Lying by that mountain stream I expect she was being eaten alive by mosquitoes and black flies.
Good point. No wonder she's gone. Except mosquitoes feed only at night. The black flies would do it, though.
Lying by that mountain stream I expect she was being eaten alive by mosquitoes and black flies.
I expect she'll have some pretty good goosebumps, too. Maybe she needs to put on a sweater.
I wish I hadn't pictured it.
bestsellers seem to have some really cardboard characters in them.
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What? Like the cardboard Elvis cut-out in Odd Thomas?
Punched-out I assume to mean like holes punched out of a piece of paper."In Toni Morrison's Beloved, the eyes of Sethe, the protagonist, are certainly a telling detail. Here is how Sethe's eyes are seen by her old friend Paul D:
irises the same color of her skin, which, in that still face, made him think of mercifully punched-out eyes.
...Such telling details...stay in the reader's mind with an almost hypnotic force."
I don't get this. What are "punched-out eyes"? And "mercifully" punched-out eyes?
Maybe it's a cultural thing...
"...Now fetch me a pair of pants or I'll see you're made into a rug."
In my version, she'd prefer to have that bear turned into a fur coat rather than a rug considering the fact that she's not wearing a whole heck of a lot at this point...
Easier said than done. Have you ever tried to turn a bear into anything? Even a side-street? And this one is armed with a camera!
And I'm pretty sure he's chewing some bubble gum. Bazooka...Yeah, but it's just a Kodak! Now if it were a Canon...
I think that description should serve two purposes: to define (in the true sense, like a sculptor cutting away the marble that is not David) and to impress. The latter is key, the diction of description is a freeby for telling the audience what to think. "Thieflike eyes" imply so so much in so little space.
That is a brilliant description. I think what's also helping it is the fact that Mr. Ellison isn't mixing metaphors for the same sensory impression. The examples of Proulx's work especially made me wince.The Atlantic article confirmed something I had long lamented. And it's a shame, because longer metaphors don't necessarily have to suck. Take Harlan Ellison, who once wrote, "It was the kind of voice one suspected would accompany the body attached to the moving finger writing mene mene tekel in letters of fire." He spent half a paragraph describing this voice before summing it up in a single word. Why does this succeed where, say, Cormac McCarthy fails? Because Mr. Ellison knows what words mean.
And I'm pretty sure he's chewing some bubble gum. Bazooka...
What do you mean by impress? I hope you don't mean to influence the reader to think "what a natty writer - coming up with telling descriptive phrases like that". I hope you mean to implant a strong image in the reader's mind.
Being confident also gets you frisked at airports. "Hey wait, this guy is on time for his flight, he has all his paperwork in order, he proceeded through the line without fumbling, and he isn't sweating... Only a terrorist would know our system so well!"I have those, btw, thief-like eyes. Very shifty. I never could look anyone in the eye. I've flunked untold quantities of job interviews because of them. And going through customs at airports is a nightmare!
Standing on the precipice of a runaway train, nice.
Please explain.
It will make more sense once you've listened to the song Uncle Jim linked in post 8017 (Linked as "mixed metaphors").