In her writing guide, Steering the Craft, Ursula Le Guin uses “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain as an example of how to “be gorgeous” with your prose. By being “gorgeous” she’s referring to how the words sound on the page. “Jumping Frog” has wonderful dialectical cadences that make it sound authentic and folksy if not gorgeous.
Twain wrote such great-sounding stories because he observed real people and listened. In “Jumping Frog”, he portrayed Mr. Wheeler, a man who prattled on and on about Jim Smiley, even though it had nothing to do with the narrating character’s inquiry about one Leonidas Smiley. This confusion is typical when talking to the elderly or the perpetually bored – they don’t know who or what you’re asking about, but they do know something and, wanting conversation and company, by golly, they will tell you everything that they do know. There is no way to interrupt someone midway into such rambling without being rude. Such storytellers never pause for an instant to let you make your excuses and get away. Best just to hunker in until something else catches their attention.
