A Meme of My Own: Writerly Strengths I Wish I Had

The your strengths as a writer meme  prompted the thought that, as an unpublished writer, the strengths I aspire to are more interesting than the strengths I can  claim.

The meme:  What five or ten writers’ strengths would you most like to appropriate?

I would like to swipe the ability . . .   

1. to push the language as far as it can be pushed: Bellow in Augie March, Shakespeare in the tragedies.

2. to create an unconventional, yet inevitable, form—Virginia Woolf in The Waves and To The Lighthouse; Colson Whitehead in The Colossus of New York.

3. to use irony to illuminate  characters—Jane Austen in Sense and Sensibility.  (I’m just starting this and loving it)

4. to quickly establish a story—John Cheever in the stories.

5. to create oddly pressurized description —David Foster Wallace in parts of Infinite Jest, early stories,  some essays

6. to write unforgettably about humble things—John Updike in Pigeon Feathers

7. to use figurative language to deepen description—Dickens in the intro to Bleak House

8. to write beautiful sentences that evoke a place and time —Edna O'Brien in the Collected Stories, Verlyn Klinkenborg in The Last Fine Time

9. to write about social forces in human terms—James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time

10.  to effortlessly accumulate detail—Joseph Mitchell in Up In the Old Hotel

I'm not going to tag anyone, because a few of you have grumbled about that, but I would encourage any writers reading this blog to pick up this meme. 

Comments

[Sari]

Oh, this is a good one!

I wish I could:

1. plot a memoir. Recently, I've really enjoyed "Brother, I'm dying" by Edwidge Danticat and "Mountains beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder. (Both, curiously, take place largely in Haiti.) How do Danticat and Kidder structure their books so perfectly, so naturally?

2. reflection. I'm so impressed when writers can just spin on an idea and stay patiently with it.

3. I love the way Susan Orlean brings in research. She has this hunger to share really cool trivia with the reader. It's awesome.

4. I admire everything about Michael Ondaatje--but beyond his general magnificence, I admire his lush word choices, his tone, his use understatement to create emotion in the reader, the way he can sharpen a character with a single sentence.

5. Allan Bennet is really funny. (K, if you haven't read it, I think you'd enjoy "The Uncommon Reader.")

[K]

I should have known this would expand my list of books to read. I haven't read Ondaatje in years, but loved his sentences. I somehow got a review copy of The Uncommon Reader and enjoyed it.

[Carolyn]

You are so brave to do this. Very enjoyable to read and think about your answers, both of you. I'm going to check out Bennet--thanks for that tip, Sari. Also, on Bleak house, wow, my big desire there would be to create character descriptions like Dickens does. It's like a magical trick to me, how he brings people to life!