So I've only read the first chapter of Dan Chaon's novel, "You Remind Me of Me", but wow!, it's vivid, powerful and very sad. The descriptions are amazing as well as the randomness which is all too real and by the end of the first chapter, you need a break, perhaps a long one to emotionally stabilize yourself. Dan teaches creative writing somewhere, I forget, and he mentioned in an interview that he usually begins stories with an image that won't escape his head. Usually an intense image, strange; those are always the best. He writes about depressed, Mid-western characters, and the chapter I read is all about the most depressed 6 year old boy you'll ever meet. In class today, we were assigned to go outside and describe what we saw, as if we were a camera hovering over life from a helicopter and we slowly zoomed our lenses in. Here's what I came up with:

The light is bright, like 10,000 summer days compacted to fit on the tip of my finger and then flicked off into the sky. The trees below are as tall as 5,000 clay bricks, piled one on top of the other, creating a haven for the flying workers. A place to not only rest their red, orange and black beaks, but to sing songs for the humans below. The humans huddle between boring brown buildings which match the mess on their heads. The rustling green columns above seem to be inviting these humans to the concert which is about to begin as each bird hums its vowels, smoothing out the curves of each sound. But the humans don't hear because their ears are connected only to their guts, through many canals and fleshy pink tubes. Their ears succumb to these gnawing, viscousy guts. A little less bright now, the light turns its attention to its feathery children, where a momentous event is ready to begin.