Here’s the latest entry for my copywork exercises: Grendel, by John Gardner. I wanted to copy Grendel because it’s told in first person POV. Also, I like unreliable narrators, especially the dramatic and primadonna kind (Grendel is one in this fine retelling). Despite his histrionics, he is still and will always be a monster.
You will notice that the title for this entry is labeled as “Copywork” instead of “Scene Analysis”. I am pulling back on in-depth analysis because I want to focus more on writing new content (novels and short stories). Also, I’m running into problems where some scenes don’t require an in-depth analysis.
For now, the purpose of these posts will be for sharing only. I’ll share what I’ve copied, but I’ll also show how the narrative modes look like on a bar graph.
So--
As a refresher from my copywork blogpost (click here to read the full post), here is the color coding on the highlights:
- Orange for Action beats
- Green for Descriptions
- No highlights for Dialogue
- Yellow for Summary/Transition
- Blue for Thoughts
- Pink for Authorial/Narrator Intrusion
- Purple for Exposition
A double highlight means that a sentence is functioning with more than one mode.
Below is a graph of the narrative modes of the copied scene. This shows the rhythm between abstract and concrete beats. It scales from -3 to +3 with the following sequence respectively: Exposition (as -3), Intrusion, Thought, Transition (as 0), Description, Dialogue and Action (as +3).
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