TANGERINE THEMES

I intended to post this morning. Waking with a headache in the middle of the night scotched that idea. Here’s today’s entry:

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Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively by Rebecca McClanahan, Writer’s Digest Books, 1999

Chapter 3: From Eye to Word: The Description

Description is more than a grocery list of attributes. The details need to be organized. In describing a tangerine, for instance, the description might begin at the rind and end at the seeds.

Use specific nouns, such as scalpel instead of knife. The writer must learn the vocabulary of whatever world he is using, whether a beauty salon or a surgery room. The precise word goes beyond accuracy to the word that evokes the attitude and emotion the story requires. Even the sound of the word can reinforce the image. Sometimes description can use the back-door technique by saying what an object is not: Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” states that the woman’s eyes “are nothing like the sun.”

Descriptions need active rather than passive prose: not “The ship was rocked by rough sea winds” but “Rough winds rocked the ship.” Filtering devices such as “he noticed” or “she felt” should be eliminated.

Like nouns, verbs also need to be active and specific. “Verbs are the foot soldiers of action-based description. They march in the front lines, toting the heavy artillery.” Verbs to avoid include linking verbs (appear, seem, was, and all “to be” verbs), and helping verbs (would, can, might).

Adverbs in writing should be examined. Writers can avoid them by using stronger verbs (whisper instead of talk softly).

Sensory, concrete detail can give weight and substance to an idea, emotion, or abstraction. A character sewing a missing button onto his dead father’s jacket can become a metaphor for grief.

This makes me want to interrogate every word of my prose with a “what are you doing?”

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The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Scholastic Press, 2008

I clasp the flask between my hands even though the warmth from the tea has long since leached into the frozen air. My muscles are clenched tight against the cold. If a pack of wild dogs were to appear at this moment, the odds of scaling a tree before they attacked are not in my favor. I should get up, move around, and work the stiffness from my limbs. But instead I sit, as motionless as the rock beneath me, while the dawn begins to lighten the woods. I can’t fight the sun. I can only watch helplessly as it drags me into a day that I’ve been dreading for months.

Leach and drag are the specific verbs used here.

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That’s it for the day. Have a good weekend, and I’ll be back on Tuesday.