Please consider this description of a glittery vampire:
“Edward in the sunlight was shocking. I couldn’t get used to it, though I’d been staring at him all afternoon. His skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday’s hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface.” (Meyers, 260)
Now please consider these descriptions of inanimate objects:
“You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank.”(Stephenson, 148)
Both of these excerpts describe nouns, both are about the same length in words (neither is more than 50 words), both are narration not dialogue, but one is apt and amusing while the other is somewhat insipid at best.
I know that it’s easy to make fun of the Twilight books, but more people are interested in laughing at the fans than in really examining why the books themselves are so laughable, mainly because the latter concern is easily answered: the Devil’s in the details.
Meyers’ description of her main male character is entirely based on cliché. Sounds weird, doesn’t it, that glittery bloodsuckers are trite?
Well, they are when written like this. Shining, sparkling, shimmering or glowing like diamonds (even thousands of tiny ones) has been done. Done to death. It’s a dead metaphor and nobody who takes their writing seriously uses language like that for anymore. Don’t believe me? Look at the list below.
The ocean looks like a thousand diamonds, strewn across a blue blanket. – Incubus
Her lips like the red rose in dew, her eyes they did sparkle like diamonds – The Maid with the Bonny Brown Hair (Irish folk song author unknown)
Shine on you crazy diamond – Pink Floyd
I want a girl with a mind like a diamond, I want a girl who knows what’s best – Cake
No one on that list is serious. All of those lyrics (and please note, they’re lyrics, not prose) are making a point about the cliché of shining like diamonds or are trying to kill the cliché by expanding the metaphor, for instance, the Cake lyric is about how diamonds are cutting and sharp – not how they’re sparkly.
Now think back to the description of a phone booth and a mailbox. Neither the phone booth nor the mailbox are described by their overt visible properties – you hear nothing about their shapes, colors or sizes; instead Stephenson uses a humorous suggestion of their physical properties to allow an image to form in the mind of the reader. I’ll admit that the ability of an object to stop a tank is somewhat overused in descriptions of various intimidating things (occasionally women) but the thought of a mailbox as an intimidating object never occurred to me until I was actually typing this sentence. What Stephenson has done here is the opposite of what Meyers does in her books; Stephenson uses wry phrasings to animate the inanimate while Meyers uses dead metaphors that (unintentionally, I’m sure) suck the life out of her characters.
So what does that have to do with you, reader?
I’ve read about a lot of shining eyes, soothing waters, kind hands, warm hearts, quiet rain, frozen time, awkward silences, and loving caresses recently.
Stop it.
I want to read about shining fists, soothing arguments, kind ignitions, warm katydids, quiet tsunamis, frozen cats, awkward sex, and loving LCD screens.
Shake up your writing, mess things up, be original and be daring. When I was in a creative writing class once, and made the mistake of writing “time froze” in one of my short stories. My professor’s response was a kind “DEAD METAPHOR” scribbled in inch high letters with a red pen. My response was to reconsider and turn in a second draft with “time took a breath” in its place. It might not have been the best fix, though I was fairly happy with it, but at least it wasn’t one of a million stories, poems, novels, essays, or articles with “time froze” somewhere in there.
As an experiment, consider:
Annie’s heart slowed only after Kevin lowered his shining fists and stalked back to his rattling old Dodge. Yesterday, once all the soothing arguments, heralds of a better time coming, were done her ignition had been kind and allowed her to get her beater of a Beetle the hell out after only wrenching the key twice.
Today, in the wake of Kevin’s latest attempt at reconciliation, the warm katydid hum on the air was a balm – a soothing tsunami that washed away the tension burned into her after the day; her muscles, which had been as rigid as a cat frozen by a sudden sound, relaxed. Kevin was awkward sex at its worst, all elbows and knees, all the time, with eyes as loving as an LCD screen when all your searches return zero results.
Sure, it’s not much – yet – but it’s the beginning of something interesting, and that’s all that matters. So kill your dead metaphors, dump out your shining diamonds, and welcome a world of dynamited phone booths and soothing tsunamis. Play with your language, play with your perceptions, and let’s get out there and make a better world of it in and for books.
- Cheers,
Alli
Works Cited:
Meyers, Stephanie. Twilight. Qtd. online. 2005.
Stephenson, Neal. Cryptonomicon. Avon Books. New York: New York 2005.
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