Art of Story Telling
THE BOY ATE ORANGE !!
Here’s an example of how a narrative can be built into a story.
Let’s say we are describing a character that eats an orange. I could say, simply, “The boy ate the orange.” But what if I describe the peeling of the orange so as to capture what the moment is fully like for the character? The words we choose help us to bring our characters to life.Their own thoughts and dialogue work to do that to an extent, but part of the narrator’s job is to help those characters’ bodies/actions/minds take shape on the page. Patient narration, narration that uses the five senses, creates depth, so that as we read we pick up on several things all at once. A “snapshot” slows down and lets the eye’s camera go to work. So, what I might write in place of “Aarush ate the orange”:
He applied it so that the upside-down word was perfectly straight and readable to others. When he was little, his shirt would become his uniform as he pretended to work for the Sunkist company, and he’d protest when his mother tried to remove the sticker at night when he went to bed. Aarush then dug two fingers into the orange’s rind and pulled at it, but it held on stubbornly, the way a deflated bike tire manages to hold onto its metal rim. The fruit’s resistant skin once hurt his small fingertips, but he ignored this every time until finally, like now, he’d created a flap. And from there a strand of peel unwound, exposing a white layer and round shape that reminded Aarush of a bald doll’s head. In fact, when he’d reached the age of being able to play a decent prank, he’d shaved the long blond hair from his sister’s favorite doll. He smiled. It had been mean of him, yes, and such days were mostly behind him. Soon he had created a single long length of curlicue that made him think of the cursive alphabet letters hanging above the blackboard back in his old third-grade classroom. The head of the boy who sat in front of him then had blocked everything in front of Aarush but that strip of bulletin board. The head belonged to Tommy Zak, a pushy kid who felt important always wearing his older brother’s baggy football jersey. Its white neckline would become a discolored crescent moon after a while, for he wore the shirt almost every day, but then it’d unexpectedly show up white again thanks to a washing machine and dryer. The shirt’s tired black number on the back had long ago broken up into what looked like a tiny plot of land cracked by drought. The lines kept Aarush’s attention as he daydreamed in class that third-grade year. He realized now that he hadn’t seen the other boy since then and he briefly wondered what’d become of him, but in another moment the rind was off and Aarush’s full attention went back to the orange. It was half its weight unpeeled and felt springy like a tennis ball. He split the fruit open and withdrew one juicy segment. He bit into it. Triumph.”
In the above example we get to see the orange and feel what it’s like to hold it, but you also get a sense of the character’s personality and a glimpse into his history and into the state of his current life. Vivid description makes something seeable and someone knowable. Writing
vividly is also very enjoyable to do as we string together little clues that will come in handy as the story continues.
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