Description Writers are often tripped by descriptions, by stuffing the sentences with adjectives. In the first half of the 20th century writers like Ernest Hemingway rebelled against the past era and recommended that writers not use adjectives at all. Many novelists accepted his advice and wrote books where the hair, skin, or eye colour where revealed. Readers seemed not to notice what’s missing because their perception and memory fill in the blanks. But not describing in a story leaves prose stilted and unimaginative. Successful writers avoid clichés in their descriptions by using rhetorical devices such as analogy, metaphor, and simile, an example is the essay “politics and the English Language” by George Orwell who says these clichés save people the trouble of developing original language to express an idea and inadvertently circumvents the core function of analogy. Philosophers argue that the wider notion of analogy, including metaphor and simile as its parts, is the core of human cognition and helps to solve problems, make decisions, explain abstract ideas, and to help memorize. For example how a character experiences eating a slice of rare beef can reveal characterization rich in detail that a reader might not discover if the author simply wrote, “he chewed a slice of rare beef.” Instead of “I savored the warm iron tang of the cow’s meat lying still on my tongue.” The successful rhetorical devices transport the readers to the time and place of the character’s world and allow the reader to experience with the character. In Modern Greek, the word metaphor is still used to mean, “To transport”. How to avoid clichés Analogy, metaphor, and simile, though, can have the failings of simply writing adjectives when they turn into clichés. If a reader can predict a metaphor before an author writes it, then it will not be effective. Or if an author gilds the lily (make superfluous additions), a metaphor risks pretension and the reader will laugh in the wrong places: “She sliced the air with her eyes and glared at him.” So when you write your description ask yourself: 1. is it predictable? 2. does it transport the reader to the time and space of the character i.e. stays in character. 3. is it without pretension? If is sounds awkward, then the writer tried too hard. Before you begin to write description, think about how you might describe the scene, then read the description while asking the questions above.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Jul 2013 08:54:25 +0000
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