Weave Your Threads

"The third boy -- probably not much interested in what his friends might find out, anyway -- said that his brother-in-law was expanding his business. The brother-in-law was going to rent hang gliders, as well as motorcycles, in June." -- In Amalfi by Ann Beattie, Paragraph 2"Christine looked at the sky, wondering how many hang gliders would be up there during the summer. Icarus came to mind..." -- In Amalfi by Ann Beattie, Paragraph 11A reader gets one sentence at a time, and that's all. Written text can only be digested in this manner: word by word, letter by letter. This focus gives power to - but also limits - the author. A TV show can have concurrent dialogue. The written page can only have the suggestion of concurrent dialogue. This fact gives birth to the metaphor at the heart of this post: present your reader with a thread, weave it amongst other threads, and present it to your reader again.Let's say the story begins: "He sat in the airport typing, alone, and saw man throwing a football to his son from the top of the escalator. He laughed."In her short story In Amalfi, Ann Beattie weaves a metaphor about hang gliding and Icarus. She begins by describing a group of Italian boys who speak to her, ask her about her older male companion, change the subject to hang gliding. The thread - hang gliding - is dropped for several paragraphs.Let's say the story continues: "He saw the man again, sitting at a high top table, martini glass in hand, his young son restless on the seat next to him."Then Beattie picks up the thread and uses it to transition into a meditation on Icarus, and specifically "Auden's poem about the fall of Icarus," and she characterizes Andrew and Christine (the woman and her lover) with that transition. The effect is smooth because she pointed Christine's attention elsewhere and came back to the hang gliders when Christine looks at the sky. Christine's world feels detailed and consistent, all because Beattie dropped a thread and picked it back up.Let's say the story ends: "The man took the football from his son's hand and put it in their bag. He put the martini glass on the counter, still full."Today, present threads, hide them, and bring them back again.***The old man was crazy. No one decided over a plate of spaghetti to talk conspiracy theories, to believe conspiracy theories, to plan a robbery. No one, Joe thought, no one. His father sat in the passenger seat of the pickup truck. His father wanted to prove that Washington elites were plotting with Russian operatives on a basement floor of the National Archive. His father listened to too much talk radio.After Mother had died, Dad had insisted on upholding the family tradition: every Sunday, the family met at La Scala in Little Italy for dinner. Jennifer - his sister - had quit first. Dad had become sexist first. Jennifer did not bother making an excuse. "I don't want to see him." She wouldn't say his name.Google maps told him to exit the highway in two miles. "Why do you have it in a woman's voice?" Dad asked. "Don't answer that. People always say, 'A woman's voice is more pleasing.' I know I wouldn't want a woman's voice telling me what to do."Ray had quit when Dad began to pick fights about politics. He was more subtle than Jennifer. The kids had a t-ball game, his wife was going to the doctor, he needed to water the garden. Maybe he wasn't more subtle than Jennifer.As they turned onto the exit ramp, a sedan pulled alongside, windows open. A young man with down syndrome waved at them from the back seat."He's a cute little idiot."Jesus."Dad, you can't say that.""Constitution says I can say what I like."Thomas had strongchinned through comments like that for years now. He called them his father's thorns. His father had a wild, cold temper. When they had been young, Dad had ran around the playground, the backyard, the baseball field with them, having more energy than any other man his age. Since mother's death, that energy had been dedicated to an abiding dislike for the world and all the people in it. Perhaps his father had always been crazy.They reached the outskirts of D.C., and pulled into a small hotel. At the front desk, the attendant spoke in a thick Middle-Eastern accent. Thomas felt the small of his neck tighten. He worried about what his father would say. But Dad sat on the curvy red couch nearby, and even ignored the flamboyant purple pillows. He was plotting."We're going tonight."***The Threshold between Yin and Yang - Love and Truth, Rationality and IrrationalityThe Spine - to make his father happyImaginary Quotation Marks - His opinion on his father's version of the world is shared throughoutThe Anatomy of a Myth - 1) Flashback to he and his father visiting on Sunday 2) After listening to a talk show host tell them that the Washington Elites had secret meetings with the Russians in the secret 15B floor of the National Archive, he and his father drive to DC from Baltimore's Italian District 3) The librarian tells them to shut up and follows them around the floor 4) The library closes; they come back and are made fun of 5) They find an elevator, and a button with no label takes them down far. They see men in lab coats 6) They see a man floating inside of a cage, with wires attached to him 7) The dad steals a lab report. They sneak back to the elevator 8) They return home. Dad keeps the report to himself.Shakespeare's Syntax - "He strongchinned through the blows."Shakespeare's Rhetoric - 1) alliteration: repetition of the same initial consonant sound throughout a line of verse 2) anadiplosis: the repetition of a word that ends one clause at the beginning of the next 3) anaphora: repetition of a word or phrase as the beginning of successive clauses 4) anthimeria: substitution of one part of speech for another 5) antithesis: juxtaposition, or contrast of ideas or words in a balanced or parallel construction 6) assonance: repetition or similarity of the same internal vowel sound in words of close proximity 7) asyndeton: omission of conjunctions between coordinate phrases, clauses, or words 8) chiasmus: two corresponding pairs arranged in a parallel inverse order 9) diacope: repetition broken up by one or more intervening words 10) ellipsis: omission of one or more words, which are assumed by the listener or reader 11) epanalepsis: repetition at the end of a clause of the word that occurred at the beginning of the clause 12) epimone: frequent repetition of a phrase or question; dwelling on a point 13) epistrophe: repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses 14) hyperbaton: altering word order, or separation of words that belong together, for emphasis 15) malapropism: a confused use of words in which an appropriate word is replaced by one with similar sound but (often ludicrously) inappropriate meaning 16) metaphor: implied comparison between two unlike things achieved through the figurative use of words 17) metonymy: substitution of some attributive or suggestive word for what is meant (e.g., "crown" for royalty) 18) onomatopoeia: use of words to imitate natural sounds 19) paralepsis: emphasizing a point by seeming to pass over it 19) parallelism: similarity of structure in a pair or series of related words, phrases, or clauses 20) parenthesis: insertion of some word or clause in a position that interrupts the normal syntactic flow of the sentence (asides are rather emphatic examples of this) 21) polysyndeton: the repetition of conjunctions in a series of coordinate words, phrases, or clauses 22) simile: an explicit comparison between two things using "like" or "as" 23) synecdoche: the use of a part for the whole, or the whole for the part***Getting Started: 4Character: 4Point of View and Tone: 4Plot and Narrative: 4Dialogue and Voice: 4Descriptive Language and Setting: 4Revision: 3Overall: 4*Level 3*