Tone: Violence & Heavy Breathing

109}VINCENT PRICE SYNDROME:
PANTING PROSE

Remember Vincent Price—the horror movie actor known for his funereal demeanor and chilling voice? The Master of Menace, the King of Creepy, the Sovereign of Sinister. But like many a stereotyped performer, Price eventually fell victim to his own shtick and turned into a Hollywood joke.

This psychological thriller—about a daughter whose relationship with her widowed dad is threatened by his possessive, vindictive girlfriend—is marred by what I’ll call Vincent Price syndrome:

She stares into the glassy lifeless eyes. His jaw drops open; his mouth is so dry his lips stick to his teeth. Suddenly things begin to move very, very slowly.

A harrowing black speck appears in the corner of his left eye, barely visible at first but growing miraculously larger and larger until it slides down his cheek leaving an ominous trail along the side of his nose around the edge of his mouth down to his chin where it freezes for a heartbeat before breaking off. The young girl follows with quavering anticipation the single blood tear’s straight and sudden descent to the white tiled floor of the foyer.

And suddenly things begin moving very, very fast.

“Mom!” Kara screams, but more like this:

“Mooooooooooooooomm!”

Expelling all the petrified breath from her lungs her cry carries into every room of the house. Meanwhile outside a light powdery snow is falling on frozen grass and the windows of the house begin to light up one by one.

This is full-blown Vincent Price syndrome: over-the-top emotions and breathless prose, aided and abetted by an overuse of modifiers (“miraculous,” “harrowing,” “petrified,” “ominous”). The characters’ actions are themselves over the top—at one point the protagonist pees in her pants out of fear (see Meditation # 30).

This is sentimentality, unearned emotion. It can try readers’ patience, leaving them not numb with fear, but just plain numb. With its panting modifiers and ominous asides (“… little did Loretta know …”), such writing never trusts a reader’s powers of perception and intuition. Like a bad instructor, it does all the work for them.

In their predilection for panting, over-the-top prose, novices are hardly alone. More than a few established authors, and even some mega-bestselling ones, set the tone. Staggerered, lunged, heaved, collapsed; thundering, gasping, cavernous, chillingly close, mountainous, ghost-pale; stammered, defenseless, perfectly immobile, ghostly, surge of adrenaline—this breathless glossary studs just the first page of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

To date, that book has sold over 45 million copies in hardcover alone. But you and I don’t aspire to make millions, only to produce great works of art. Right? Right?

110}TAKE A HOSE TO YOUR PROSE: COOL
LANGUAGE/OVERHEATED IMAGES

“Reporting on the extreme things as if they were average things will start you off on the art of fiction.”

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

In relating violent actions and emotions, verbal restraint is important. Violent emotions are best painted in “cool” colors, clinical blues and sober industrial grays—the antithesis of overheated language, aflame with modifiers, that shouts in garish reds and flamboyant yellows. (Modifiers seem to be the first things writers grab for in the heat of emotion.)

Wordsworth wrote, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” When powerful emotions are conveyed by hysterical language it has (for me) a double-negative effect: The heightened, intense, frantic language cancels out heightened, intense, or frantic emotions.

Style ought to complement content rather than collide with it. When dealing with violent material, cool your prose down; take a hose to it.