Craft Notes: “Once More to the Lake” by E.B. White

a.      Techniques: immersion into the experience. He paints vivid images as soon as the piece begins, but not before he puts it in context. Summarization  - quick summaries of backstory to be developed later. He picks out the most minute details like the dragonfly and a fork and a bait box and gives special meaning to them.

b.      Voice: Open and honest. He lets us into the process of remembering and re-finding the place. He lets us into his mind and what he’s thinking and how he feels like his father.

c.       Telling: He tells at the very beginning. It is interesting enough to keep me focused for the second sentence, which contrasts the telling with vivid imagery. “I felt dizzy and didn’t know what rod I was at the end of.” He tells there, but it is such a bizarre statement that it engages us.

d.      Form: simple paragraph form, but each paragraph serves a purpose. 1-Backstory, 2,-remembering, 3-lake description, 4-I am my father, 5-Lack of passed time, 6-trusting the lake, 7-changes, 8-painting the town, 9-travel, 10-boat memories, 11-father-son adventures, 12-storm description, 13-Feeling the feels of his son. The middle to end sections give less poignant insight like deciding that he is his father, but give us more details and imageryo the entire endeavor, so by the end paragraph when he makes the final connection to being his son, we have a very vivid picture placed within a larger scene we can also place.

e.      Weird and cool stuff: He doesn’t mention that there are other campers at the camp except in passing during paragraph 6. No mention of his wife or other family members. “The waitresses were still 15,” he doesn’t specify that certain things are false or imagined. “No loud wonderful fuss about trunks.”

f.        Q’s: The piece is separated into general sections of back-story, meaning and insight, and imagery and description. Which section was your favorite? Could I have stood alone or how does it rely on the other parts?

What was the value of leaving out other family details? Leaving other campers until certain points of the text and mentioning them in passing? Do we get a greater (but false?) sense of their solitude?

g.      Write about: A time or place where/when you felt like you were living in another person’s shoes, associating your actions with someone else’s, just as White associates all his actions with either his father or his son. Think of places once dominated by someone close to you that you now dominate or fill.