face.

Here, C. S. Lewis goes from zero to sixty in terms of comma use. He's brought the reader along on the journey—a necessarily lengthy journey—and now he wants the reader to be caught in the moment where Lucy, across the divide between air and water, somehow recognizes a kindred spirit and latches on, in an unbreakable bond, even though she never actually "meets" her friend.

For a paragraph that took a surprising amount of time to type out, the wealth of information and feeling that is conveyed makes it seem actually compact ... and that, too, is a masterful technique worth emulating.

Our Fearless Leader explained, when she assigned this exercise, that one way artists learn is from copying the masters, and after trying the writing equivalent, I can certainly see why. It's but one of many ways to learn more about the craft that is my passion, and I'm glad to have made the effort.

Kicking my comma habit is a bit of a humongous goal to set, but anything that supports my natural tendency to digress, THAT I can fully support!