Analysis of "Some Terpsichore" by Elizabeth McCracken

“Some Terpsichore” by Elizabeth McCracken was incredible and made me want to quit writing because I don’t see how I could ever be that good. McCracken had such a grasp of her voice and used it confidently and consistently throughout the whole story. I enjoyed the use of the saw throughout, how McCracken used it at the beginning as a hook before I knew the importance of it, then made comparison’s using the saw and her voice and even explained the love story as between the saw and her voice. Then, again, the saw was used as the very thing that drove her away from the relationship in the end.

McCracken also did a great job with progression. The slow build of the love story was perfectly believable and easy enough to follow but then just as I started to settle in to it, it begins to change. Change is really the strength of this story. The initial change is dramatic: the main character decides to move away with a man she’d just met and start singing with him, but because it was the very beginning of the story and the reader had very little stock in the characters, this change was not the most important. The most important change was the one from love to out of love. The characters fall in love within the story in a complex way, then fall out of love in an equally complex way. The fact that it all took place within such a short story is what really impressed me with McCracken’s skill. There were no large gaps and I never felt like McCracken left something out of the story that should have been there.

In the end the details really make the writer, to me, and besides her grasp of techniques and plot, her details about the little things are what kept me reading and what made the story, in my opinion, successful.