When I saw him the other night he was just as handsome as ever;—the same look, half wild and half tame, like an animal you cannot catch, but which you think would love you so if you could catch him.

Anthony Trollope, from Can You Forgive Her?

Writing Advice #?: Choose your descriptive details wisely.

To start, I’d like to share my favorite phrase in the entire English language:

Coffee the temperature of piss

I know it’s no “cellar door.”  But it’s wonderfully evocative on several different levels.  First of all, the obvious: the temperature of piss is also known as... perfect drinking temperature. Coffee slightly less warm than human body temperature is coffee optimal for drinking.  But the choice of comparison has immediately put us off that coffee.

Second, the phrase is viscerally gross: it’s comparing a beverage to a bodily fluid.  And it’s crude: “piss” is rude slang, not childish like “pee” or technical like “urine.”  Third, it’s a great metaphor: pee is acidic and has a strong smell; bad coffee is acidic and has a strong smell.  But the narration didn’t come out and say “the coffee had a strong acidic odor similar to the smell of piss”; it simply evoked that comparison indirectly.

Fourth: I first encountered the phrase in a since-deleted fan fic, in which the narrator was sitting in a hospital room waiting for his son to wake up from surgery.  (A fic about John Winchester on a Supernatural LJ, if anyone cares.) So the phrase worked on several other levels.

We’re in a hospital setting, you’re comparing something to pee: ick, we can guess why that’s on the character’s mind.

The narrator is former military, so the use of profanity fits.

The narrator knows that his son is in this situation because of his own decisions; the self-disgust is evident in comfort (hot coffee) being turned to contamination (urine).

Hospital coffee is famously bad, so anyone who has ever tasted it will get to feel their gorge rise at the image that evokes it so well.

The thinness of the paper cup and the sickly warmth of the liquid within also come through, to readers who know hospitals.

However, like I said: coffee that temperature is good coffee.  But the writer has managed to thoroughly put us off it with the extremely specific word choice for that scene.  “Piss” is about the grossest thing you can compare a beverage to except maybe blood, and drinking blood comes with a whole other set of implications that the author obviously doesn’t want.

Another example done right: Homecoming describes an overpass where cars “hurtled over that bridge as if the devil himself was chasing them. He’d be chasing them from both directions then; he’d catch you either way.” Why?  It’s a bridge that the main characters, on foot, have no way to cross to safety.  This description comes at the narrator’s lowest moment of despair.  It’s just a bridge, with traffic moving at normal speed, but it’s also not.  The circular nature of the description, the sense of fleeing but being unable to get away, are exactly the right details to be evoking then.

An example done wrong: Vampire Academy opens on a sequence where the guy kidnapping the main characters is described as “He was older than us, maybe mid-twenties, and as tall as I’d figured, probably six-six or six-seven. And under different circumstances—say, when he wasn’t holding up our desperate escape—I would have thought he was hot. Shoulder-length brown hair, tied back in a short ponytail. Dark brown eyes. A long brown coat—a duster, I thought it was called.  But his hotness was irrelevant now.”  This paragraph brings the story to a screeching halt.  Instead of the action advancing, it’s dwelling on the “irrelevant” “hotness” of a character’s face.  Why would the narrator notice the physical attractiveness of this person right now?  Why would she wonder whether she has the name of a designer coat correct?  It’s distracting, it’s confusing, and it verbally moves the scene from a desperate shaky cam to a sparkly slow-mo long enough to get a very long pan over this character’s hair and outfit.

It would be easy to describe him as “menacingly large” with “a long dark coat” and keep going.  Then the focus of the narration matches the focus of the characters.  If it’s important for the reader to know that he’s attractive and long-haired and wears leather, then add those details later when the narrator has already been kidnapped and has time to sit around and study him.

So, yeah.  If you have a self-loathing former Marine waiting in a hospital room with a hot drink, “coffee the temperature of piss” evokes worlds of implication in just five words.  If you have an upbeat kid eagerly caffeinating, that same cup can be “coffee with the warm zing of a hug.”  If a third-grade teacher is sucking it down to stay alert, it’s “coffee as tepid as my soul.”  If you’re writing a doctor who sprints past the coffee because their patient is going tachycardic in that same room, don’t mention the coffee at all.

What if stars are just wounds seeping light, stitching themselves together with dull, discolored flesh for the rest of time? Do they know we can't hear them crying out in the darkness? Do they know that we cry too?

If I start laughing out of no where it’s cuz I invented a new saying in my head and it was funny

Todays saying: “well don’t light my fucking toes on fire”

I finished :)

Once again, k traced the bases for the bird but I did the details on the feathers myself :)

Chair support

“Experimenting” - a poem written 10/27/2022

so funny sometimes i use so much figurative language when i talk to myself i end up making new phrases 😭😭

Connotation and word choice is never not fun, either as a teacher or an editor!

What's your favorite connotatively oppositional pair?

She wasn't in love with him, she knew; but she also knew that love for him, the warmth that steals through a centrally-heated house on a cold day, might come.

L.P. Hartley, from The Harness Room

Descriptive Writing: Breathing Life into Your Words

Descriptive writing is a literary tool that breathes life into your narrative. It paints vivid pictures in the minds of your readers, immerses them in the world you’ve created, and heightens their emotional engagement with your story. Yet, mastering the art of descriptive writing can be a challenging endeavor. This guide aims to demystify the process, equipping you with valuable techniques to…

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If your brain listens, processes sound while asleep but hides the memories from you– does it sort through secret images staring from the dark of a dead tv, codes in the negative space of books, messages slipped in the silence, the lapse between songs in a playlist– how much is hidden in the waking world?

i continue to #slay academically

I’m having to do a project abt figurative language in Romeo and Juliet… and I have to draw a scene literally… and it’s due tomorrow… and I wasn’t at school today… so I have to trace it so I can finish it on time :c

But I’m only texting the main body and doing any details myself… I’m weirdly proud of it

I have to color it too 🤢

The quote that I’m doing is “so shows a snowy dove trooping with crows” (I.V.50) it’s when Romeo first saw Juliet and he decides to make every analogy he possibly can like the theater kid that he was

I feel as though I am the moon, merely reflecting your beauty and grace as I talk and look upon the world with such wonder