Phone Books and Graveyards

Here are today’s Wonderful Words:

In my adult life I’d hardly shared a phone book with anyone else using my last name. Now I could spend Memorial Day decorating my ancestors’ graves with peonies from my backyard.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver, page 3

Background

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle tells the story of a family that moves to a farm in Virginia and spends the year eating only local food, most of which they grew or raised. This particular sentence describes their journey from Arizona to Virginia.

What makes it wonderful?

I recently read an essay explaining how in the first half of the 20th century, many people never traveled more than a few miles from where they were born, and they never felt like they were missing out on anything.

That’s not how the world works today, but the idea of home being where your family lives is still intact.

Kingsolver uses these two sentences to tell us she’s going home in a way that’s fun to read.

I bet this took some time to write. It would’ve been easier to tell us she was moving back home after decades of independence and adventure, but those words aren’t as carefully crafted. They’re almost lazy. And even lazy readers can spot a lazy writer.

Let's get technical

Kingsolver used juxtaposition to tell us about her cross country move. Juxtaposition is a technique where you place two contrasting concepts side by side to highlight the differences in the things you’re explaining.

In this case, she was contrasting locations. The first was a place so foreign that not a single other person shared her last name. The second, so familiar that her relatives were buried in cemeteries only a stone's throw from home.

The entire book is a juxtaposition of people who eat from the bounty of big agriculture against those who supply their own sustenance. So it makes sense that she’d set the scene with a contrast as early as page three.

Sometimes you can use techniques that work on both the micro and macro level. Here it worked at the level of the sentence and the story. It described the immediate location and hinted at the theme of the book. If you can manage to make use of these micro-macro techniques, your writing will have a coherence that readers will be able to feel but not explain. They’ll be mesmerized by the magic of your wonderful words.

Happy writing,

Joe

P.S. Want a couple more examples of juxtaposition? Here’s one about the Uber Killer. And another about the Hoover Dam.