More Elements of Style

Ahhh...class is in session. OK....about that wind whipping about ghostlike in your story and why it works... Look up metaphor and simile....in any grammar text. This is the nifty writers' tool for saying such as My father was like a tree, tall and straight and beautiful....LIKE is the KEY...you get to this kind of metaphor via LIKE and the word AS used in the "double AS" sense... Example: When I was a kid, my dad was as tall as a tree, and just as straight and beautiful.

                                                         

 Like and AS - your keys to how disparate things are alike....creating a connection between truly unconnected things. A man is not a tree...but we can imagine he is LIKE a tall Oak. Or Mother was as hard and callous as stone (logically impossible but metaphorically possible).

 Take it a step farther and often it is cool if you can turn the metaphor or simile - how things are kinda sorta alike to say they are equals, THE SAME. This is an absolute statement. Absolutes take you to a higher level of IMAGERY (which this is all about...pictures in your readers' minds). Look up Absolutes - words that are absolute...EXAMPLE... The fog is a veil. It is not LIKE a veil or as thick as a veil....it g'damn sure IS a veil...IS acts as an EQUAL (=) SIGN.

'Nother example. The man is a walking cipher, or timepiece, or enigma. The man is a walking encyclopedia. More flowery might be: The thick jungle became a carpet of blackness by nightfall. A camel is a horse created by committee.  Lots of jokes rely on metaphor, simile, and absolutes.
It is also an absolute to say simply this: The fog lifted from the carpeted cemetery.

THINK about that sentence. The fog did not SEEM to be lifting...did not perhaps or maybe begin to make a move toward lifting (Qualifiers - BAD for sentences, weakens them). No, the fog "ABSOLUTELY" lifted, NO doubt about it. AND the cemetery is absolutely carpeted....ever been to Arlington National Cemetery?

This is the magic secret surrounding that kind of thinking. My wife wrote a novel, The Well Meaning Killer. She had me edit it, of course, and there was a scene where her heroine goes out for a jog in the city of Baltimore and all along her route are trash bags for delivery pick up in her neighborhood, and being a cop, her first thought is how it looks...It looked as if the street was littered with body bags.

She put the bags out there; I merely suggested the body bag image come from her character's sense of things. The author liked it, and she added it.

 Of course, if you like the ghost image I added in this article in first paragraph, and it is likely that you do, by all means it is YOURS for the taking. No one owns imagery, symbolism, representational language. Hey even Shakespeare learned from authors that came before him...like Plutarch from who he stole much.

 Well just be certain to look up Qualifiers in a grammar book to know what to avoid; sometimes, as in the use of sometimes in this sentence, a qualifier like some, very, maybe, perhaps, etc. is 'absolutely' needed but most are way overused, for instance a word like VERY, maybe, perhaps, and the phrases 'I think' and 'in my opinion' and 'to me'....when it is totally NOT needed and only undercuts your strong sentence, weakening it.

 By all means, look up Absolutes, words that are opposite in nature to Qualifiers. No wishy-washy with these words and using them MOST of the time, working toward all the time (all is absolute, most is qualifier) makes your fiction STRONG in voice so the reader BELIEVES you and is so willing to follow you because you are not 'hedging' like a politician (in my opinion).

This coupled with metaphor and simile gives readers a strong visual image deposited in their minds. One reviewer once said of my book of the time, "Mr. Walker quite literally snatches the reader's mind for the duration of the book!" -- Midwest Book Review, it was. Love that as that is my goal...my watchword stamped in my mind's eye is MAKE it COMPELLING - and do not forget to bring in your POV character in each scene via his five senses, his eyes, brain, hands, nose, smeller, taster, ears.

These are the elements of style. For more find my Dead on Writing on Kindle books or read my Titanic 2012 or Bismarck 2013 to determine if I practice what I preach.

I hope you will find time to comment here!
Rob Walker

www.robertwalkerbooks.com

Character Attributes - So Important as Visual Cues

How important are character tags, descriptions, the stats of your characters?  Very. In a nutshell, how tall or short, how hefty or slim, whether he wears Hawaiian shirts or three-piece suits, whether he uses a cane or smokes incessantly, chews gum, or she has eyelashes longer than a crocodile's snout.

There's been a lot of talk going around that many--perhaps too many--characters found in genre mystery novels of all sub-categories and beyond are peopled by tall, handsome, virile, young men and long-legged, lovely ladies all solving crimes via big brainy heads usually below scarlet or auburn or blonde hair. Then there are those characters that defy all the 'standards' as their authors (creators) may well be far more concerned in depicting an aging character, a scarred character, a character with physical difficulties, an illness, a limp, a problem with constant pain. Or just plain age and what comes with it.

So while the hero and heroine have routinely been the beautiful people, I believe this is changing more today than ever before. As many of us authors are aging, so are our characters. What interests we have as senior citizens, we want to convey via our characters, which requires a seasoned veteran with an accumulation of scars. In fact, these scars are his or her badges and are worn as such.

Then too there is the need to make every character distinctive from the others. Each should have his or her own gait, speech patterns, non-verbal cues, psychology as well as dress and perhaps superstitions. When you introduce a character and he is chewing on an unlit pipe, wears a watch on a fob, carries a cane and dresses in suit and hat the reader gets a mental picture with each detail that surrounds a hero in your book. If another character has a wooden leg, all the better.  Then another is a young intern wtih a scalpel and a stutter.

Characters are made colorful for a reason. Two police officers sharing the same squad car should be as distinct as Laurel and Hardy. Or at least Cagney and Lacey.

Each officer depicted on my Titanic in my work in progress all wear the same uniform but they are made as different as night and day. One may be wound too tight, the other too easy-going, a third a coward. Two miners in the same coal mine again must be night and day. The items they carry on them helps, these props and tags. One has food and drink on his mind, the other home and family as they work to dig out the coal.

So while it may seem on the surface unimportant how tall or short, how slim or hefty a character is, in fact it is extremely important.  One more caveat. If you do introduce a cane or a special watch or a scalpel given to a surgery student as a gift from dear old dad, you may want to think of them as needing to be remarked upon more than once, and even make them from time to time props that will be used to save a life later in the story, possibly the one carrying the item having to use it as a weapon when back is against the wall. The old saw is that if you introduce a dog, don't forget where you last left her and do not create those sorts of convenient babies we see on TV sitcoms and soap operas as children who are only seen when the script calls for it.

Please do leave a comment!  And thanks for being here!

Rob Walker
FREE opening chapters for Children of Salem, and/or Titanic 2012 @ http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/