“A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness . . .” “The Glass Castle” by Jeanette Walls “I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a dumpster.” “Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus “Back in 1961, when women wore shirtwaist dresses and joined garden clubs and drove legions of children around in seatbeltless cars without giving it a second thought; back before anyone knew there’d even be a sixties movement, much less one that its participants would spend the next sixty years chronicling; back when the big wars were over and the secret wars had just begun and people were starting to think fresh and believe everything was possible,…
Tag: The Glass Castle
Make characters real and likable.
Play around with different ways to describe characters in stories. Here are examples of how to make characters real and likable and how to capture readers’ interest. What We Keep by Elizabeth Berg “My mother was dressed in her beautiful yellow summer robe, the tie cinched evenly into a bow at the exact center of her waist, but her auburn hair was sticking up in the back, an occasional occurrence that I always hated seeing, since in my mind it suggested a kind of incompetence. It was an unruly cowlick, nearly impossible to tame — I knew this, having an identical cowlick of my own — but I did not forgive its presence on my mother. It did not go with the rest of her looks: her deep blue eyes, her thin, sculptured nose, her high cheekbones, her white, white skin — all signs, I was certain, of some distant…