Holes 2/8

Chapters 1-12 Writing Prompt

Welcome back! I hope your New Year is getting off to a good start, but mostly I am hoping you are liking this book so far!

If you would like to experience this book in a real live actual book club, I am offering a virtual class on Tuesday afternoons. And if you are Brooklyn based, I am holding in person creative writing classes in Greenpoint resuming in February. If you would like more info or to enroll, email me at olivia.mardwig@gmail.com.

Now back to our book :)

Probably the most amusing thing about this book is the summary. If someone asked you what is this book about, you’d say something like, “it’s about a boy who digs holes in a desert.” Not terribly interesting. I’m guessing if someone tried to pitch you on the summary of this book, you’d hard pass. Even though the book is (technically) about a kid digging a bunch of holes, it’s also about a lot more.

It’s about the circumstances we are born into and the choices we make for our future. It’s about building resilience, and self-confidence. It’s about how easy it is to underestimate people, and how incredible kindness can be. It’s about greed, survival, friendship, luck. It’s about a person’s place in the history, how one outcome influences another… and also about digging a bunch of holes in a desert.

Like with any good book, Holes does a few things at once. Among other things, it has an interesting story, and it is well written. In fact the writing is so enjoyable to read and moves so quickly it can be hard to notice how stunning it actually is. For this prompt today, we’re going to hold off on the plot for a moment to give the writing some deserved focus.

The author Louis Sachar is very good at giving us a great sense of a character without telling us a lot about them. For instance we get a strong sense of the kind of guy Mr. Sir is and it’s very different from Mr. Pendanski. How do we know this? Did Louis Sachar tell us? In a way he did, just indirectly. To get a bit closer to understanding how he does this, let’s move onto the writing prompt.

The Prompt:

For your prompt I would like you to write out all the characters we’ve met so far. This includes backstory characters like Stanley’s great-great-grandfather. Then pick three. Write a character trait that’s particular to them. Then give an example that proves that trait.

Example:

Stanley is kind and thinks about other people’s feelings. Proof is when he wrote to his mother about what a fun time he was having so she wouldn’t worry about him.

The idea behind this is that the small things these characters say and do tell us a lot about them. And paying closer attention to these details will help us improve our own writing and be better readers. Observing someone’s behavior/posture/manner and connecting that to a deeper understanding of them, helps us to be more aware of the lives of others and therefore more empathetic of someone else’s experience.

Which characters did you pick to observe? What are the character traits that reveal something about them?