{"id":38,"date":"2020-09-19T15:28:46","date_gmt":"2020-09-19T15:28:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.daretohavewritten.org\/?p=38"},"modified":"2020-09-25T22:05:37","modified_gmt":"2020-09-25T22:05:37","slug":"powerful-paragraph-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.daretohavewritten.org\/?p=38","title":{"rendered":"Powerful Paragraph #2"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Tuesday after Tuesday she fails. She leads her father on six-block detours that leave her angry and frustrated and farther from home than when they started. But in the winter of her eighth year, to Marie-Laure\u2019s surprise, she begins to get it right. She runs her fingers over the model in their kitchen, counting miniature benches, trees, lampposts, doorways. Every day some new detail emerges\u2014each storm drain, park bench, and hydrant in the model has its counterpart in the real world. <\/p><p>Marie-Laure brings her father closer to home before making a mistake. Four blocks three blocks two. And one snowy Tuesday in March, when he walks her to yet another new spot, very close to the banks of the Seine, spins her around three times, and says, \u201cTake us home,\u201d she realizes that, for the first time since they began this exercise, dread has not come trundling up from her gut.<\/p><cite><em>All the Light We Cannot See <\/em>by Anthony Doerr<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These two paragraphs describe a little blind girl learning to make her way through the city of Paris by memorizing a model of the city created by her father. They are powerful both for the language and for the emotion evoked. Marie-Laure is a child learning to survive while blind in a seeing world. The rich detail in the descriptions helps us as readers to picture surroundings that she cannot see. Yet her emotional landscape\u2013which we know must be filled with overwhelm and fear\u2013remains very subtle in the language of the paragraphs. \u201cTuesday after Tuesday she fails,\u201d but when she finally succeeds, she simply notices that \u201cdread has not come trundling up from her gut.\u201d Trundling is a great word choice here. It\u2019s a verb carrying the descriptive weight of the sentence. The overall image is particularly powerful because we are not hit over the head with it. We are not asked to pity her or fear for her. We are told about her normal state of dread only by its absence. That is great writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tuesday after Tuesday she fails. She leads her father on six-block detours that leave her angry and frustrated and farther from home than when they started. But in the winter of her eighth year, to Marie-Laure\u2019s surprise, she begins to get it right. She runs her fingers over the model in their kitchen, counting miniature [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[23,22],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-powerful-paragraphs","tag-anthony-doerr","tag-writing-style"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.daretohavewritten.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.daretohavewritten.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.daretohavewritten.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.daretohavewritten.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.daretohavewritten.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.daretohavewritten.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39,"href":"http:\/\/www.daretohavewritten.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions\/39"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.daretohavewritten.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.daretohavewritten.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.daretohavewritten.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}