No Tricks, Just Treats

As I’ve mentioned before, Ray Bradbury is one of my favorite authors. I was fortunate to hear him speak in 1990 and have him sign one of his books, The Halloween Tree. I read it again this week and was awed at his ability to pull readers along with the action.  Fly, actually.  Hanging on for dear life, just as the characters were doing in the story.

The story is about eight trick-or-treaters who embark on a wild chase through time led by Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud to find one of their missing gang, Pipkin.  Pipkin is the bees knees and they can’t have Halloween without him. But something’s gone wrong with Pip on this night and they don’t have much time to save him.

Here are some reasons why I think the book works so well:

• The pacing takes the reader on a breathless ride utilizing sentence structure and fine-tuned tension.  Pip is always just out of reach, in a mummy’s tomb, on the rooftop of Notre Dame, in a Mexican graveyard. The author’s avalanche of one, two and three word sentences gives the illusion of racing with eight little boys pulling you along by the hands and shirttail, crying, “We gotta find Pip!”  It also creates a lot of white space which encourages the eye to skim along the page faster. 

•  His use of description solidifies the setting – cements our feet right down to it.  “Wham.  Eight front doors banged shut” is much more powerful than ‘the boys came out of their houses.’ When they create a kite from old circus posters from the side of a barn, it becomes a mosaic of talons, claws, lion’s fangs and tiger eyes. They hear “roars of Africa down the wind.”   A review in the New York Times called his ‘frenetic imagery’ a ‘great treat.’

• His characters are endearing.   On the day Pipkin was born “all the Orange Crush and Nehi soda bottles in the world fizzed over.” The seat of his pants is full of splinters from fences and he’s the kind of kid who would run back and help a friend finish a race.  The other boys are brave and noble, especially in the end when they each make a sacrifice for Pip's sake.

•  Delicious active verbs make the action a feast for the tasting.  “...something dark frittered and danced and slithered away…”  Mr. Moundshroud’s house “leaned after them with soft groans.” As for the jack-o-lanterns hanging on the Halloween Tree “Sparks leaped out of their ripe-cut ears.”  He uses softer, sibilant sounds or harsher consonants to set different tones.  

•  His clever use of simile and metaphor creates memorable visuals.  “Like a big spider with many legs, the boys tried to cram through the door” and  “the windows blinked wide their ghastly eyes” says it better than narrative ever could. 

Do any of these strike a chord with you?  Do you see a writing technique that could enrich your writing?  We’d love to hear!

Happy Holidays

Today is July 4^th, Independence Day in the United States, and only a few days past Canada Day. Holidays are great opportunities to get some much-needed R & R or to spend time with our families, but I’d never really considered them as fertile ground for story until I attended a conference class on script writing.

Although the presenter at the conference had written scripts for Hollywood, script-writing was not the limit of her experience. She pointed out that holidays can add an important dynamic to a script, novel or play and can increase the story's longevity. For treatments in which the holiday is the backbone, the story cannot stand without it. Think "It's a Wonderful Life," Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," or "Holiday Inn" (which spun off 2 others: White Christmas & Easter Parade). We watch/read these and others like them every year which makes them lucrative. For many people, they become family traditions. Ray Bradbury's novel, "The Halloween Tree," is one such novel that follows a group of boys as they race through time to save a friend, all the while learning about the origins of the observance. Without Halloween, there is no story. Many popular authors write Christmas or Valentine's Day novels or novellas because they sell so well and make great gifts.

The presenter also challenged us to think of other stories that perhaps weren't so obviously about the holiday, but would be greatly impacted by its exclusion. "While You Were Sleeping" with Sandra Bullock was one of these. Setting the story around Christmas and New Years makes us sympathetic to the main character's loneliness and lends credibility to her motives. We especially want her to get both the guy AND his family because her loneliness is magnified by the holiday season. But the story is not so steeped in the holiday that you need to wait for Christmas to watch again.

Sometimes, rather than setting the story on a holiday, it's enough to include the holiday in a scene to show, for example, relational dynamics, the passage of time or a character's motives. In "Catch Me if You Can", Frank Abagnale calls Tom Hanks' FBI character on the phone on certain holidays which provides Hanks with some of the information he needs to finally catch him. (BTW, here is a very interesting disclaimer by Mr. Abagnale about the book and movie here.) There is also a pivotal scene in Anne Tyler's "The Accidental Tourist" set at Thanksgiving dinner which gives a revealing look into their family's dysfunction and manipulation. The Christmas scene in "Little Women" gives us a taste of Christmas during the Civil War and insight into the character of the young women. I included scenes involving the family at the holidays in "Tuesday Night at the Blue Moon" because holidays are highly significant and challenging after the the death of a loved one.

Have you incorporated any holidays in your writings, and what was the purpose? Can you add any books/movies/plays to the list and why do you think the holiday was included in them?