TOW #16

Brian Doyle wrote “The Wonder of the Look on Her Face” about discovering some of the best writing tools while he was talking to a curious young writer. In order to properly explain the tool and to give it the justice it deserves, Doyle employs whimsical personification. Brian Doyle is an avid writer; he is editor of Portland Magazine and the author of a few renowned novels. This short story described his interaction with a nine-year-old girl who has an interest in writing as she asks him countless questions about his writing process. While talking to her and considering her questions, he was able to discover his favorite way to write a book. Doyle figured out that he likes to start writing books without clear outlines or any idea of how it is going to end so that he can make it up as he writes. He explained this tool, writing, “that didn’t seem as much fun as having a rough idea what might happen and then being startled quite often by what did happen. I said that I rather enjoyed that the people and animals in my books didn’t listen too much to what I thought should happen, hard as it was sometimes for me to watch.” (Doyle). His tool was to write without knowing the full course of the story so he could see where it led him. He used whimsical personification by saying that the animals didn’t listen to him because they were writing the story on their own. This assists his purpose of explaining how helpful the tool is by showing how unpredictable it made his stories through his use of rhetoric. He enjoys letting his story ‘write itself’ so he and the reader can be surprised by how unpredictable it is. I found this tool to be helpful in knowing how he uses this tool to write his books, and it also helped me understand how it is helpful in the writing process.