Can you write like Sarah Palin?
No, this is not going to be much of a diary, but it will be fun for a day-before-Thanksgiving activity.
Slate is having an excellent contest.
I know we have some fabulously talented writers on this site.
Follow me over the flip for some rules and inspiration.
Here are the rules:
The goal is to write a sentence that could be mistaken for one from her book. Keep it to a single sentence of fewer than 150 words and send your entry to writelikepalin@gmail.com by Wednesday. We'll publish our favorites later in the week.
Personally, I find the contest mildly misleading -- the writing style is supposed to imitate Palin's from her book, but as we know, Palin didn't actually write the book; her ghost writer Lynn Vincent did, so I suppose the contest is actually a meta one (how nicely that goes with today's theme!) of imitating Lynn Vincent imitating Sarah Palin.
I can't imagine any of my fellow kossacks have actually purchased "Going Rogue" so likely don't know her writing style except from her twitters so beautifully rendered by William Shatner. I certainly haven't. For inspiration, I'd recommend going to Mudflats. The tag head-bangery covers AKM's superb coverage of the "best book and greatest literary achievement by a political figure in my lifetime." (That was J. Ziegler, not AKM or me, btw).
Here's an example from Slate of what they're looking for:
From p 102 of Palin's masterpiece
"As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on."
Slate also references NYT's reviewer Michiko Kakutani's favorite worst sentence:
Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times didn’t have to read past the first paragraph for her nomination: "I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier."
The above are great examples of Vincent's attempts to produce Palinesque poesy. Here's another:
"In New England and other parts of America, fall foliage burns in the colors of fire, but autumn in Alaska shimmers in white and gold. By mid-September the birch leaves have turned from bright green to rich yellows and golds, and the mountaintops are powdered with "termination dust," the first snows that signal summers end. The alpenglow is pinker on the mountains late in the evening, casting the prettiest light."
But we don't just have to go with writing Palinesque poesy. There's plenty of hilarity in the book, such as the following:
"there was a bright spot in Philly and his name was Joe Lieberman."
There's also the Sarah as victim you could try your hand at:
But when I finished (...) Bexie opened the curtain to let me backstage, there was Katie. Again. With a microphone in hand. I tried really hard to smile, but wondered again about a media strategy that involved ignoring objective journalists and continuing with a reporter who clearly had a partisan agenda. In a situation like this, I's have thought expert political strategists would realize that you don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there. But that's what we did. (p. 276)
On the bus, the topic turned to social issues. Katie asked me if I thought it was possible to "pray away gay" - to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality through prayer. Hmmm, I thought. Odd question. I don't think she really wanted to hear my answer because she interrupted me five times as I tried to give it. The badgering had begun. This is really annoying me, I thought. The she asked me about abortion and the morning-after pill twelve times. Twelve different times. I answered as graciously and as patiently as I could. Each time, I reiterated my pro-life, pro-woman, pro-adoption position. But no matter how many ways I tried to say it, Katie responded by asking her question again in a slightly different way. I began to feel like I was in the movie Groundhog Day. (p. 277)
So have at it, Kossacks. Have some fun and post your entries in the comments, and a happy Thanksgiving to all!