Clear Light of Day Compendium (Waddell)

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Strategies/Techniques

• “To Bim’s wonder and astonishment, Tara smiled at this radiantly as though he had made a profound remark on which he was to be congratulated.” I think the reader can see Tara’s face so clearly because of the combinatin of the “as though…” statement and the astonishment we get from Bim.

• “They would have none of these silences and shadows. here things were left unsaid and undone. It was what they called “Old Delhi decadence.” Old Delhi decadence opens this paragraph up, shows how the description of this one specific family fits into the cultural context of their community.

• Rich paragraph at the top of PAGE 22. Vivid memory of parents in the living room spurred by observing the empty room. Power of a transformed space to segway into vivid prose that evokes the feeling of a particular time for the character. 

• “There was that little sensual quiver in the air as they laughed at what she said, and a kind of quiet triumph in the way in which she drew in her cheeks to make the cigarette catch fire and then threw herself back into her chair, giving her head a toss and holding the cigarette away so that a curl of smoke circled languidly about her head.” POV so clear here. When observing an action fondly or negatively, even the non-human elements are tinged with the attitude of the human being observed. The smoke was languid.

• “it was a little difficult for the children to remember always that she was not at the club, playing cards, but dead.” This is a serious statement offered in an offhand way, because it does not seem serious to the girls. Describe a death or trauma this way if it is seen as inconsequential to the narrator/protagonist, even if it should be important to the reader.  

• “a season of presents and green mangoes and companionship.” A time of [tangible] and [tangible] and [intangible].

Loved Phrases and Ideas

• “she felt that heavy spirit come and weigh down her eyelids and the back of her neck so that she was pinned down under it, motionless.”

• Even the veranda would be better, with the pigeons cooing soothingly, expressing their individual genius for combining complaint and contentment in one tone.”

• “tired with the triumphant tiredness of the virtuous and the dutiful.”

• “In his ripest, roundest tones.”

• “such matters as will soon pas into oblivion? These aren’t important when compared with India, eternal India.” I love pulling back the perspective so that the characters consider what will last. Their ideas of what will become permanent and what constitutes the “eternal” character of something reveal so much about the characters.  

• “A person needs to choose his death.”

• “It was the great event of our lives — of our youth. What would our youth have been without it to round it off in such a definite and dramatic way?” Ways in which people use history to measure and divide their lives, to construct their personal narratives.

• “Terrible what it does one — what it did to us — and one is too young to know how to cope, how to deal with that first terrible flood of life.”

• “unease was in the air like a swarm of germs, an incipient disease. The empty house across the road breathed it at them.”

• “a nerve jumped in her cheek.” Beautiful way to say facial tic.

• “he seemed prepared for death as if it were an evening at the club.”

• “He had a vey honest facie, she decided, painfully honest, like a peeled vegetable. But it was also kind, dreadfully kind.”

• “she had no imagination: to him, the saddest sin.”

• “Bim’s excessive meanness — the way she would scrape all left-overs onto saucers and keep them for the next meal so that some of the meals that arrived on the table were just a long procession of little saucers with little portions smudged onto them, like meals for a family of kittens.”

Words to use

sycophancy

insipid

confectionery

censoriously

dilettantism

pall (like a pall of bees)

cobalt (cobalt sky)

marshal (marshal them into something)

Ideas for my story

• Look at unreliability on bottom of page 97. Good to have such a clear statement at about the half way mark of protagonist’s misunderstandings of herself. Unreliability builds to this point throughout the book and then gradually gets addressed by narrator as she comes to terms in the rest of the book. Try this with David.

• Story of Baba finding the record player has a lot of weight and significance behind it because we learned early how important the records end up becoming to him. Setup a pivotal interaction that coems later in the book between Custis and David when they’re in college by revealing the sentimental value of an object early in the book, when they’re adults. 

• C. and D. have contradictory memories about a key event. Refer to page 25. “It was a family dictum that Raja was a poet and wrote great poetry. Now Bim, his favorite sister, was denying this doctrine. What had happened?”