June 16, 2020
Mastery has always fascinated me. My first encounter was in grade school. A boy named Lucas who drew tree-cities full of mushroom people. My crude attempts to mimic him made his facility seem magical. Everything I was good at I was just good at. Lucas must have a gift I decided, and I gave up any attempt to develop skills I could not master in twenty minutes. That practice and instruction will work is something that is not obvious and which must be taught (especially, because of our obsession with testing which teaches nothing but – don’t be wrong!).
I wanted to visit the world of Lucas’ drawings just like a kid who reads C.S. Lewis or J.K. Rowling wants to live their life in Narnia or Hogwarts. In particular, I remember Lucas’ use of shadows and his ability to create perspective. Writing also has skills like this. Sometimes these skills are called craft and craft can be taught, observed, practiced, and mastered.
I say all this to introduce one such display I saw in a story I only managed to read yesterday. The writer is Michael Lapointe, and the story, published in The Walrus, is called Candidate (subsequently collected in Best Canadian Stories 2018 and long-listed for the 2019 Journey Prize).
The technique is how to move a narrator through time and space efficiently while carrying the reader along without losing them. Too much description or explanation and the reader gets bored; too little and they get lost.
“I was planning to go back east that summer. Kim invited me to the house, which their mom had left to them. We had coffee in the living room.”
In three sentences, the narrator makes a decision, travels across the country, gets to the house, and has coffee. We also learn his mom died and they inherited the house. Marvelous. This shit might seem obvious, but it’s harder than you think.
