Our last writing exercise left me with ten books and ten excellent pieces of craft. I couldn't pick a few to share, so for this installment, here are the ones I found:

#1: “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” James Joyce. This novel doesn't have a Table of Contents, so I opened to a random page. Pg. 176, halfway down, “He moved a thin shrunken brown hand gently in the air in time to his praise and his thin quick eyelids beat often over his sad eyes.” What I find useful in this single sentence is its action. Not only does it describe this character, it describes them in action, rather than at rest.

Further down on the same page, “The park trees were heavy with rain; and rain fell still and ever in the lake, lying grey like a shield.” The same with this s...

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