Conroy and Anger

Conroy's framing narrative of tempting fate and death by speeding in a Jaguar works well at keeping the tension high at the beginning. The reader is automatically tense, and I believe kept that way throughout the whole novel. There isn't a lot of time to breathe or have relief. I think that is because when you are writing with anger you are tense the entire time. There is no time to breathe because if you do you might lose some of that anger, you might be rational. I also think that it deals with the sense of adolescence and that feeling of invincibility.

I have written a confessional scene between me and my bishop. It was a very hard scene for me to write because I don't want to disrespect my bishop or the religion that my entire family still believes in. However, I wanted to get the despair and heart break across in my scene and realizing that I couldn't affiliate with a religion that I had believed in for my entire life. I feel that it has the same intensity as Conroy, but it is a different kind of intensity. And maybe I only feel that it is different because Conroy came at his writing with anger, I came at mine with pain. Just saying that though I realize that anger is a secondary emotion, it's primary is pain. Perhaps my writing was more similar to Conroy than I thought. I feel that the only way I could highlight the scene is by craft, using better word choices, or making my sentences flow the way I need them to, to punch up the anguish I was feeling at the time.