- Hara tells her dad (who is in prison) that she will interview a famous basketball player (+)
- Hara’s mother presses her to find a husband (-)
- The flight to Boston and limo ride from airport is unpleasant (-)
- Hara sees Derek Darcy for the first time (+)
- …and then embarasses herself in front of him (-)
- Derek is a jerk, leading to Hara’s first impression of him (-)
- Hara is invited to the cocktail party/tomorrow’s game (+)
- She sees Derek again (-)
- Hara interviews Charles (+)
- Hara overhears dirt on Charles, her chance to write a big story (+)
- Derek is begging Charles to come clean about his mom taking a bribe from a college for Charles (-)
- Hara feels confident in the press row at the game (+)
- Derek is a jerk to her at the club (-)
- ….but opens up a little while they sit at the bar (+)
- Derek and Hara go in for a kiss when Hara is taken back to O’Donnell’s (+)
- ….but are interrupted by Madeline (-)
- Hara finds out that her father rigged the writing contest for her (-)
- Hara is comforted by Naomi (+)
- Hara discovers the softer side of Derek as the story progresses (+)
- A big storm shakes Boston (-)
- A pregnant Naomi lands in the hospital with an injury (-)
- Derek takes Hara back to his place where he comforts her (+)
- Derek and Hara end up sleeping together (+)
- Derek tells Hara what’s going on with Charles, then regrets it (-)
- Hara promises to wait for the green light from Derek (+)
- Hara goes to the hospital to check on Naomi (+)
- ….and sees Madeline leaving (-)
- Hara finds out that O’Donnell is forcing Naomi to get an abortion (-)
- Derek is summoned by O’Donnell, who tells him to stop trying to make a name for himself and pass the ball to Charles (-)
- Derek argues with a drunk Charles, telling him to get his shit together (+/-)
- Hara and Derek talk things out about the O’Donnell situation (+)
- Hara gets a call from the hospital saying that Naomi miscarried (-)
- Hara visits Naomi later, only to find that she attempted suicide (-)
- Hara finds out that her father was attacked in prison as a warning from O’Donnell (-)
- Hara gathers her courage and goes to the next game despite warnings (+)
- Derek sees her, but so does Madeline (-)
- Madeline brings Hara and Derek to a parking garage, where Charles knocks Derek out (-)
- It’s revealed that O’Donnell was having the games rigged, and Charles was an unwilling accomplice (-)
- A scuffle ensues, ending with Charles being shot and killed (-)
- Hara and Derek manage to defeat O’Donnell (+)
- Hara and Derek realize that they can’t be apart and admit their feelings (+)
- Hara and Derek visit her father in the hospital (+)
- Derek gives Hara the green light to interview him and tell Charles’ story (+)
Introduction
Upon entering the How Writers Read course, I expected it to be like my AP Literature class that I took in my senior year of high school: analyzing books and poems, taking notes on a good part, finding the parallels between different metaphors, and all the other things that come with it. As I went through, however, I realized that there was more to it than that. You don’t have to be an Ernest Hemingway or a Mary Shelley to write a piece of literature, but you do need to be able to understand and immerse yourself in another author’s work so that you can form your own path of writing. After reading, my reading group members and I have discovered four important components that make a good writing piece.
Part 1
The book that I brought up to my reading group was called The Wrong Mr. Darcy by Evelyn Lozada and Holly Lorincz. It was a romance novel that followed the life of Hara Isari, a small-town reporter from Portland, Oregon who dreams of being a sportswriter. She gets the chance of a lifetime to travel to Boston to interview the Fishers’ star player, Charles Butler, after winning a contest. Along the way she meets another player, Derek Darcy, whose cold, prideful personality turns Hara off from him. Yet as the story progresses, the pair find themselves together at any situation, and they begin to develop feelings for one another. Many things are tested in this book like loyalties, morals, and especially one’s patience. But it all boils down to this premise: “Would you abandon the opportunity of a lifetime in favor of helping someone else?”
The controlling and counter ideas were a bit difficult to decipher, as there was much to discuss about it, but my group and I settled that the controlling idea of this book was, “Remaining true to your ethics and loyalties will lead to success and personal fulfillment”. McKee says in his article, “The controlling idea shapes the writer’s strategic choices.” In this case, the controlling idea is relevant towards Hara. She is devoted to her goal of writing a juicy story, especially one with scandal, yet as the story progresses, she finds herself becoming more loyal to Derek. She sees how protective Derek is of Charles and his mother, as they’ve been like family to Derek. And we see at the end of the story that she lets Derek give her the green light saying, “From the beginning, he trusted you to do a good job, and he was right. Only you can tell it the way it needs to be told.” (pg. 269). At the end, Hara is loyal to Derek’s wishes because she loves him.
For the counter idea: “If you rely too much on your own quick judgement, you lose sight of what’s in front of you.” Throughout the story, there’s a rift between Hara and Derek, a reporter and a basketball player. Derek’s distrust for reporters makes it hard for him to open up to Hara, therefore making it equally hard to pursue his feelings for her. And for Hara, her quick judgement of other people blocks her from actually getting to know them which is why she and Derek had so many arguments and misunderstandings. And her sticking to her first impression of Charles didn’t make her realize that he ran with the wrong crowd until it was too late.
With things like genre awareness, there are certain expectations to a story. Being that this is a romance loosely based off of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, we were reading for the romance. As we watched Derek and Hara’s relationship build, we get the elements of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy with their arguments and terrible pining for one another. I believe we were also reading for other actual Pride and Prejudice elements, yet really only got the small references such as one of the characters being named Madeline Bingley and the Pride and Prejudice quotes at the beginning of each chapter.
Part 2
The genre of The Wrong Mr. Darcy was a given, as being based off of P&P we were given romance. A quote from Jane Gallop in “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters” resonates with us as we think about genre: “Those things which conform to our expectations are things which resemble what we have read before, things where we have learned what to expect.” We expected a central love story between two characters who are opposites from each other, and we got one followed by a series of differences and obstacles to get there.
Now, this wasn’t your typical “love at first sight” story, but Lozada gave us the body language of the first encounter that sparked something. As my classmate Angela wrote in her blog, “A central love story is first introduced to the reader on page 22 of Lozada’s book; “Their eyes locked. Hara, caught spying on him, felt a blush sizzle up her neck to the top of her head. But his eyes… she had never seen anything like them,” (Lozada 22).” She continues to explain that this is a typical occurrence in the romance genre, which is very true, as we know that semic code “represents the major device for thematizing persons, objects, or places.” (Silverman 251). This again ties into genre conventions, where we are given certain things to expect in a type of genre. We also see that another building block of the romance genre is a big climax that leads to a crescendo of emotions. This ties into the encounter with death towards the end of the book, where afterwards Hara and Derek know that after that experience, it further solidifies their true feelings.
Part 3
When it comes to intertextuality in reading, you have to pull out all the stops and decipher as many codes as you can, breaking the text down to its bare essentials. We’ve focused so much on Derek and Hara’s relationship that we still need to look at the other half of the story that deals with morals and ethics. Every character deals with some kind of inner turmoil that has an effect on them later in the story.
As Scott writes in his blog, “There are plenty of unresolvable oppositions throughout The Wrong Mr. Darcy: rich and poor, those who know and those who don’t know, ethical and unethical.” I thought this was a very good point to discuss away from the romance aspect because it deals with the characters as they are. There’s an unethical symbolic code spread through the entirety of the book: Hara finding out that her father rigged the writing contest so she could kick start her career as a sportswriter, Derek discovering that Charles had a list of unethical choices: helping to rig the basketball games, his mother accepting a bribery from a college that wanted to recruit him, and having Naomi as his mistress, getting her pregnant, and not being there for her as her life started to go downhill. Because of this, it tests Derek’s morals and makes him wonder if he should keep supporting his friend’s actions.
Silverman’s “Re-Writing the Classic Text” says that the symbolic code is “central to the organization of the cultural order to which they belong . . . entrusted with the maintenance of that order’s dominant binary oppositions.” (Silverman 270). We talked about our main characters and their moral compasses, but let’s move on to the ones whose compasses were a tad rusty. We have Hara’s father, who was imprisoned for illegal sports betting and rigged the contest for Hara. O’Donnell, who was also rigging games and threatening Hara, Hara’s father, Naomi, and Derek, ends up in prison. And finally Charles, whose role in the rigging cost him his life. These cultural codes that these characters have led have also led to their downfalls. It goes to show that karma was especially strong in this story.
Part 4
There are maybe two types of audiences who fit into the category of this book: those who enjoy romance, and those who know about basketball. I have next to zero knowledge about basketball, or sports in general, but I figured I’d give this book a shot because I’m a sucker for romance and the enemies-to-friends-to-lovers trope.
In James Seitz’s “A Rhetoric of Reading”, it is written that “The ‘implied author’ an author who possesses a system of values indicated by the text, addresses the ‘implied reader’, a reader whom the text needs to hold….those same values and thereby ‘see eye to eye’ with the implied author.” (Seitz, 142). As Evelyn Lozada was a star in a season of reality TV series Basketball Wives, one could tell that her knowledge of the sport as well as the lifestyle of the WAGs (the wives and girlfriends of basketball stars) hits well with readers who share the same life or knowledge. Another type of implied reader would be the ones who read for Hara and Derek’s dynamic and the trials and tribulations of it, presumably the fans of Pride and Prejudice. I was one of those readers as I’m drawn to the enemy-to-friends-to-lovers trope. It reminded me of the time I read Red, White, and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston.
However, Daria mentions in her blog that as a huge P&P fan, she was resistant to the text at first as she writes, “As I moved into the narrative of The Wrong Mr. Darcy, my caution turned to resistance. The narrative style is not something I typically look for. The language was simple, outright clunky to me at times, “She sat up and shook off the drama queen moment. Hara liked to find reasons to be happy, not emo” (Lozada and Lörincz, 2)….I was confused why it opened with the main character reading Pride and Prejudice, and why Hara didn’t feel like a Lizzie Bennet at all. I couldn’t translate Hara’s family to the Bennets outside of a marriage-obsessed mother. It seemed the only thing this book had in common with Pride and Prejudice was the enemies-to-lovers trope, and the names of a few of the characters.” Looking back at the text, I agreed with that statement. The book focused more on the corruption part. Daria then stops herself and begins to view this through the narrative audience. There were times where I felt that way with certain books, too. As an author, you already have a set of values put into your story. As a reader, you either put yourself at the same level as the author, or reject the text as a whole.
By tuning in to the author’s side, we can start sympathizing with characters like Hara, who faces misogyny within the sportswriting scene and deals with the struggle of having a father who is in prison and therefore absent, and Derek who tries desperately to make his best friend do the right thing and come clean about his wrongdoings. These kinds of things resonate with the readers who can relate to some of these struggles, and hereby solidify the relationship between author and reader.
Reflection
As I navigated my way through the How Writers Read course, I discovered that it’s not like AP Literature. It’s more complex than that. Instead of analyzing metaphors and what have you, we dive deeper into it and weave through the worlds of genre, rhetoric, codes, and targeted audiences.
Working with my reading group took a little bit of the pressure off of the class, and although my timing for posting blogs was less than pleasing, my group members offered their help in any way they could. When I heard we would be doing lots of critical analysis, it made me wary because I usually doubt my analyzing skills when I read everyone else’s work. I feel behind. But I realized that everyone carries out an analysis differently and that I’m just another cog in the machine.
Over the course of reading the four books, my critical analysis skills sharpened, and I knew that I could apply these skills to my future writing pieces. Out of the four books, I have to say that The House in the Cerulean Sea was my favorite. It was a very wholesome book about found family that had me and my group members gushing throughout our writing of the blogs. It was definitely a good book to end on! And combined with the writing skills from Intro to Writing Arts, I was able to apply a few of those skills and get a better handle on what I was doing.
Works Cited
Gallop, Jane. “The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (2000)
McKee, Robert. “Structure and Meaning.” Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. (1997)
Seitz, James E. “A Rhetoric of Reading.” Rebirth of Rhetoric: Essays in Language, Culture, and Education. By Richard Andrews. (1992)
Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. (1983)
Faustino, Angela (Blog 2): https://allyoureadislovewa.wordpress.com/2020/10/29/romance-on-the-court/
MacLean, Scott (Blog 3): https://allyoureadislovewa.wordpress.com/2020/11/02/unlocking-the-codes-in-the-wrong-mr-darcy/
Links to My Other Blogs
The Alchemist: https://allyoureadislovewa.wordpress.com/2020/10/07/the-symbols-and-messages-of-santiagos-journey/
The Majesties: https://allyoureadislovewa.wordpress.com/2020/10/23/a-closer-look-at-majesties-reading-into-genre/
The Wrong Mr. Darcy: https://allyoureadislovewa.wordpress.com/2020/12/18/a-look-inside-the-wrong-mr-darcy/
The House in the Cerulean Sea: https://allyoureadislovewa.wordpress.com/2020/12/01/understanding-rhetoric-how-submitting-to-this-story-is-beneficial/
All You Read is Love 