Friday, April 12, 2019

Copywork #2 - Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins

 

Hey folks, this week's copywork is Library at Mount Char, by Scott Hawkins. I had picked this book up because I like odd and weird fiction, and this book delivered.


One thing I noticed as I copied was the narrator was very intrusive. You can see in the graph that concrete and abstract beats oscillate consistently.

Some note on stylistic choices. On page 2, there is a great use of adverbs by contradicting what it's modifying: "She smiled ruefully..." On page 4, filtering verb was used on one line, but rather than being descriptive of the sensation, Hawkins opted for an emotion: "The stones under the leaves and pinestraws felt right against the soles of her feet..."

The POV is 3rd Person Limited. There are lines in page 3 that may indicate Omniscience. The old man in this scene is thinking: "...trying to remember how he knew that name. He thought about it for a while, then gave up." But a closer look shows that the narrator is assuming what the old man's thoughts are rather than reading them.

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 0.5), Description, Dialogue and Action (as +3).




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