Creative Elements Of Writing In Brian Doyle's Short Talks

British playwright W. Somerset Maugham agrees that there are no set standards to writing, and it is up to the author to find which creative elements help them portray their idea in the way they find most effective. With authors Brian Doyle and Anne Carson, both take unconventional approaches to writing to create an effect unable to be explored with a classically styled narrative. In Joyas Voladoras, Doyle uses extended metaphors and seemingly randomly inserted facts to draw importance to certain parts of the essay. Meanwhile Carson uses perspective as a tool to find the meaning of her seemingly random short stories from Short Talks. In Anne Carson’s short story, Short Talks, she writes a collection of paragraphs or even sentences with significant

In “On Waterproofing,” a story is told about Franz Kafka’s sister and her struggle in concentration during the Holocaust. Her husband suggested she waterproof her shoes so they wouldn’t get wet, yet with a sad irony her soon death could not be prevented. Here the dark metaphor of Nazi Germany as something that cannot be predicted is written. By not taking the story as truly literal, the reader can get the assumption of the aphorism “life cannot always be predicted.”
Much like Carson in these manners, Doyle uses metaphors to enhance the meaning of his writing in Joyas Voladoras. Joyas Voladoras tells about how all animals have a certain amount of heartbeats that they live for, and once those end, their life is over. Doyle uses the extended metaphor of the heart throughout the story and eventually brought the story back to his personal issues. Without the reader knowing that Doyle’s son was born with a three chambered heart, they wouldn’t understand the meaning as much. Once again in this case, the narrator of the story is crucial to understanding how much “So much is held in a heart in a lifetime” (Doyle 148) means to

Whatever perspective “On Gertrude Stein About 9:30” is heard from, the entire meaning and even what the viewer sees the time to refer to will vary. Thus, a crucial element in modern writing is using different narrators to the advantage of creating meaning for the reader. By varying her perspectives, Carson is able to change the tones of the short stories. By using her childhood self as a narrator, she purveys a since of innocence. Meanwhile by using an unnamed wise sounding narrator in other stories, she creates a sense of tenseness and urgency. Thus, she experimentally demonstrates that the narrator can heavily determine what the reader thinks of the piece, and therefore can very precisely be used as a creative device to convey meaning. In traditional writing styles, the main element to give the story meaning is the narrative itself. However, with more modern and distinct styles such as the short stories written where the narrative is no longer the primary stylistic device, but the use of metaphors and distinctive different narrators applies meaning to the stories. Though it is easy to judge what is different from tradition as inferior, this change is no different than the rise of cubism in the art world. Even though initially many would comment on the art not being “real,” or in this case, the stories being poorly written, this style has even more of an effect. After