Huddled under my electric blanket this morning*, reading a new book, I had one of those moments. You know the ones. When you're reading something for the first time--or maybe for the five hundredth time because its one of those books that's your very favorite it speaks to your soul--and you come across some little moment or description or dialogue exchange that's perfect. Something in that little chunk of text is just delicious its so true and genuine and original.
It's like a little treasure you just discovered, and your fingers itch to grab your phone and text it, out of context, to your friend or younger sister.
Today it happened while I was doing homework--see kids, homework can be fun! But instead of texting my younger sister who probably wouldn't have found it nearly so wonderful as I had, given she was probably, (gasp) working, rather than cuddled up in bed, I thought I'd shared it with you:
"It's a mysterly to me," McTavish said."Mysterly?" Banderbrock said."Yes," McTavish said. "As in something unknown, or mysterlious."Down the Mysterly River by Bill Willingham, p. 59
Oh, mysterlious. It killed me. All it took was one letter! One letter and a perfectly "meh" exchange between an over-proud possibly-a-cat and a gruff badger transformed into a perfect little gem of humor. Though I will say that McTavish and Branderbock--the names, the characters, and the careful characterizations up to that point in the text--helped.
As a writer, I try to take note of these things. What is it that makes a book work? What makes if fresh and funny and unique, even literary?
Another example, off the top of my head, comes from a very different kind of book, E. M. Forster's A Room with a View:
As soon as he had turned his back, Lucy arose with the cunning of a maniac and stole down the arcade towards the Arno.There was something about Forster's description, "the cunning of a maniac," that not only caught hold of my imagination so well that now, four years after I read the book, I remembered the exact phrase but it also perfectly captures the essence of the moment. I can see Lucy, somewhat traumatized by the sudden fight and death she's just witnessed and befuddled by the strict Edwardian social codes of propriety, driven to try to sneak away from her benevolent but socially unacceptable friend. It's a ludicrous thing to do, crazy even given she doesn't know her way around Florence, but she attempts it and she even has the presence of mind to send Mr. Emerson on a little errand and wait until his back is turned. Even if the societal impetuses of the novel, the little moments of drama caused by what seems to my Modern mind as inconsequential social gaffes, still sometimes elude me, Mr. Emerson had me "with the cunning of a maniac." Those six words, their brilliance and perfection, were enough to establish him in my mind as literary.
Have you, as a reader or a writer, ever had one of these moments?
*You live in the basement of a house built over a hundred years ago and then let me know how you fare even in a mild New England winter
