“I Won’t Kill It. I’ll Just Surprise It.” Corey Sobel on the Impact of Writing Physical Action

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter— sign up here . One hot, fine summer morning, a group of pre-adolescent boys flits to the outskirts of Sweet Water, Nebraska. Splashing through sand-bottomed creeks and tramping over lush meadows, they come to a faded, bumptious, yet appealing white house that sits on the crest of a hill. The house belongs to the Forresters, and the boys get permission from their beloved Mrs. Forrester to fish and have a picnic on the edge of her property. A few blissful hours go by. The boys have finished eating their lunch in the shade of a cottonwood grove and are lying on their backs in the grass, talking, when Ivy Peters appears. Eighteen or nineteen, Ivy is out hunting on the Forrester’s land without permission. He is ugly, arrogant, and sad. It’s said he poisons dogs for fun. Ivy notices that woodpeckers have drilled holes into many of the cottonwood trunks. He brags that he can knock one of the birds out of a nearby tree. He drew from his pocket a metal sling-shot and some round bits of gravel. “I won’t kill it. I’ll just surprise it, so we can have a look at it.” “Bet you won’t hit it!” “Bet I will!” He fitted the stone to the leather, squinted, and let it fly. In Willa Cather’s fiction, physical action and physical details are almost always in service to emotional ends, while emotions often culminate with some kind of physical expression. And so here Cather sets up not only the scene’s outer baseline—cottonwoods, woodpecker, older boy, younger boys—but also the emotional dynamics that will guide the action within it—namely, that Ivy wants to establish some kind of connection with these boys, while the boys are ambivalent about engaging back. See how effectively a few small physical details vivify Ivy’s inner life. The older boy is already carrying a rifle for hunting, and the revelation that he also keeps a sling-shot in his pocket helps to more finely etch his personality—this is a child’s toy, suggesting that his spiritual […]

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