Metaphors Musings and James Lee Burke

Metaphors are a great way of conveying imagery, meaning or mood with brevity and impact.

Rather than a paragraph describing in detail the vines on a spooky house, consider something like this: “Vines, like tentacles, climbed the east wall.” If you don’t like similes: “The vine’s tentacles clung to the bricks …”

James Lee Burke is a master. In Rain Gods (page 5) he uses a simile to describe shell casings, to create a macabre mood and to foreshadow the finding of dead bodies: “Scattered about the churches interior, glinting like gold teeth, were dozens of shell casings.”

Of course metaphors are a great way to convey the feelings of a POV character: “He felt a pressure band tightening around his head.” Or how that character perceives something or someone; for example, the character looks at someone whose “eyes are like marbles pushed into tallow”—same book, at page 201.

As for an image: “a rear like a washtub”— at 150.”

Irish Noir

If you liked Ken Bruen's The Guards, then you should give Stuart Neville's books a try (Ghosts of Belfast and Collusion).

Adjectives

Mark Twain said, "If you find an adjective, kill it." However, there are exceptions. Here's a paragraph from James Lee Burke's, Swan Peak:

Sometimes in his dreams Clete saw a straw hooch with a mamasan in the doorway suddenly engulfed in an arc of liquid flame sprayed from a Zippo-track. He saw a seventeen-year-old door gunner go apeshit on a wedding party in a free-fire zone, the brass cartridges jacking from an m60 suspended from a bungee cord. He saw a navy corpsman with rubber spiders on his steel pot try to stuff the entrails of a marine back inside his abdomen with his bare hand. He saw himself inside a battalion aid station, his neck beaded with dirt rings, his body dehydrated from blood expander, his flak jacket glued to the wound in his chest.

It would be hard to cut out the adjectives. Seems to me many of them could be hyphenated to the noun or made one word; for example, wedding-party or weddingparty.

Here's a string of adjectives by Cormac McCarthy: "two heavy white china mugs." Note these are not coordinate adjectives and need no commas because they are of a different class. Here are the classes:

1. determiners--the, a, two, some, Larry's;
2. general--big, attractive, silly, perfect, special, tall, expensive;
3. ages--young, old, new; [McCarthy didn't use this one, but could have added "old."
4. colors--red, pastel, pale, brunette;
5. origin/location--Swiss, Dutch, etc.

My new rule. If you see an adjective kill it, unless you really need it. Don't leave any coordinate adjectives standing.

Maiden Blog Entry

This is my first blog entry. It is April 4, 2008, at 7:18 am.