Wild Fiction

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‘Yep, too much dialogue at the moment,’ Rebecca wasn’t giving him her full attention. ‘What you need to do is read more and see what other authors have done. Take this bloke, for example,’ she said pulling a book from the shelf. ‘I’m going to read you a passage from Light Is Like Water, a short story by Gabriel García Márquez.’
‘Who?’ the author asked.
‘You must know who he is. You have one of his books on your shelf, Twelve Pilgrims. His famous one, which you don’t have, is One Hundred Years of Solitude. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.’
‘Never heard of him,’ the author replied embarrassed that he did not know who she was talking about and very curious to learn where Rebecca was getting all this knowledge. He tapped his fingers on the desk and tried to recall where the book had come from but his mind was blank.
‘Never mind,’ Rebecca said. ‘Listen to this and learn. It’s about a couple of kids who pretend that light is water.’ She was leaning with her back against the vast wooden shelves that lined the study:
‘The following Wednesday, while their parents were watching The Battle of Algiers, people walking along the Paseo de la Castellana saw a cascade of light falling from an old building hidden among the trees. It spilled over the balconies, poured in torrents down the façade, and rushed along the great avenue in a golden flood that lit the city all the way to the Guadarrama.’
There was a short silence when Rebecca finished reading.
‘Wow,’ the author said. ‘That was beautiful. How can I ever match talent like that?’
‘There’re three things you need to do,’ Rebecca said. ‘Practise, practise, practise. Every word that you write should be thoughtfully laid out among its confrères to form mellifluous sentences that entrance and captivate the reader.’
‘Like that one?’ the author asked.

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