Fiction Course: Infernal Prose
How to Light Your Prose on Fire
For this week's assignment, we will imitate my favorite paragraph... OF ALL TIME!
The paragraph is from "Burn Man on a Texas Porch" by the Canadian dark horse GOAT, Mark Anthony Jarmon.
This paragraph is on FIRE and the type of prose we should strive for.
"Propane slept in the tank and propane leaked while I slept, blew the camper door off and split the tin walls where they met like shy strangers kissing, blew the camper door like a safe and I sprang from sleep into my new life on my feet in front of a befuddled crowd, my new life on fire, waking to whoosh and tourists' dull teenagers staring at my bent form trotting noisily in the campground with flames living on my calves and flames gathering and glittering on my shoulders (cool, the teens think secretly), quasi-leaf smoke like Sterno nausea into my stomach and I was brimming with Catholic guilt, thinking, Now I've done it, and then thinking, Done what? What have I done?"
Some elements to notice and imitate:
One sentence 🤣
Heavy use of gerunds and verbal adjectives watch the sentence structure course for more on this)
Image patterning for later scenes
Very few pronouns for the scene (first-person POV of a dude on fire, lol)
Metaphors
Use of all senses
Quirky Paranthesis Usage
If you want to activate your prose (even just for a scene) these are some of the best ways to do it!
Assignment: TURN YOUR PROSE ON FIRE and imitate the paragraph. Keep it under 150 words.
Ready, set, BURN!
While lunging at her cocking his fist back the air winnowed in the wake of his elbow before thrusting the fist toward her jaw brushing against the jawline scraping to the tip of her chin then floating off into the empty air yanking his body down with the inertia tumbling him down to the coating of morning dew still speckling the lawn now dampening his clothes like the licks of water splashed off a monks wisk at a blessing, the sobering water waking him to new eyes only to see her running away with her backpack jingling in the strides.
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What I made for the lesson. Trying to work on a way around the pronouns. Need more practice.
Tomorrow, after the sun rises and all our anxieties are safely imprisoned in a flying saucer heading towards the most distant galaxy in outer space where mirrors shatter into billions of colors with multicolored petals roaring in an ecstasy of happiness here on earth, we will be feeling life this way, that way, in thousands of different ways in the chaos of the turning of a drop of saliva exploding into atoms, positrons, quanta and more quanta of light dazzling until the most complete illumination-blindness of all things present, past, lived and died after nothing remained but the drop of dew hanging on the wing of the remains of the last downed plane.