Tag Archives: style

Titles: How I Live Now

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , ,

Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now sounds not a whole lot like her. When she’s onstage, she has a presence and voice that fills up the room and all the little spaces in your skull. But the protagonist of How I Live Now is a fifteen-year-old bad-attitude madly-in-love girl who fills up only her own space. Much of the work –

Massive spoilers

Is filled with the feeling of dirt and death and decay, even before the invasion. There is a sense of a dissolution of a life as she falls in love and the sense of a family unit breaking down when the siblings begin to fracture over whether they should go with the army, bunker down, or strike out on their own.


When I think of this book I think of scenes from war films, largely WWI, of brown and green and hot, bloody red, and blackened corpses. Then, all the way at the end of the novel, there is a single sentence where the color changes to white. White, cold light. It is a scene where the girl reunites with her lover and they come together, not clinging to the past they have lost, but coming together in the now.


From a reader perspective, that sentence is an immense payoff – especially if you read the book in one sitting. If you haven’t already, I’d put it on your to read list, somewhere near the top. It’s good.


I’m a fan of titles that add to the work and aren’t necessarily spoken within the work. Something that adds a whole new dimension, over and over again every time you read it with new eyes.

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.