Mentor Texts discussion

Every character in this book is so easy to visualize. Their physical traits are so memorable and that makes it so simple to follow along with the number of people in the book. While I was reading, I wondered what Sheff was doing in his writing that made his characters so vivid in my mind. He wasn't using a lot of words to describe each person, in fact, he only uses about 3-5 adjectives when he introduces new characters. At first I thought that might not be very effective in making sure certain characters stay clear in the reader's head, but then i realized that the conciseness of the describing is what made each person so memorable. Sheff uses very few words when talking about a someones characteristics, but he never fails to mention the important ones. The way a person is standing, how they smell, how they speak, how deep their voices, how their eyes look. Sometimes he doesn't even mention hair color, or height, because he recognizes that it isn't the most important thing about that character. It's so clever how he finds a few traits that are personal and special to each person, and he makes them pop. For example "Her skin is pale, pale white and her features are petite and delicately carved." This is the way Sheff describes Lauren, a main character in Tweak. He never mentions how tall she is, how skinny she is, or what her eye color is until later in the book when its actually necessary. Another thing I learned is that it is important to stay on track while writing a book. Sheff often jumps around from topic to topic, which must be very easy to do when writing about one's own life; memories triggering each other one after another, until you've strayed entirely from the first thought. Within the first chapter their are so many different things going on, i felt very distracted. All these quotes are from the same three pages "I smoked pot every day. I was seventeen and had been accepted at prestigious universities across the country and I figured a little partying was due me." "I'd heard rumors about what happened to Lauren. I mean, I never even knew her that well but we'd sort of hung out a few times in high school." "Zelda was a woman I thought I was madly in love with. She was fourteen years older than I was and, well, she was also engaged to marry another guy..." While all of these are relevant to the story, I felt a bit thrown around since they were all so close to each other. The third thing I took away from reading this is that it is not okay to share someone else's story without their permission. This was something I actually learned by reading the "afterword" in the way back of the book. To quote Sheff "Sharing someone else's secrets, even anonymously, is a violation of their right to their own story." This sort of connects back to what Mary Gottschalk talked to us about. It really is hard to write about your own story without including other people's story in it. Even if those people don't want to share that story themselves, it doesn't mean that you get to- unless they give you permission of course. But then there's the problem of having a few people's permission, but not everyone, or not being able to/not wanting to get back in contact with some people to get their permission. It's just very hard to work around, and that was reminded to me when I read the "afterword" of Tweak. So to recap, three things I learned that will help me with my own writing are: how to be concise and effective in describing characters, to keep in mind that it's important to not jump around on topics too much, and finally that it's very important to remember who's story you're allowed to tell.