a.
Tone/voice: Personal and informative. Court
Cases, history lessons, like a newspaper story in its beginning—telling us what
happened like a newscaster. Interesting flair to the piece: “epic tale of blood
and belonging.” Changes to personal tone, uses first person.
b.
Structure: Starts out as a news story. Moves into
the personal with the doll stories. To the general with Black/white doll stats.
Back to the personal story with her doll. A short section broadening it back to
the general again. Staying with Cousins. Back to the original news story, but
in a personal way now. It’s a braid of many different elements, none of which
come to a real conclusion until the end, so it keeps us interested.
c.
I will take the suspense from this for my own
writing. The idea of broadening a personal story with elements of world news or
historical fact and leaving each part of the story open-ended until the end. I
will use that to make my pieces more interesting.
d.
Words that bring in the focus: “It isn’t easy to
accept a legacy of whiteness as an identity.” “Topsy-turvy doll” “refused to be
white.”
e.
Style: it’s like a mix genre between historical
non-fiction, news writing, and personal essay. The beginning seems like the
news writing, and the facts and history of the dolls seems like historical
non-fiction. Then she adds in the personal essay throughout.
f.
Q’s: I wonder whether she started with the
personal essay idea and expanded the historical and news-y pieces around it, or
if she thought the news story was interesting and then as a second thought was
able to connect it to her own life. Was the piece heavily research-based, or
just knowledge she kept somewhere in her brain and later used?
Good observations for your own writing. Great questions that show you're thinking like a writer.
ReplyDeleteOver comment on your Writer's Notebook so far (Checkpoint One): You are really doing fantastic work at developing your father memoir in the shorter pieces here. I like the way you honestly investigate your own urges to own something new in the last piece, too. You have good observations in your craft notes. You could dress them up a bit by introducing the work and your task in a first sentence that frames the entry. You are missing craft notes on "Time and Distance Overcome," but you have enough other entries that I'm willing to give you the 8/8. This blog was a pleasure to read.