“The Power Paragraph” by Candace Walsh (fiction ’19)
An excerpt from “The Power Paragraph” by Candace Walsh (fiction ’19), published by Fiction Writers Review.
With Some help from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, Candace Walsh explores the power of the paragraph.
The Power Paragraph
Fiction writers agonize about using le mot juste, and we also strive for finely honed sentences. But what of the paragraph? A power paragraph can serve as a story’s fuse box, sending softly glowing, undulating, or hissing-hot power to different parts and levels of a story. This power paragraph can also serve as a hinge in the middle of a novel, as it does in Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, looking forward and backward, to the future and the past, like Janus (Chronos), the two-faced Roman god of gates, transitions, and dualities. Engaging with the idea of a power paragraph can help to focus one’s writing at an initial stage, or serve as a keystone in a work that is closer to being finished.
