That Perfect Line

I need to learn to write things down when they come to me. I don’t know how many wonderful thoughts, lines, ideas I’ve lost because I’ve thought I’ll just finish what I’m doing and write it down then and then forgotten it all together and when I’ve remembered that I had something I’ve forgotten what it was.

To a degree I have learned this lesson. I’ve learned to sleep with my journal by my bed and to turn my light on as I’m trying to fall asleep and something is finally sounding just right – or, because I sleep with a nightlight, to just write in the dark. I’ve learned to jot thoughts in the margins of my notes in class (to the degree that once the course is over I have to go through my notebooks and write all the precious gems down so they’re not lost forever) or to be sure I have paper with a blank side tucked in my Bible for church (though the margins/inserts in the bulletin often work just as well).

What I struggle with is the stopping while I’m working to write something down. Today I was cleaning house (the bathroom to be specific) and I was composing in my head as I worked and I came across this amazing little bit, and I thought I should write this down before I forget it. But I didn’t. I finished my job and then for the life of me I couldn’t remember what it was I was thinking of. I’ve wracked my brain trying to remember. I’ve tried to remember what scenes I was working on (I can remember that) and what other things the characters were saying (I can remember that, too) but that perfect little line, that inspired little line, is gone, probably forever, unless I remember it in my sleep tonight and wake up and write it down, but I’m not counting on it.

You see, I’m a believer in inspired lines, phrases, sentences, pieces of dialogue; little pieces of writing that are perfect, sent from above like little letter-angels… okay, maybe the angel thing is a bit of an exaggeration, but you get what I’m saying. I believe that these exist mostly with dialogue, that little piece of dialogue that appears on the page exactly as it would appear in life, no contrivance exists in it at all.

One such piece of dialogue I believe is in Susan Elizabeth Phillip’s novel Natural Born Charmer. The main male character is speaking with his estranged father about how he thought his girlfriend might be pregnant, and he delivers this line, “These pregnancy tests people buy…You have to—Maybe you already know this. You have to wait three minutes to get the results” (Natural Born Charmer, 332). The hesitation in the sentence, the breaking in on his own thought, that’s the way speech sounds in real life, and it comes across perfectly in this instance.

That’s not to say that you can’t miss that perfect line. I’ve read books and thought, That would be perfect if he’d said this, or if she’d said that. And maybe the author thought of it and didn’t write it down write away. I don’t know. But if you think of that perfect phrase, that perfect sentence, stop, regardless of what you’re doing and write it down. You’ll thank yourself later.

Phillips, Susan Elizabeth. Natural Born Charmer. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. P. 332

Dedication

I recommend Dedication primarily to writers. It’s not a particularly remarkable book for the casual reader. It’s not bad, the characters are interesting, the plot fairly expected, but not boringly so. A word of caution, there is quite a bit of language (so don’t recommend this to your grandma who still washes out your mouth every time you swear).

Dedication by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus tells the story of Kate, a woman determined on avenging her once broken heart against Jake, the man who was her first love, who held her up in some of her hardest times, and then left her behind to make a future for himself. And the stories he told in his songs were based on her life.

What Kate doesn't expect are the feelings of hurt and betrayal she feels towards others—feelings that have little to nothing to do with Jake—that also come to the surface; feelings that she was never able to deal with because her feelings for Jake got in the way.

She also doesn't expect that when she places herself once again in Jake's path, there might be the possibility of getting a second chance at a first love. Is it possible to get back what they once had? And if it is, what happens when the peace of a vacation, a time outside of real life, fades away and real life shines through? And when it comes down to it, is that second chance really what she wants?

I recommend this book to writers because of the way it relays and presents information. It’s always a little difficult for a writer to decide how they want to relay information, how much the reader needs to know when, and when does the suspense become too much so the reader just feels left out. Dedication provides an interesting solution to this problem: it alternates between the past and present, not an unusual tactic, but it’s done very carefully, so the reader knows just what they need to know and not a whole lot more, but so the reader doesn’t feel left out of the story.

You start out knowing the very basic plot, be it from descriptions online or from reading the back of the book, and from the content of the first chapter, but you don’t know the details. As you continue reading you find out more of why Kate and her friends are angry with Jake, not just because he took the music that they had worked on for so long and made it famous without them, but because he left in the middle of the night without any word. You find out why she’s so angry about the stories he tells in his songs. These details come out just at the right time and by switching between past and present you can see the incidents as they occur, and you can then immediately see how they have affected the narrator.

Because there is a first person narrator in the story the reliability of the narrator is immediately called into question. However, because the story goes back and forth and we see so many of these incidents that have affected Kate and her friends first hand, we don’t question her reliability further because of the time that has passed. If Kate were recounting the stories of her teen years through the lens of the present and of her adult hood her views would be skewed and she would be even more unreliable, almost to the point where we as readers might not believe anything that she says about the past because of the way everything has turned out (she’s a little bitter). But we see a semi-reliable narrator in Kate because even the past we see as though it were the present.

I also want to comment on the end of the book. I found the conclusion of the story to be very satisfying in a way that I really can’t explain. Not only the end of the story, but by the way the novel concludes. The last chapter I felt, really tied things up beautifully and it didn’t feel contrived the way it could have.

I hope that the writers out there read this, if not for content, then for the form.