Donna Miller's List: Teacher Blogs

“How do you write? My answer is that I start with the trees and keep right
on straight ahead.”
William Saroyan

“Find your tree.”

Saroyan uses a variety of metaphors in the piece,
including “the old English walnut tree with every year literally thousands of
the magnificent hard fruit, which, when you removed the black casing, which
dried and could be made to crumble away to the grooved shell, which then you
could break with a hammer and then behold as a design of intricate engineering,
of art, of construction, the hardwood slick and light brown in its convolutions
in which the meat of the nut, as it is called, had ripened to a substance with
the most subtle and satisfying flavor implanted into anything that creatures
including human beings and small boys, like Henry and Willie, as my brother and
I were referred to be other members of the family and neighborhood, and still
are, thank God, could remove from the shell and put into the mouth and taste and
chew and swallow and never suspect that indeed that is how we do, how we live,
how we die, how we write, and how we read.” Surely a perfect example of a run-on
sentence used to its maximum descriptive potential.