Journey Through Wonderbook (Chapter 2)

• Chapter 2: Anatomy of a Story is all about the structural elements that make up a piece of fiction. It makes and explains the metaphor of stories-as-living-creatures. It illustrates the various forms of life stories make, (novel, novella, novelette, short story, flash fiction, poem) with some very cool illustrations before it goes into The Elements, such as Characterization, Setting, etc.
  
  
  I found this chapter incredibly useful, especially the section on Description which I post-marked. It also goes in-depth on a few of The Elements, such as Point of View, Dialogue, and Description, before giving information about mysterious things such as Voice, Structure and Theme. It discusses how all of these elements come together, living and breathing, to make a world. There are also a couple essays about Exposition and Messages in our writing, that are quite good. This chapter also delves into Style, explaining and describing different styles, giving examples from authors. One thing this book does well is give various examples, and thoroughly describe the topics it covers, without making judgments about personal choices authors might make.
  
  
  The exercise in the second chapter is….interesting and I found it difficult. It is about style. It involves choosing a subject and finding four different writings involving that subject. Say, you choose dive bars, so you would have to find a couple different descriptions of dive bars, at least one or two of those sources an essay or non-fiction piece of some sort. Then you put those different pieces together into a pastiche of sorts. I gave it a try at first, but had difficulty finding decent sources. I had even told myself I was just going to skip it and get on with the book, but after finishing the 2nd chapter, I went back. I had to go through with it. Here is the result, taken from a couple amazing novels and a couple essays I found online:
  
  
  
  The Gunslinger
  They saw one day a pack of vicious-looking humans mounted on unshod indian ponies riding half drunk through the streets, bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals stitched up with thews and armed with weapons of every description, revolvers of enormous weight and bowieknives the size of claymores and short twobarreled rifles with bores you could stick your thumbs in and the trappings of their horses fashioned out of human skin and their bridles woven up from human hair and decorated with human teeth and the riders wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened human ears and the horses rawlooking and wild in the eye and their teeth bared like feral dogs.
  These were not the mythical cowboys who were rarely seen working with cattle but were instead involved in saving maidens and punishing bandits. They were almost always white, and carried twin Colt.45 revolvers.
  The cowboy was a mercenary of sorts whose primary task was to protect the property of the rancher for whom he worked. He was not by definition “chivalric,” did not have a “code” other than to protect what he was paid to protect, and believe it or not, did not necessarily play the harmonica by the fire on long, cold nights. A horse, though, was as essential to the cowboy as it was to the knight.
  What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them.
  His guns, carefully weighted to his hands; a plate had been added to each when they had come to him from his father, who had been lighter and not so tall. The two belts criss-cross above his crotch. The holsters were oiled too deeply for even this Philistene sun to crack. The stocks of the guns were sandalwood, yellow and finely grained. Rawhide tiedowns held the holsters loosely to his thighs, and they swung a bit with his step; they had rubbed away the bluing of his jeans (and thinned the cloth) in a pair of arcs that almost looked like smiles. The brass casings of the cartridges looped into the gunbelts heliographed in the sun. There were fewer now. The leather made subtle creaking noises. His shirt, the no-color of rain or dust, was open at the throat, with a rawhide thong dangling loosely in handpunched eyelets. His hat was gone.
  He is not big but he has big wrists, big hands. His shoulders are set close. The child’s face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the eyes oddly innocent.
• 
  
• 
  
•