Style Map

Cleaning my room, I found this assignment. A few weeks ago Lorna Jackson, my fiction professor for workshop, set us a ’style map’ assignment, to teach us about sentences. We mapped a paragraph from Tim Winton’s book The Turning, from a story called “Boner McPharlin’s Moll.”

Here’s a sentence from the excerpt we mapped. “The local bad boy, a legendary figure.”

Here’s it mapped: “Sentence 5: The + adjective (location) + adjective (moral judgment) + noun (diminutive male) + comma + a + adjective + noun (vague person).”

Then we took our map and rewrote the paragraph, using different words. Here’s mine:

To mention that I sauntered to tango class with Quint MacDougall is exaggerating affairs a wee bit because he was advanced midway through my beginner class at the dance studio. That would set it at 2007, I wager. I imagine that I glimpsed him three times in his smashing pin-striped jazz pants but I was blinded when I did. We’d all of us got wind of him the first week of class. The resident angel boy, an envied status. And amazingly, there he was, eighteen and fey-looking, with autumn lips and dandelion-puff hair framing his chin. In his Darcos’s and his dress shirts he had that flaring fluidity, like a Lipizzaner’s airs, stepping instep to instep with his head tossed and eyes half-closed. He had freckles on his nose and an absent grin. His entire person emanated with a glow of steamy exactness. To me, a virgin hardly seventeen, he was the entirety of lust. I craved that—God, right from the first touch I craved it. I craved him. I craved to be his.

I really want to write this story now.

~ by ambergor on 04/11/2009.