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[ USING ALL THE TOOLS IN YOUR KIT ]

Just because you might have a kitchen cabinet absolutely overflowing with spices and flavors and various sundry things from the specialty foods market, and a drawer brimming with gadgets and utensils and cutlery and racks of shiny pots and pans, you would be foolish to try to use all of those doodads and ingredients when preparing every recipe. As foolish, in fact, as if you tried to use none of them.

Cooking is a process of using what you need in order to come up with what you want.

So is writing.

The crafting of fiction is, as I've said before, a slow and deliberate undertaking, in which you should use all of the magic that you can conjure up to tell the best story that you can. It will call for good ideas and planning, believable and interesting characters and settings and situations, and many other things. But, at the bedrock of its foundation, it will require a set of useable tools.

In this chapter we'll look closely at just a few of the many devices and approaches available to you. Some of them are purely utilitarian and serve a single purpose; others encroach on bigger ambitions, like moving the story along or calling attention to a character or a theme. A few are out and out trickery, ways to influence your readers without them catching on. We'll look at several that will be particularly useful to you when tackling description and setting.

MODIFIERS

When I say modifiers, I'm referring specifically to adjectives and adverbs whose functions are most often to more specifically define nouns and verbs. You've relied on them all your life; you use them countless times every day. You tell the kid at the drive-through window that you want the big order of fries. You urge your children to speak quietly on the phone while you grab a nap. So, none of this will be news to you. But paying careful attention to the selection and use of these two essential parts of speech that are often taken for granted will make an enormous difference in your fiction, especially in regards to setting and description.

Adjectives

People who attempt to replicate the sparse, clean writing style of Ernest Hemingway — and it's become quite the vogue (they even have a festival in Key West that has a contest) — sometimes assume that his unique voice emanates from the almost absolute absence of adjectives. Following that template, some would-be Hemingways have produced some really ghastly narratives.

But they miss the point. Hemingway did indeed use fewer adjectives than many authors. But when he used them — much, much more often than his imitators seem to realize — he did it in pure Hemingway fashion: the best that it could be done.

Here's a morsel from For Whom the Bell Tolls:

There had still been snow then, the snow that had ruined them, and when his horse was hit so that he wheezed in a slow, jerking, climbing stagger up the last part of the crest, splattering the snow with a bright, pulsing jet, Sordo had hauled him along by the bridle, the reins over his shoulder as he climbed.

Jerking, climbing, bright, and pulsing make up an active little covey of adjectives, especially coming from a man who is widely believed to have shunned them. More importantly, they are each perfect defining words that were selected carefully and well.

Adjectives, along with other modifiers, are the spices that good writers use to flavor their writing. A serving of scrambled eggs is okay all by itself, but it's much more appetizing, in most peoples' opinion, with salt and pepper sprinkled on and even more so — depending on personal taste and inclination — with paprika or garlic or rosemary or Tabasco sauce. Eggs are good with a little spice or a lot. So is fiction. But remember, food that is not flavored at all might be bland, but when spices are poured on like mad it becomes inedible. So strike a balance between too little and too much, in your cooking and your description.

Look at how Robert Cremins uses adjectives in a couple of places in his novel A Sort of Homecoming:

I laugh, a little hissy laugh, and that breaks the heavy spell I've been under for the past few minutes.

Then, a few pages later:

I woke up feeling grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre, unprecedented.

The first time around, he relies on one small adjective — hissy — to “break the heavy spell” and, in the second piece, he lays it on thick, putting forth a group of heftier modifiers, like defensive linesmen on a football team, to show that the spell has returned. Determining how little or how much you want to describe is a decision that you will have to make constantly in your writing. The answer, of course, depends on how much you need to describe. Hissy is a modifier that nails a particular, singular attitude, and does it well. That thundering quartet of adjectives in the second example makes a stronger impression — each word packs more muscle than hissy — that leaves no doubt about what sort of mood this guy woke up in.

Cremins uses the four adjectives to drive home his point, not because he thought of four good ones that would work. He most likely could have thought of dozens more, but those dozens wouldn't make his description any clearer or stronger; in fact, the effect would be diminished with each new one he tacked on. When using modifiers, don't get so carried away that you let the adjectives become the focus of what you are doing. Never let any of the tools become more that just that: tools. The important thing — from start to finish — is your story. In the Cremins model the use of an uncommon, unexpected word like hissy is effective, as is the piling on of the four stronger ones later on. But all of them do exactly what the author intended and needed them to do: They paint a clearer picture of a situation or a character within the larger context of the tale he is telling.

The use of any of these tools, as well as everything else that you do in your writing, must pass the clutter rule, which stipulates that anything that is not directly serving to move the story along is clutter and must go. Test your adjectives and adverbs constantly. If you've written something about a large, ferocious, gigantic dog terrorizing a neighborhood, you'd best lose either large or gigantic, since they both mean the same thing.

Also, be on guard against falling into a pattern of using similar modifier structures, like teams of adjectives, over and over.

Listen:

At the last of the hectic, exasperating day, the small, tired man approached the crowded, frantic train station with trepidation.

Each of the coupled modifiers — hectic/exasperating, small/tired, and crow-ded/frantic — is a fine describer. But what is likely to happen is that your reader will pick up on the repetition of the pairs and that will be what he focuses on, rather than on the action that is important to your story. Then the adjectives will be working against you, and, as with all of these tools, you want them working for you.

Adverbs

As you know, adverbs serve a triple function; they can modify verbs (he slowly chewed the apple), adjectives (the overly attentive man became a bore), as well as other adverbs (she ran very quickly). Because of this, you will use them very, very often. But beware; they can, like all of their fellow tools, be used badly, to the detriment of your fiction.

One way to use them badly is to work them into your tag lines — speaker identification lines — in fiction.

Consider:

“Oh, my,” Ellen sadly replied, “it's not even worth getting up today.”

If it's not even worth getting up today, then we hardly need to be told that Ellen replied sadly. Her own dialogue describes her as sad, and that is altogether more effective description than providing constant little instructions in modifiers.

This isn't meant to imply that adverbs are evil and should never be used at all. They should be used — even occasionally in tag lines — but they should be, when you use them, the best choice available to you. “Leave me alone,” she said, defensively,” might be the most effective way for you to show that a speaker is defensive. Having her cringe and bare her teeth would be a little over the top, don't you think? And using the one word — defensively — is a much more delicate approach.

Here's one more point concerning adverbs: Since so many of them end in -ly make sure that you don't overdo it, lest you end up with eagerly, charmingly, angrily, and cleverly in the same sentence. After wading through all of those, your reader might just put your story aside, vehemently.

PUNCTUATION

We could get awfully technical here and trot out the several rigid grammatical rules regarding punctuation usage. But for our present purpose regarding description and settings, let's bypass all of the procedural guidelines that you can dredge up out of style manuals and grammar texts and get to the point of what these little devices can do for you when writing fiction.

In a nutshell, exclamation points, periods, commas, colons, semicolons, and dashes are road signs for your reader, put there by you throughout your fiction to show them where to pause, where to continue, where to speed up, and where to stop.

This requires that you listen to your story or novel, both while you are writing it and when you revise. Not necessarily reading it out loud, or having somebody else do it, but actually striving to hear the words and phrases and sentences as you want your reader to receive them.

Sometimes more of your story can be told in a pause, either in narration or in dialogue, than in a paragraph or a page. And your readers won't make that pause unless you tell them to.

Periods and commas carry most of the workload, and their placement is usually so predetermined that you don't have much flexibility in their usage, but you have more options with exclamation points, colons, semicolons, and dashes.

Exclamation Points

If your characters bellow at each other from time to time, that's fine, and that's when you'll need to use exclamation points. But your voice, the hopefully dependable and comfortable voice in which you tell your story, shouldn't depend on such shenanigans as shouting. Horde these useful little devices in the corner of your kit, and use them only when you really need them, as Luanne Rice does in her novel The Perfect Summer to emphasize the absurdity of a concept:

The other parents would be smiling at her father, giving him thumbs-up for her excellence in — Annie cast about, searching her mind for the perfect sport — field hockey!

In your fiction, determine when your characters need to be loud and when they need to be quiet. By the same token, determine when you need to be loud and quiet in your telling of the story. Sometimes an important moment in your plot will demand some noise, thus requiring exclamation points, but other times the point will be better made by a different approach. Listen:

“I hate you so much I could kill you!” she yelled.

It certainly gets the point across. If somebody yelled that at me, it would get my attention. But in a story or novel, something like this might create a stronger image:

She locked him into a frigid gaze, the hate welling up in her eyes along with the tears. “I could kill you right now,” she whispered.

There's no yelling this time, so there's no need for an exclamation point. People who are angry often yell, which carries with it all of the fly-off-the-handle, heat-of-the-moment, sorry-about-that business that whispering hardly ever involves. People who whisper things usually have thought things through, and mean every word of what they say. Your readers know that, because they have both yelled and whispered. So the quieter treatment of this little scene — the one with the whispering and the tears — will deliver a more vivid image.

When writing your fiction, consider each and every scene and decide how it will best be played out — loud or quiet, long or short, light or heavy — in order to serve the bigger story.

Colons

This fellow (:) is so regularly confused with its cousin the semicolon (;) that some writers use them interchangeably, and in doing so they commit a cardinal sin. The use of a colon gives the reader some warning. Here comes something of importance, it says.

The most common task of a colon is to introduce a list, and this can be one of the best ways to describe a character or a situation in your fiction.

Here's Edward Rutherfurd, in his novel London:

There had been three candidates for King Henry's vast inheritance: Richard, his brother John, and their nephew, Arthur.

Remember, your job is to convey information and images to your reader. And, sometimes, things are made clearer when methodically laid out — one, two, three.

That information doesn't have to be a list. It might be a definition, like this one, again from London:

Ned was a good dog: medium size with a smooth, brown and white coat, bright eyes, and devoted to his cheerful master.

Or it might be an example or a clarification:

The patriots of the Revolution fought for one thing and one thing only: freedom.

Whenever you use a colon, you're setting your reader up for something: for a description, a clarification, an idea, a list. It's one of the best ways for you to call attention to something important in your story.

Semicolons

While colons can be used in several ways, semicolons have only one function. But it's a very important one. They connect two otherwise complete sentences without resorting to conjunctions like and or then, thus letting you avoid two unforgivable offenses: (1) run-ons and (2) an overabundance of short, choppy sentences that bump along like a rocky road.

Consider these three sentences, all of which are complete (subjects and predicates in attendance) and all of which are clearly stated:

The Hens continued laying.

It was a miracle of sorts.

As a boy he'd not eaten a fresh egg from November until the spring.

Taken together, the sentences dovetail into a particular image, that of a boy who hadn't expected a thing to happen and saw its occurrence as a sort of a miracle. If you wanted to convey this image in your fiction, you could line the sentences up just like that and be done with it. But look how much nicer the image works when configured in another way, as Jeffrey Lent does it in his novel In the Fall:

The hens continued laying. It was a miracle of sorts; as a boy he'd not eaten a fresh egg from November until the spring.

Varying the lengths of your sentences is an effective tool that we'll get to in a few pages, and the best way to create longer, more flowing ones is to use semicolons to tie short sentences together. Be on the lookout in your manuscripts for places to do this.

Dashes

Dashes do almost exactly what commas do; they set things off from the rest of a sentence. But the use of dashes comes much closer to establishing your unique voice. Everyone must use commas in exactly the same way; they fall into the province of the immutable rules of the language. But dashes are freer spirits than commas and offer you more leeway. Look at how Clare Francis uses them in two places in Night Sky:

He wondered what time it was — probably after four. Still too early to go out.

And later:

Soon — by tonight — he would have enough money to buy a D8SS.

In both examples, the author uses the words set off by the dashes to more clearly define something mentioned in the main bodies of the sentences. In each case, she could have used commas, but, by using dashes, she focuses the reader's attention more closely on the details they enclose.

Dashes everywhere will become old fast. But using them sporadically, along with the more conventional commas, or instead of them in many cases, will add a little spice to your description.

Parentheses

Don't get dashes and parentheses mixed up. Anything set off by dashes is still a part of the ongoing story, but if it's set off parenthetically, the reader is being told to assume that it isn't there at all. It's like an aside in a play, where an actor turns away from the drama and explains something to the audience. It's like a jury being told by a judge to disregard something said in the witness stand. Of course, the jury can't really disregard it, since they heard it. Neither can a reader separate it fully from the tale, which you don't really want him to do anyway, or you wouldn't have put it in.

Using parenthetical material throughout a manuscript is a way to carry on a running conversation with your reader, as if you're sitting beside him while he plows through your story or novel, offering little comments along the way. Charles Dickens did it regularly, as did Victor Hugo; both were of that era of literature where a phrase like “And now, gentle reader, let us continue” popped up pretty often.

Chit-chatting with your reader in modern times isn't likely to be the best of ideas, unless you've decided to use a correspondence or a diary motif in which to tell your story. But adding little snippets of information in parentheses occasionally can add flavor to your work. Here's an example from King, Queen, Knave, a novel by Vladimir Nabokov:

Somewhere a door closed softly, and the stairs creaked (they were not supposed to creak!), and her husband's cheerful off-key whistle receded out of earshot.

If the parenthetical information was lifted out altogether and tossed away the rest of the sentence would still convey the image that needs to be conveyed. But the slipped-in bit — almost like a secret being shared — adds much to the description, especially since it is followed up with that dramatic exclamation point.

WAYS TO SHOW RESEMBLANCE

One of the most effective ways to convey a particular image to your reader is to show him something that it is similar to. Metaphors, similes, analogies, personification, symbolism, and allusions are all ways to nudge your readers toward making the connection that you want them to make. The first three differ in what they do only by degrees; a metaphor is an implied resemblance, a simile a stated one, and an analogy is a detailed one. Each of them will be useful to you, depending on how broad or how slight you want a particular resemblance to be in your story or novel.

Metaphors

A metaphor is an implied analogy; it suggests a similarity without actually saying that the similarity exists. It literally makes your reader think of a thing or an action that is not the thing or the action that you are describing. The end result of which is — you can only hope — that the reader will see the thing or the action that you are pointing her toward more clearly.

Look:

Winston Churchill, a proud statesman, led England through the war.

It isn't quite as catchy (or as effective) as this:

Winston Churchill, that proud English lion, led his nation through the war.

The second sentence isn't meant to imply that Mr. Churchill was an animal. Only the most literal of readers would get that out of it. Metaphors help your reader to see how something that is in your story is like, in some way, something that is not actually in the story at all, so very literal readers will just have to make the little leaps of faith that metaphors require. It's very much like a wine expert saying that a particular vintage has hints of berries or melons or pepper. These things aren't actually in the wine, but they help the listener imagine what it will taste like.

In Roots, Alex Haley did not mean for his readers to believe that big carpets sometimes fly around when he wrote this description:

… a great beating of wings filled the air and a vast living carpet of seafowl — hundreds of thousands of them, in every color of the rainbow — rose and filled the sky.

In your fiction, you'll want to use this tool pretty often. If you have a burglar in the process of burgling, and you want the reader to see him as catlike, you can simply tell him he's catlike, or you can have him move around on “little cat's feet” (to steal a line from Carl Sandburg). Now you're not telling the comparison; you're implying it.

We need to call attention now to the greatest and most constant danger of using metaphors, namely mixing them. We've all come up with these rascals. My most recent faux pas of this particular variety was in the first draft of the first chapter of this book. I originally wrote this sentence:

Finding and polishing the writing voice in which you will describe your setting is a solo flight, with you alone in the cockpit.

Then, a few sentences later, I referred to your style surfacing, like Ahab's white whale off there on the horizon. So I had, in one paragraph, both aeronautical and nautical imagery and, almost certainly, a very confused reader. So when I revised, I changed that first sentence to this:

Finding and polishing the writing voice in which you will describe your setting is a solo voyage, with you alone at the helm.

After the alteration, my images are completely nautical, with no mention of airplanes or pilots. I hesitate to say we are, to use a common metaphor, all on the same page now, since pages have nothing to do with ships. So I'll just say we are all steering in the same current.

If you want to see mixed metaphors used pretty often, read the comic strip Crankshaft, part of the humor of which rests on the central character's frequent use of them. In one strip, somebody tells the old man that his granddaughter has really grown up. “Yep,” he responds. “Pretty soon she'll be spreading her wings and walking out the door.”

Mixed metaphors come off as comical when you have a character use one. But it's not one bit funny when you let one slip into your writing.

Similes

Similes do exactly the same thing that metaphors do, except the similarity is prefaced by like or as. So it's not quite as subtle. This time, Mr. Churchill might roar like an English lion, or be as proud as an English lion.

Here are a few examples of how authors use similes (the italics are mine):

Aidan Chambers uses one to express movement in Postcards From No Man's Land:

To one side of the theater, facing in to the rest of the plein like an auditorium facing a stage, was a mini-square crammed with tables served by waiters who fluttered in and out of canopied cafes like birds from nesting boxes.

Ken Follett, in The Hammer of Eden, uses a simile to portray a lack of action:

As the light strengthened, they could distinguish the dark shapes of cranes and giant earthmoving machines below them, silent and still, like sleeping giants.

When some of my writing students first stumble onto the fine things that similes can do for them, they tend to over do, like young girls dipping for the first time into their mother's makeup drawer and globbing it on too thick. Some of the students are apt, in their stories, to trot similes out one after another, like ponies in a parade.

I overdid the similes myself in that last paragraph. The cosmetic laden girls are like writers using too many metaphors; so are ponies in a parade. But to use both in one paragraph is a bit much. But, not overdone, the simile will be one of the most effective tools in your fiction.

You'll use similes in many of the places were you might have otherwise chosen to use metaphors, but now they will be stated resemblances rather than implied ones. This time, your burglar will not move on little cat's feet but will move like a cat, or as silent as a cat.

Analogies

While metaphors are more delicate than similes, analogies are at the other end of the spectrum and make no attempt whatsoever at understatement. They are carefully laid out comparisons, hitting on how two things are similar in at least one way. Here's a short one from When Kambia Elaine Flew in From Neptune, a novel by Lori Aurelia Williams:

The bayou was to me like hot-water cornbread was to Mama.

This one is in the exact format of all those analogies that used to give you fits on standardized tests in high school — you remember: card is to deck as month is to year — but don't think you have to work your brief analogies into this precise wording. Yours might go something like The bayou was as important to me as hot-water cornbread was to Mama or Hot-water cornbread was the epitome of goodness to Mama; just like the bayou was to me.

Sometimes in your fiction a short analogy won't accomplish everything you need it to. Then you'll need to work it into something longer.

The subjects of James Michener's The Eagle and the Raven are Santa Anna and Sam Houston, so he decided to begin with an extended analogy, linking them metaphorically with the two birds that symbolize them in the title and throughout the book:

It was as if two powerful birds had entered the sky within a single year, The Eagle in the south, The Raven in the north, each circling and gaining strength, each progressing in the consolidation of its own powers. For forty-two tempestuous years the adversaries would fly in ever-widening orbits until confrontation became inevitable. They would meet only once, a clash of eighteen culminating minutes in the spring of 1836 which would change the history of the world.

In your own fiction, short descriptions of similarities will work best as metaphors or similes, and more elaborated juxtapositions that compare two characters or things should be treated in a brief or an extended analogy.

So if you choose to use an analogy in your burglar saga, you would go into some detail about just how he is like a cat.

Allusions

Since we're already on the subject of cats, let's look at how Kurt Vonnegut begins his novel Cat's Cradle:

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

The “Call me Jonah” part is an allusion, a figure of speech that makes reference to a famous person or event. In this case, the author is referring to the first sentence of Moby Dick (“Call me Ishmael.”), just as I alluded to that novel a few pages ago when I mentioned Ahab and his white whale.

Using an allusion is a great way to describe something or someone by calling attention to something else, but you must remember this (which is an allusion to the song in the movie Casablanca): The key word in that definition is famous. The allusion will fall flat if the reader doesn't make the connection. So, while your Uncle Elmer out there in Flagstaff might be the epitome of thrift, saying that a character in your fiction is as cheap as your Uncle Elmer isn't likely to work for anybody outside of your family.

So, when using allusions, you want to make them wide enough for the reader to get. Neither should they be a puzzle that you've designed. I was given a novel a few years ago in the introduction of which the author let us in on a little game that she had devised. She said that those readers who, like herself, had “been happy enough to have had a classical education” should look for allusions to works of art and literature that she had planted in the text: words or phrases or dialect that would ring a bell (a silver one, no doubt). She gave the exact number of the precious nuggets and sent us on our way, like well-scrubbed children after Easter eggs. She said, in that introduction, that none of the allusions were essential to any understanding of her novel, and that neither disregarding them nor being unable to decipher them would alter a reader's perception.

And here is where I disagree with this classically trained scribe. Allusions that are not perceived with at least some ease are useless. They slow down the pace at best, or, at worst, they offend. I don't know if I would have picked up on any of her little gems or not, since I slammed her tome shut before even getting to her story.

The purpose of using allusions is not to drive your readers away, but to bring them more completely in, by reminding them of similar situations or events that they know something about. And, by the way, this author was wrong in thinking that allusions don't have to add to the story. If you choose to use them, they should have a purpose beyond giving your reader a chance to identify them. They should — as everything you write should — add value to your story.

Here's how Tony Kushner alludes to the movie The Wizard of Oz in his play Angels in America by having a character wake up from a serious illness and point to some of his friends. “I've had a remarkable dream,” he says. “And you were there, and you … and you. And some of it was terrible, and some of it was wonderful, but all the same I kept saying I want to go home. And they sent me home.” This is exactly what Dorothy says at the very end of the movie. It's an obvious allusion to a film that long ago established itself as an American icon, so most readers will recognize it.

Much less obvious is the short sentence “Then I defy you, Heaven!” in Anne Rice's The Tale of the Body Thief. Which is awfully close to Romeo's “Then I defy you, Stars!” in Romeo and Juliet. The character in the Rice book is going through a Romeo-like moment, so his shouting of the similar line reinforces its meaning.

Allusions, either strong or subtle, will work well for you in your writing, as long as you make them broad enough so that just about everyone will get it. You're on solid ground calling a little boy's dash on his bike through town to alert the population to a fire a “Paul Revere's ride.” But leave your Uncle Elmer at home.

Lofty Language Indeed

Literary tools that show resemblance have been used in the world's religions for centuries.

Consider a couple of the hymns that are sung each Sunday morning. “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” is not proclaiming that the Almighty is, in fact, a fortress, but that He is like one. In another one, we sing of Christian soldiers, marching as to war, not off to war, or into war, which would be the thing itself. As to war means that these soldiers are not soldiers in the literal sense, but are similar to them in their commitment.

Sacred texts are filled with metaphors, similes, and symbolism. What are parables but stories whose only function is to make their hearers think of other things than are in the stories? And while debate rages on regarding the literal, historical truth of many biblical or sacred text events, most of the debaters would agree that, whether Noah actually floated an ark or not, the symbolic lesson is the most important thing: that people better behave.

Think of how many times characters in sacred texts allude to characters that came before them, to prophets and kings and rascals and rogues. And if a group of listeners are referred to as sheep, or lambs, then you can bet (or hope) a metaphor is being employed.

If literary devices like symbolism, similes, metaphors, and allusions have helped countless generations to see something as mystical and lofty as divine nature and eternity, just think how useful it will be in your fiction, which will more than likely focus on characters and settings and situations that are tethered more securely to the here and now.

Personification

Let's consider another couple of lines from Romeo and Juliet, at the very end:

A glooming peace this morning with it brings;

The sun for sorrow will not show his head …

Here, Prince Escalus is lamenting the two dead lovers sprawled out before him and numerous other deaths in the play (Shakespeare liked to bring his tragedies to a close with high body counts). He is implying that the very sun in the heavens — the gaseous star itself — is remorseful and hides behind clouds. And though even the most literal of readers will know that this can not be (it just happens to be a cloudy day in Verona), it works well as personification, a figure of speech that bestows human actions or sensibilities on inanimate objects and ideas.

Here's another literary element that you already use constantly, both in your thinking and in your speaking. Who hasn't been slapped by a wave or kissed by the wind? Who hasn't heard the wind singing in the trees or a last slice of pie in the fridge calling your name?

You can take your time with personification in your writing, working it meticulously along, as Ann Packer does in her novel The Dive From Clausen's Pier:

The silk was like nothing I'd ever worked with before, slippery and so fluid it was almost as if it were alive, slithering from my table onto the floor, sliding off the deck of my sewing machine if I was careless when I pulled the needle out, if I didn't have my hands right there to coax it to stay.

Or you can pack the personification into one short image, as J.K. Rowling does in a single word (swam) in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire:

They set off across the deserted moor, unable to make much progress through the mist. After about twenty minutes, a small stone cottage next to a gate swam into view.

The use of personification is an excellent opportunity for you to make clear in your reader's mind an action that is important in your story. It is a dull description indeed to say that the warm water of a swimming hole touched a character's arm, and extremely more effective to say that it caressed it.

Symbolism

Too many people, I fear, come away from their high school and college English courses thinking that literature is composed almost completely of symbolism. This is because teachers pay a great deal of attention to what characters and things and situations stand for or, more specifically, to what they think or the textbook or the study guide says they stand for. So their students sometimes get the notion that the heart and soul of the works they are told to read are the various symbols their teachers point out, often to the exclusion of other important elements in the stories; too often, in fact, to the exclusion of the meanings of the stories themselves.

Though symbolism isn't the alpha and omega of literature that your high school teacher might have thought it was, it is an essential tool in your kit. Aaron Elkins in Fellowship of Fear describes some sculptures that are obviously intended to be symbols, things that represent other things or ideas:

The great stone eagles on either side of the entrance had once gripped laurelled swastikas in their talons, but those had long ago been chipped away by young GIs laughing into the newsreel cameras, so that now they did duty as American eagles, guarding the headquarters of USAREUR — United States Army Europe.

In this example the symbolism is as heavy as those stone eagles. Almost always in fiction you will need to be more understated than that when using this tool.

It's a good idea to refrain from intentionally building symbols in, unless you're up to something as obvious as Elkins was with his eagles. The most effective symbols occur naturally in the story and float effortlessly to the surface, like cream in milk.

When I wrote the memoir about my father and his Alzheimer's ordeal, I mentioned, several times, a navy surplus clock that he had bought before I was born and attached to the wall in our kitchen. It is a great, heavy thing, with a glass face that tilts up on a hinge; I grew up watching my father wind it with a key each morning, and even learned to tell time on it (unfortunately, it is a twenty-four-hour contraption and I had to be retaught on a traditional twelve-hour clock in elementary school). When my father died, I unscrewed the clock from his wall and moved it to my house, where I took over the winding duties.

I honestly never intended that clock to be representative of anything or anybody in my book, but more than a few readers perceived it as symbolic — of my father, of their fathers, of all fathers, of the inevitable passage of time (the classic symbol called a memento mori — a reminder of death). So, the fact is that my inherited clock is indeed a symbol, no matter what I think about it. And it's a symbol because it works as one, in the natural progression of the story, and not because I planted it there to be symbolic.

What you're probably asking yourself right about now is how the heck you're supposed to use symbolism if you're not supposed to put symbols in your text. Here's my answer: Write your story or novel the best that you can — write it truly and well, as Hemingway might have said — and don't worry about what will be symbolic and what won't be. Let things and characters that turn out to be symbolic simply materialize.

That's not to say that you won't write characters that personify goodness or evil or love or vindictiveness or any number of other things. But they should personify those qualities because of things you have them say and do in the story, not because your intention was to set them up as symbolic. What you'll likely end up with — if your overall intention is to create a symbol — is what some critics call cardboard characters, people who are so one-dimensional that they resemble cutouts that are propped up to look like real folks. In short, let your characters be real folks, and if they end up being symbolic, then so much the better.

The same holds true for things and places. You don't want your setting to be just a backdrop that thumps down on the stage when a scene changes. You want it to be a vibrant, believable place. And if your only goal for it is to stand for something, like Maple Street being a slice of apple pie America right out of a Norman Rockwell painting, that's likely all it will be, and not a street where real people with real problems live.

Now, how about the names of the people that live there? Long ago, very obviously symbolic names could be used to great effect. Like the hero who made his hard journey through life in Pilgrim's Progress being named Christian. But now we have to be considerably quieter about it. So quiet in fact that my first inclination is to persuade you not to make your characters' names stand for things at all. But if you do, make sure you are as inconspicuous as Harper Lee was in To Kill a Mockingbird when she named the central character Atticus Finch. A finch is a songbird that doesn't cause anybody any problems, just like a mockingbird, and just like Atticus himself, and Tom Robinson, another character in the novel.

Perhaps the best use of symbolism, when it comes to names, will be in nicknames. In The Windows of Heaven, I had the children at an orphanage call a nun with a large birthmark that covered much of her face Sister Blister. And symbolic nicknames can be ironic, as when naming a slow thinker Einstein or a bumbling lady Grace.

In your manuscripts, stay on the lookout for characters or situations that might make the natural progression to symbolism. Then you might very well want to do things that emphasize the resemblance. Let's say it becomes obvious that an old homestead in your setting begins to represent a years old crime and the guilt that a character feels because of it. That means you'll need to come up with a backstory, a few red herrings (false clues), a few foreshadowings (real clues), and a good many other things. The homestead, in the midst of all that literary commotion, becomes finally a bona fide symbol. And your story becomes the richer for it.

ONOMATOPOEIA

Many first-time writers want to begin their stories with onomatopoeia, words that sound like the actions they describe. Or they want them to stand alone in their texts. So words like Bang! Pow! and Slam! pop up as one-word sentences all over the place and, before long, it's like we're back in an old Batman television episode, where such things frequently splashed across the screen. Splashed, by the way, is an example of onomatopoeia.

Ring! Ring! all by itself is one way to show that a phone is ringing, but it's almost never the best way. Even resorting to reporting that the phone rang is preferable. But much better yet is something like this:

He picked up the receiver and said hello.

Give your reader a little credit. Surely she knows, if a character picks up the receiver and says hello, that the phone rang.

Instead of using onomatopoeia all by itself, weave it into the fabric of your sentences, letting the sound words work their magic in little doses. Like Zane Grey does in the opening sentence of Riders of the Purple Sage:

A sharp clip-clop of iron-shod hoofs deadened and died away, and clouds of yellow dust drifted from under the cottonwoods out over the sage.

Clip-clop sings out to readers from within the sentence, not set apart as a sentence of its own. We hear it, and then we move on to the next bit of business, just like we do hundreds of times every day in real life.

Make sure that your use of onomatopoeia occurs as naturally in your story or novel as it does in the real world. Let what things sound like work toward the bigger description that you are after, rather than be isolated little descriptions of their own. If your scene is set on a beach where some gulls are squawking and the waves are sloshing against a piling, steer away from coming up with something like this:

“Squawk! Squawk!” sang out the many gulls. Slosh! The water met the piling.

As a matter of fact, steer far away from something like that, because it's absolutely abysmal.

“Squawk! Squawk! Slosh.” The sounds of seagulls and the waves filled up the morning.

Now that's a little better. But you'll fare better yet with something like this instead:

A congregation of gulls squawked as they floated through the gray morning; uninspired waves sloshed against a concrete piling.

Squawking and sloshing are fine sound words that will help your reader imagine the setting you are offering, but the words will be much more effective when worked into the overall framework of your description, not standing outside of it calling (squawking) attention just to themselves.

CADENCE

Here's a mantra that you might consider chanting from time to time while writing: Cadence is good; repetition is bad.

Cadence is when you employ a measured, lyrical movement, often repeating words and phrases for rhythmic effect. Repetition, on the other hand, is when you botch things up and repeat a word or a phrase too soon. Believe me, your reader knows the difference and so should you.

Cadence is a wonderful way to describe something in your writing, all the while letting your reader glean the information in something akin to hearing it in a melody. John Grisham uses a brief cadence in this segment from his novel Bleachers. He uses the same word — our — and the same verb structure — were waiting — in a pair of sentences that describes a situation:

We ran two plays until all eleven guys got everything perfect. Our girlfriends were waiting. Our parents were waiting.

And in Provinces of Night, William Gay establishes a longer cadence by giving a pleasing cluster of descriptions of the setting:

The citrusy smell of the pine woods, the raw loamy earth smell of a field turned darkly to the sun by Brady's tractor, the faint call of distant crows that was all there was to break the silence.

If you come to a place in your story where you want your reader to have no doubt that one character is deeply in love with another one, you might just say that this is the case: He loved her very much.

There. That should do it, don't you think? Well, it does accomplish what you set out to do: to relate that he was deeply in love with her. But if you want to prove it, do something like this, using cadence to get the point across:

He thought of her all the time. He thought of her when he got out of bed in the morning and when he rode the subway to work. Thought of her all day long, as he went about his dreary job, and when he rode the subway home again. Thought, during his nightly dinner of meat and cheese from the corner deli, of how beautiful she would be standing on the platform at the train station on the weekend. And he thought of her, finally, when he closed his eyes to go to sleep each night.

All of those thought ofs aren't repetition at all (remember: repetition is bad). They make up a carefully choreographed melody that should bring your reader fully on board with the fact that this guy is head-over-heels in love.

Using cadence is one of the best ways to utilize and call attention to the essential beauty of language. It is pleasing to your reader's ear and — being that — it provides you an excellent opportunity to not only convey important parts of your story but to help establish the unique voice in which you are telling it.

FLASHBACKS, BACKSTORIES, FUTURE STORIES

A flashback is a sudden, brief relocation to a previous time and then, just as suddenly, a return to the present story. A backstory is a longer trip (in fact, sometimes backstories make up most of a story or even a novel). A future story is a glimpse of what is to come after, sometimes long after, the present action.

In a flashback, a character is usually reminded of something or someone from his past. The smell of cabbage cooking might cause him to see a kitchen that he hasn't actually seen in years. Or you might have a character who looks over at his wife of fifty years and, in just the right light, sees her as the teenager he married.

Flashbacks come in handy when you need to infuse a clue or two into a mystery story or when some character trait needs to be enhanced or explained. Let's say you have a fellow in your story that doesn't like dogs. Your reader wants to know why this is the case, so you lead her along for a while and then give her a nice little flashback, in which the man recalls being bitten by a dog as a child.

Flashbacks are quick. Backstories, because they drag in the baggage of a character or a situation, are longer. Here's how William Styron begins the fourth chapter of Sophie's Choice:

“In Cracow, when I was a little girl,” Sophie told me, “we lived in a very old house on an old winding street not far from the university.”

Thus begins the backstory that becomes the heart and soul of that novel. It goes on to play itself out in many scenes that are built into the framework of the present story.

A less frequently used vehicle to wander away from the present story is the future story, which can be nothing more than a glimmer into the future, like this from M.M. Kaye's novel The Far Pavilions:

Years afterwards, when he had forgotten much else, Ash could still remember that night. The heat and the moonlight, the ugly sound of jackals and hyenas quarreling and snarling within a stone's throw of the little tent where Sita crouched beside him, listening and trembling and patting his shoulder in a vain attempt to smooth his fears and send him to sleep.

Flashbacks, backstories, and future stories are good ways to establish setting and provide description. Diverting your readers' attention away from the here and now allows you to focus on times and places that give deeper insight into a character or a situation.

FORESHADOWING

Foreshadowing gives the reader a clue — a taste of what is to come — like a formation of geese ahead of an approaching cold front. Listen to the first sentence of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones:

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie.

The word that is most packed with foreshadowing is the verb was. Why, most readers will want to know, isn't her name still Susie Salmon? The very next sentence answers that one:

I was murdered on December 6, 1973.

Now the readers' inquiry changes; now they want to know how and why she was murdered. That, and what the heck is going on here? They won't get all of their questions answered for several hundred pages. But their interest is stirred in the two opening sentences.

That's what foreshadowing should do for you. And that is also exactly what first sentences should do: make the reader keep reading.

Little harbingers of what's to come are wonderful carrots to dangle in front of your readers. They are the cold wind against the windowpane, the giddy step along the lane, the money buried in the backyard. They are some of the things that keep your readers reading. So they are very important bits of business.

SENTENCE AND PARAGRAPH LENGTH VARIATIONS

Sometimes you can impress your reader with the arrangement of your sentences and paragraphs as well as with the fine wordsmithing that comprises them. Consider these sentences from Patricia Cornwell's novel From Potter's Field:

One bullet had entered through his right cheek, and as I compressed his chest and blew air into his mouth, blood covered my hands and instantly turned cold on my face. I could not save him.

The point here — that this unfortunate fellow's a goner — is made as effectively by the structuring of the two sentences as by the words contained in them. Your reader may not realize this when reading them; so in a way this is a form of manipulation. But it is also a darned effective way to convey what you want the reader to know.

Look at this passage from Shelley Mydans's novel Thomas:

Baldwin sat back and looked at him. In Eustace's mind, a thought was forming; he looked at Thomas, then to his brother, then at Thomas, breathing as though he might soon speak, but he said nothing.

She begins with a short, nonelaborated sentence and then gives us a much longer, more involved one that builds on the first. It makes for a fine description of a scene. You'll do well to pay attention to sentence length variation in your own writing, and the best way to do it is to fiddle with your sentences constantly, either in your mind or on the monitor screen. Consider several configurations, then choose the best for what you're trying to show.

Imagine for instance that you wrote this paragraph, which is really from Miss Buncle's Book by D.E. Stevenson:

Sarah looked up at the clock; it was midnight and John had not returned. She hoped there was nothing wrong. It was a first baby, of course, and first babies were apt to keep people waiting.

The sentences work fine as they are, but they will work a little differently when reworked. How about this, starting with a shorter sentence and following it up with a pair of longer ones:

Sarah looked up at the clock. It was midnight and John had not returned, and she hoped there was nothing wrong. It was a first baby, of course, and first babies were apt to keep people waiting.

Neither is inherently better than the other, and your decision should be based on the meaning you are attempting to convey.

Pay as much attention to the structure of your sentences as to their length. Many times I find myself falling into a pattern of using the same sentence framework one after another. A prepositional phrase followed by my subject followed by my verb followed by one more prepositional phrase felt right the first time, so why not do it again? You know the answer to that one: because it becomes repetitive quickly. So mix your structures up; move things around. Flip-flop phrases and clauses and adjectives and adverbs as regularly as you shorten and lengthen the sentences themselves. Word processing programs are real blessings here. Just think: Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Hemingway had to do all of this tweaking in their heads or with lots of scratch-throughs and little arrows. We can do it with a few clicks of a mouse (a phrase that would have baffled those three writers mightily).

This same advice applies to the lengths of paragraphs. Some authors are of the opinion that starting a work of fiction — or anything else — with a long paragraph is counterproductive to enticing the reader to come onboard. And it's a valid argument that goes along with another one concerning long chapters as opposed to shorter ones. As a reader, I can tell you that, if I am getting tired and contemplating turning off the lamp and going to sleep, I am much more likely to read one more short chapter than a long one. But I'll leave psychology to people who know considerably more about it than I do. Varying the lengths of paragraphs has little to do with psychology, and much to do with creating a user-friendly format. Readers get weary of long paragraphs, and they get just as weary of paragraphs of the same length being lined up like a freight train. So vary the length; write a long paragraph followed by a very short one.

It's quite effective.

SUMMARY: PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER

In this chapter we've rummaged around pretty thoroughly in the set of tools available to you as a writer. We certainly didn't lift each and every one out and look at it, but we focused on several that will be particularly useful to you when writing description and settings.

Instead of recapping all of the approaches and devices, let me leave you with some good advice: Let moderation and balance weigh heavily when selecting the tools and using them. You won't use all of them in any one story or chapter; you'll employ them as you need them, given specific scenes and characters and situations. In one case an extended analogy will work better than a metaphor or a simile. Sometimes a trio of adjectives will work better than one; other times no adjectives at all will be needed.

Think of these tools as the spices and ingredients and utensils that we started this chapter with. Use each one carefully and well, sparingly at times and in abundance at others. Then, when you're done, look at the end result as one thing, not as all of the little things that went into it or were used to prepare it. Then you will almost certainly have to go back in and make some changes (that's where you're better off working with writer's tools than with kitchen utensils and spices; when you cook a meal that turns out badly, you're pretty much stuck with it).

After several revisions, and reusing the tools and tinkering and maneuvering, you'll finally come up with a story or a chapter that works for you. And that's the most essential criteria that it must meet in order to eventually work for your readers.

EXERCISE 1

Using one of your manuscripts, circle verbs that might work better if you substitute onomatopoeia (sound words), like replacing fell with splattered, pounded with thumped, and hammered with ratatattatted.

EXERCISE 2

Using random paragraphs from published stories and novels, practice restructuring sentences and paragraphs. Remember to vary the lengths; chop long sentences into shorter ones and make choppy ones into longer ones to see how the reorganization might produce a different effect.

When you've played around for a while with other people's writing, turn your attention to your own. Dig out one of your manuscripts and go to work on revising sentence and paragraph variation and structure; you'll be surprised at how much better (and clearer) some of your passages will end up.

EXERCISE 3

Using one of your manuscripts, try this: Circle every adjective and adverb. Then, for each one, ask these four questions:

• Is it essential to have it here?
• Is it the best word choice for this context?
• Is the description you're trying for already made somewhere else in the text?
• Can the modification be made stronger in some way (i.e., additional modifiers, more elaboration, use of Italics for emphasis)?

If the answer is no to one or both of the first two or yes to the third or fourth, then you have some work to do.