Pretty Only Goes So Far
Who me? Yes! Guilty as charged. I find that when I write, I want to describe everything for the reader; everything in beautous, flowery sentences that incapsulate everything, like a painter. Myopia is not my problem. So my words are pretty, rich, and I go to the ends of my mind to find synonyms that sparkle. And this is a bad thing? Unfortunately it can be, because pretty only goes so far. Just because something is pretty, and it has forty dimensions of color doesn't mean it has any depth.
When I was a wee wain, I though the key to writing well was description, especially description of my characters; each time I entered a character, a little jaunt would be conjectured with it, ie. Sara was tall, had short dark hair, etc... Oh how wrong I was. I got so caught up in describing what my characters looked like I forgot about the other things, the other six million dimensions, that had nothing to do with hair, height, piercing blue eyes the color of the the Pacific in summer or that they were wearing the latest pair of Levi's. I forgot things such as character ticks, how they spoke, how they interacted with the character. Most of the time dialogue was still hatching.
Later I found - in my poetry you will see this a lot - that I was cramming as many beautiful words as possible into a piece, turning poem into say a rich chocolate cake. Not that chocolate cake is bad. Chocolate cake is good, very good. But after awhile if you eat too much of the chocolate cake you don't feel so well, you get nauseous, and you have to obstain from it. Lesson learned here, try to bake an angel food cake or some cranberry biscotti once in awhile.
People confuse flowery language with emo razors and blood. I have this joke with my friends, our paradigm of emo is from the movie Constantine; not like I hate the film or anything, I quite like it. Keanu Reeves plays a supernatural detective who literally has been to Hell and back, and towards the end of the film he slits his wrist to kill himself, because the only way he can save the world is to die, or something like that. *mocks slitting wrists* Look! I'm Constantine. I find in my experiences that people feel that if you are writing something dark, and pretty it has to be emo. It doesn't. You can write a scene, or description without pushing the extremities.
Adding depth, have your piece in entirety actually mean something more than just a jumble of words. It's perfectly okay to write something just cause it's sounds pretty, or looks pretty, but if there is nothing beyond the silacone, people will lose interest. Treat it like a living, breathing person- beyond the looks it needs personality, charm, humor, a brain perhaps... So the word is make us, the reader, want to read your piece.
Remember, even if your piece is pretty like a new Bond girl, pretty only goes as far as the knife. Your knife, the knife I will stab you with. *grins* Just kidding, I'm not going to stab you.
Bunch of flowers,
CL.
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