This isn’t so much this book specifically, but John Green’s writing has taught me much about how to have versatility in characters. Many authors can only write one type of character, whereas Green portrays a teenage girl with cancer and a child prodigy boy in very different ways, with a completely convincing character. He uses language especially to do this, keeping his casual tone and managing to twist it to fit whichever character he is portraying at the moment.
A lesson I learned from the writing in An Abundance of Katherines was the way he takes every day life scenarios and twists them into a plot. It’s much like Jayda’s ‘make a list’ sourcebook in the way he collects things and forms them into a plot. In this case, he takes an ordinary idea, such as a child prodigy working on a math formula, and sets it to further the plot. Suddenly that math formula is to calculate the course of romantic relationships, and the skewed data is caused by the fact that he broke up with one girl instead of getting dumped like all the other. This kind of writing is genius and yet very easy to understand the motivations behind. It’s taught me how to take things deeper than they might seem, and not be afraid to apply some things to scenarios that might not have seemed possible.
The last lesson I learned from John Green’s writing is that it captures fantasy elements through the language and doesn’t overuse that, since that would distract from the plot. “In my dream, her head was on my shoulder as I lay on my back, only the corner of my carpet between us and the concrete floors.” A line like that shows that element of careful and concise writing, while not over-fantasizing it or making it too casual.
A lesson I learned from the writing in An Abundance of Katherines was the way he takes every day life scenarios and twists them into a plot. It’s much like Jayda’s ‘make a list’ sourcebook in the way he collects things and forms them into a plot. In this case, he takes an ordinary idea, such as a child prodigy working on a math formula, and sets it to further the plot. Suddenly that math formula is to calculate the course of romantic relationships, and the skewed data is caused by the fact that he broke up with one girl instead of getting dumped like all the other. This kind of writing is genius and yet very easy to understand the motivations behind. It’s taught me how to take things deeper than they might seem, and not be afraid to apply some things to scenarios that might not have seemed possible.
The last lesson I learned from John Green’s writing is that it captures fantasy elements through the language and doesn’t overuse that, since that would distract from the plot. “In my dream, her head was on my shoulder as I lay on my back, only the corner of my carpet between us and the concrete floors.” A line like that shows that element of careful and concise writing, while not over-fantasizing it or making it too casual.