Here’s the image that I had, this is all that I was able to suppose: there was Frankie’s big old black Lincoln Continental parked near a a caved-in chain link fence at the shadowed end of a cul-de-sac, a back alley someplace lost and out of the way in downtown Des Moines. The front left fender ruined; both headlights shattered. The hubcaps were missing. The wheel rims were gone. Inside, the radio had been extracted, and the empty space that had been left behind in the center of the dashboard gaped. The glove box had been pried open; it’s lock was broken and bent, its papers and pamphlets strewn.
The luxury automobile had been turned into a husk, a shell, cast off and left behind, abandoned like the firm case of a chrysalis on the underside of a branch of a tree. And there was not one trace left behind inside it of anything that had ever belonged to that girl, Frankie Crane. Not even a crushed-out cigarette with lipstick kisses on its filtered tip. She might as well have never been.
These paragraphs were the first words I read upon coming home a few years ago from my local Barnes & Noble with a book called Smithereens, which I found sitting on the bargain shelf at a cost of only a few bucks and purchased on impulse because the cover intrigued me. Once I got home I decided to thumb through it quickly just to get an idea of its overall tone and so forth and these two paragraphs were the first things I read. Immediately Dorothy Parker’s immortal words leapt to mind: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
Well, I didn’t throw it with great force but I did return it for a refund on my next trip to B&N because I thought it was the most amatuerish, poorly written (yet professionally published) thing I’d ever read.
I’ve thought of this book several times over the years since, wondering if it was really that bad after all, but I could never remember its name. Finally Google Books came along and I was able to find it by searching for the “chysalis” line. Imagine my surprise when looking up the author, Susan Taylor Chehak, to find that she’s published five novels, won numerous writing awards and taught fiction writing through universities in California and Iowa.
So what gives? Was I just in a particularly foul and critical mood the night I first read this stuff (which still seems pretty bad to me) and it’s really pretty good, or is this woman just another example of how perseverence combined with luck and a blissful unawareness of lack of talent can still attain considerable success?
It sounds fine to me. A little bit over-wrought, but I like the rhythm of the sentences and there’s a distinct authorial voice immediately evident. Not the type of writing I generally gravitate towards, but I don’t see anything particularly awful about it.
I’m having a hard time seeing a Cadillac as a Chrysalis hangng from the underside of a branch. That’s a really tortured metaphor, or simile. It’s both!
The prose is a little purple, but not horrible other than the last few lines. A better writer would have used half the words to make a stronger visual image without resorting to a categorical list of details. But there is a certain style of writing that wallows in this kind of ultra-descriptive-to-the-point-of-tediousness prose. Bret Easton Ellis comes to mind. In terms of brand names and product descriptions per page, it’s a tossup between American Psycho and a Sears Catalog. Or that’s how I remember it, anyway.
It’s writing by someone who imagines that good writing is about putting lots of stuff in, and not letting the reader do anything but follow what is being said.
It’s pretty ordinary stuff - looks straight out of creative-writing night school. Impossible to judge the author on the basis of that one paragraph, though - who knows what she has in mind for the book as a whole. It might be one particular voice that demands that style, or maybe she’s a bona fide master who’s just playing around - could be a number of reasons for a good writer producing a paragraph like that.
“creative-writing night school” - my reaction precisely. It felt to me like someone writing the way they thought writers write… does that make sense? The hubcap/rims part bothered me also. Even the two phrases before the colon were painful. All in all, it reminds me of the kind of crap I used to write in high school.
[DEL]Here’s the image that I had, this is all that I was able to suppose:[/DEL] there was Frankie’s big [DEL]old[/DEL] black Lincoln [DEL]Continental[/DEL] parked near a caved-in chain link fence at the [DEL]shadowed[/DEL] end of a cul-de-sac[DEL], a back alley someplace lost and out of the way[/DEL] in downtown Des Moines. The front left fender ruined; both headlights shattered. [DEL]The hubcaps were missing.[/DEL] The wheel rims were gone. [DEL]Inside,[/DEL] the radio had been extracted[DEL], and the empty space that had been left behind in the center of [/DEL]the dashboard gaped. The glove box had been pried open; [DEL]it’s lock was broken and bent,[/DEL] its papers and pamphlets strewn. The [DEL]luxury[/DEL] automobile had been turned into a husk, a shell, cast off and left behind[DEL], abandoned like the firm case of a chrysalis on the underside of a branch of a tree.[/DEL] And there was not one trace left behind [DEL]inside it[/DEL] of anything that had ever belonged to that girl, Frankie Crane. Not even a crushed-out cigarette with lipstick kisses on its filtered tip. She might as well have never been.
That’s better. It is just too much description. The writer needs to learn how to prune. But it isn’t all bad. Just some editing makes it readable, and there might be a good story in there somewhere. She just needs a good editor to go through her stuff with a black pen. She also needs to think carefully about what she writes. The hubcap/rims thing as mentioned; the radio inside the car. Where else would it be?
Please, it’s written as a tracking shot might be. You see the outside of the abandoned car, then you are directed to the inside to look at the empty space of the missing radio. Beginning the sentence with the word “Inside…” softens an otherwise jarring jump of the view from outside the car to inside. It’s one word for chrissake. It’s not gonna wear out your eyeballs.
I agree the paragraph needs a trim, but let’s not get the chainsaw. If you want to get concise about it, you could write, “In Des Moines, there was a wrecked abandoned car with no trace of its owner, a girl named Frankie Crane.”
But that wouldn’t be very good writing either, would it?
Is that a serious question? That’s good writing. It’s not great, but it’s much better than the original passage, which invested all its energy in describing for the reader an abandoned vehicle. Doesn’t everybody know what an abandoned vehicle looks like? Why is it important to describe it? It’s possible the narrator is summoning a collage of the various problems with the vehicle as he remembers them, which is a little better, I guess, because people tend to create lists or dense physical descriptions when trying to describe a memory to somebody, but that doesn’t make it good writing.
“the radio had been extracted” - ugh, such gross writing.
I’m not surprised the writer has taught in the creative writing workshop circuit. What’s the tired bromide? Those who can’t do, teach? Nowhere is that more true than in a creative writing workshop.
I think the descriptions of the car, including the chrysalis line, are pretty evocative. I’d say it’s not bad, but it is listy and a bit melodramatic. And I don’t really like “Here’s the image that I had” as a beginning. That doesn’t work for me.
It’s garbage. I was actually kind of relieved after I read it to find out that SA hadn’t written it himself and looking for advice. I stopped trying to formulate tactful notes after about the third or fourth sentence. I’m glad to know I can just call it dogshit and be done with it.
It’s not the worst I’ve ever seen. I was a writing tutor (basically a paper doctor) in college, and this Shakespeare compared to some of what I saw then, but it’s not professional level at all. Even Twilight is better written than this.
I hope the apostrophe in the possessive “its” (“it’s [sic] lock was broken…”) was SA’s typo and not something that actually made it into a published print.
I think concision is over-trumpeted as a rule of writing, but this writer could use some. It’s from the E. Annie Prioux/Jeanette Winterson school of overwrought & fragmentary sentences that is considered “poetic” by bearded art school graduates and other fussy sorts who like the idea of books more than reading. Which is to say, it’s not my cup of tea. I’m sure somebody somewhere thinks it’s the best book every written.