May 2, 2003

• Steering the Craft, Exercise 2: ‘You are Gabriel Garcia Marquez.’ Write without break or punctuation.
  
  I broke the rules and made it into three paragraphs. It was hard to keep going, so I shifted perspectives. The stated purpose of the exercise is to get you to appreciate punctuation by tossing it out, and to show how one sentence should serve the next. What I got out of it was that without the structure of the sentence, there’s nothing on which to build narrative. You lose track of where you’ve been and where you’re going, both as writer and reader.
  
  Here it is:
  
  
  The worlds revolving around him and he can see each one as if he could pluck it out of the air simply outstretch his hands and cup them in the stream like catching minnows or pollywogs about to change transform to frog to grow up into adult and wisdom and crone he looks at the worlds in his hands cupped like water he could drink and taste the sweet and metallic and sour and bilious and sweet sweet worlds
  
  They all saw him with their tiny eyes on their tiny worlds tracing whorling orbits they called singing paths tracing out music and joy and sadness into the space between they saw him and they saw the hands the fingers the cupped hands the creases the folds cupping the singing path and catching them in an eddy the creases the folds the tiniest ridges of fingerprint the motion into the mouth the gaping blackness the warmth the metabolism the joy and sadness
  
  It was over in an instant.

  • 9:31 am
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