Your critical analysis of Charles Bukowski's writing goes here...

This section is devoted to your critical analysis of his writing. Provide your likes and dislikes and at all times provide the explicit reasons for why you praise or criticize a part of the work.

The start of the narrative journey.

In the upcoming posts we will slowly move through some of the writing techniques and suggestions that are espoused in The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.  After this we will add other teachings that have been picked up along the way and move on to different authors and examine their narrative techniques. We will look for your suggestions of the master authors to focus on later on in this blog. 

The second suggestion that S&W provide after placing yourself in the background is to write in a way that comes naturally. You must do this since how else will you ever enjoy writing and expressing yourself. It's the only way to proceed – it's the hook that gets you writing and not procrastinating about writing. 

So when you write, use phrases and words that come naturally.  They also suggest imitating your favourite writers since your favourite writers likely think and write in a way that's similar to your own style. 

Having said this, lets begin applying the S&W teachings to something we can all build on. The suggestion is to start to imitate a writer who uses fairly simple narrative.

So we will first begin imitating  Charles Bukowski's 1971 novel, Post Office, because of its simple style. 

The first step is to read the first chapter; it's only eleven paragraphs. 

Then you begin to write your narrative in a similar short predicative style. His story is about his days working for the the post office, but your story will be about your experiences in a past job. 

Objectives: 

(1) Keep your piece to the same length as his.

(2) Vary the length and structure of your sentences.

(3) Attempt humour if possible (if you can't find anything funny that's cool but from now on be on the look out at work for all those silly things that pop up that are funny because they're everywhere once you start looking for them, record them in a notebook and mess around with how you might work some of them into a story)

(4) Add some dialogue. 

Place yourself in the background (from Elements of Style)

Strunk and White advise the writer to place himself in the background.

The goal is to draw the reader into the scene by using showing not telling language, while avoiding any narration that involves the author's mood or temper.

By placing yourself in the background, you negate the tendency to affect a style, and this allows your writing style to surface on its own.

Post an example of this from the book you are presently reading.

Post your own paragraph as an example of this Strunk and White suggestion.

In the beginning.

In the beginning there was letter, and letter begot word, and word begot phrase, and phrase begot clause, and clause begot sentence, and sentence begot paragraph, and paragraph begot chapter, and chapter begot novel, and novel begot the worlds of the mind and everything was possible.