Some of my favorite books growing up were written by the fabulous Cornelia Funke. They were funny, beautifully detailed, filled with rich and wonderful characters and they felt so real that often times I felt as though I had to read with my eyes closed. Which I realize makes no sense. You can’t read with your eyes closed, unless you’re blind and reading braille, but that’s not what I mean. What I’m trying to say is that you know the feeling you get when you’re watching a movie and there’s a scene that’s so intense that you just want to hide until it’s over so you cover your head with a blanket or hover outside the door to the T.V. room listening raptly but refusing to watch until the intensity has past? Well, that’s the feeling I get when I’m reading a Cornelia Funke book. She manages to make everything feel so vital, so life and death, so real. And I can’t figure out how she does it.
These days I try to pay attention to how a writer does whatever it is that they’re doing. How do they pull the reader in? How do they structure their paragraphs – their chapters – so that the reader just keeps going until it’s 2 am? It’s an exercise to improve my own writing.
I just finished reading Fearless, the second book in Funke’s Mirrorworld series and it was amazing, just as amazing as the first book. As I put the book down after turning the last page I asked myself, “How does she do that?” and that’s when I realized that I’d been so caught up in the story that I hadn’t been paying any attention to the craft. So, I can only assume that Cornelia Funke’s craft is flawless – so flawless that I didn’t notice what she was doing or how she was doing it. I think it maybe time to go back, reread all her books and figure out what makes them so brilliant – it’ll be like a college course. Ooh, now I’m all excited, but don’t worry, just because I’ll be reading Inkheart with a highlighter doesn’t mean that I’ll be forgetting to write my own book.
Thank you for reading and go out and read any Cornelia Funke book you can get your hands on.
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