It’s disconcerting when I’ve been reading a book, sometimes fiction, but more often autobiographical, where the author has been going along recounting everything in extreme detail, from meals eaten to exact conversations had, and reaches a point where the story abruptly stops, and the writer then says something like, “…Twenty years passed and I now was married, with 3 glorious children, living in the beach house, and had published 13 books.” Whaaaaa?? Wait a minute! Just a darn minute.
For 280 pages you’ve been telling me things like how you ate your 2 eggs over easy on the daisy-patterned plate that had a chip on the edge with a slice of Rye bread topped by a teaspoon of Huckleberry jam on a particular Sunday in a particular week in a particular year, and how the sun streamed in the window and created an image of Lake Chickamauga on the surface of your swirled coffee, and how Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl was playing on the radio, and Jim looked up from watching George Stephanopoulos on TV and said, “Next week I’m going to paint the shutters Cerulean blue” and now, NOW, all you can say is TWENTY YEARS PASSED??!!? and everything was swell??!?
WriterInSoul 