Tag Archives: amytan

Space: The Joy Luck Club

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , , , ,

I read The Joy Luck Club for pleasure, before it was assigned for pain. I mean, technically, my English teacher assigned it as summer reading and I chose the work because I’d already read it, but there is some kind of evolution that happens to a work you have read before and now MUST read.


Amy Tan’s multi-voiced novel is similar to a mosaic novel and not much like one at all. For one thing, the framing device is much of the story, for another, I didn’t know the category existed when I was twelve. Thus, the novel exists in the same space as a favored, half-forgotten childhood memory. Condensed, dreamlike, and witnessed as a passer-by rather than a participant. That is not to say that her protagonists and supporting characters are no longer intimately familiar, just that my first reading has taken place so long ago that I can no longer tell you what exactly happens or exactly how I felt at any one point in the book. I can only look back, and, without truly understanding who I was then, think of green spaces and angry children and unrelenting parents. Somewhere in there is a great joy. I have also tangled the book I knew first with the second time I knew it, reluctantly, and the movie we also had to watch, and a couple of quizzes that I absolutely loathed.


What I meant to say was that Tan’s stories within the book occupy the same time and space as one another, though they are lived generations apart. Her flashback style feels similar to approaching someone you know but can’t remember why, and then in reaching out to shake their hand, you are struck with the memory of the first meeting and that first smile. Thus there is this smile with two layers, one buoyed with the joy of seeing someone again and one of self-congratulations of that knowing epiphany right before your hands connect.


Someone will read your story. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s your future self and all your audience. When you close the book, and you exhale that story world for the final time, what space will the story inhabit in your memory? The length of a bus ride? The length of one awful revelation (Memento)? The length of a dream – within a dream – within a dream (Inception)? Or a tremendous life-changing journey to a parallel world and the universe shaking revelation that physics is actually quite fun (Diane Duane’s So You Want To Be A Wizard)*?

*I had a deep-seated, frothing hatred of science in general until this book. Just, in general. Even the word made me twitch. Full disclosure, I am now a scientist. Reading: the gateway drug.

Practice: Copy Style

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Somewhere in college I had a very earnest travel literature teacher. He was actually pretty good; terribly enthusiastic about Mark Twain as we all should be, and as happy to talk about the world the authors lived in as he was to talk about their works.


One day, he talked to us about writing. One part of understanding travel literature or literature in general is understanding how that literature is created.


He recommended getting a notebook and hand writing a paragraph or two from a famous author, just to feel how the words came out of the pen. Do a page each day for a year and you will develop your own style.


What you’ll actually get is a keen understanding of other people’s styles. Try this instead. Get a notebook and write a paragraph of someone else’s work. Then try your own work in their style. Did you say enough? Did you say too little? How does the punctuation feel? Are you inspired to continue?
By practicing your words in another style you get incrementally closer to finding the one that pours forth and sounds irrevocably like the voice in your head when no others are speaking.


If this one doesn’t sound quite right, turn the page. Try again.


I didn’t keep it up for a year. I hit the normals like Hemingway and Shakespeare, and the not quite normals like Amy Tan, John Steinbeck. For a little while, I was terribly studious of the micro style. The comma placement, the sentence length, the rhetorical questions. It wasn’t until I turn to the macro style – the living setting, the satirical description, the single sentence reveal that upends the universe – that I discovered how to say what I was trying to say.

The comma placement in Steve Martin’s Pleasure of My Company told me less than the slight handful of sentences that revealed the core of the character. The short and devastatingly sensorial re-visitations of a single location in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the earnest and bombastic humor in Terry Pratchett and Mark Twain, the intertwining of physics and magic in Diane Duane’s Young Wizard series gave me permission. I could say what I wanted to say, the way I wanted to say it.