More Thoughts on Writing

I was sitting at the dinner table talking to my eight-year-old daughter about the difference between good and bad writing (poor girl!) and I was trying to think of an example of what I thought was good writing. What came to mind was a passage I read in Douglas Kennedy's The Moment.

The passage happens early in the book when the narrator, Thomas Nesbitt, is looking for accommodation. He has responded to an advert and set up an appointment to view a flat. He is climbing up the stairs of the apartment building looking for the place. Kennedy writes,

'As I reached it I saw that its door was in the same style as the others, only this one had been whitewashed in a way that allowed its old brown finish to underscore the artfully swabbed white paint.'

I think the writer is doing two things. It may not seem like much of a trick, but he has given us in a condensced way a description of a door that we can perfectly imagine. It's short enough that we hardly notice it and yet the image is perfectly clear. Very few writers can do this. Having sat thinking about this for a few minutes, the only other author I can think of is Murakami.

The other achievement of this sentence is that he has decribed the character we are about to meet before we have met him. Reread the sentence...what kind of a person do you imagine has a front door like this one? If you guessed a painter who cares about, and takes care of, the environment in which he lives then I hope you get my point.

Of course, each writer has their own style. Camus might have written, 'It was a door' and everyone would have gone wild, myself included, leading the parade with pom-poms. But it fits the the context of this book where the author spends considerable time describing the surroundings.

Totally off topic, but another sentence made me gasp today. Here it is:

'In his dream, which he later forgot, he found himself alone in a room, firing a pistol into a bare white wall.'

A free book if you can tell me the author.....