A Big Night by Leslie Norris, 1976
The magic trick:
Starting the story with a fairly standard setup, but continuing in surprising, original ways
“A Big Night” starts with some tropes you’re probably familiar with.
We’ve got the boy protagonist who is maybe a bit more sensitive and thoughtful than his pals. And those pals are pushing our narrator beyond his comfort zone, encouraging him to stay up late to attend a local boxing match.
Four pages in, we’re probably not all that interested, feeling like we’ve read this story many times before.
But things change pretty significantly at the boxing match. Our narrator learns something important about himself, and it’s not in any of the clichéd, expected ways the first half of the story might have indicated.
And that’s quite a trick on Norris’s part.
The selection:
One Friday evening after we had finished working out and we were sitting warm and slumped on the benches, Bobby asked me if I was going to the weigh-in the next day. I didn’t even know what it was. I was always finding that there were whole areas of experience, important areas too, about which I knew nothing and other boys everything.
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