Each piece in the Stories from the Kitchen collection has something interesting to offer about craft.
Take for instance the Virginia Woolf piece, the dinner scene from To The Lighthouse. It makes you think about the craft, the way she does things, the way she has her narrator move from inside one person to the next around the table, and how deftly and interestingly she does it, even at one point referring to the very thing her main narrator is doing, with this beautiful passage:
“It could not last, she knew, but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling. So she saw them; she heard them; but whatever they said had also this quality, as if what they said was like the movement of a trout when, at the same time, one can see the ripple and the gravel, something to the right, something to the left; and the whole is held together; for whereas in active life she would be netting and separating one thing from another; she would be saying she liked the Waverley novels or had not read them; she would be urging herself forward; now she said nothing. For the moment, she hung suspended.”
Think about the writerly craft of it. What better setting than a dinner table to move from one character’s thoughts to another, keeping one main character’s viewpoint but also invading each consciousness at will, moving from one to the next with similar depth of penetration, although she tends to go farther into the women than the men, always seeing the men somehow from the outside while inhabiting deeply and completely the women’s view.
So for instance a prompt might be to write a dinner scene with people you know, feeling free to enter their consciousness at will, and try to move from one to the other prompted by exterior motions such as “she lifted the spoon and thought” … or “His words had the effect on her of …” or “It could not be true, could it, she thought …”
Like I say, each story has something to teach us about craft.—CT
