
This week, I'm tackling responses to my posts about pairing unexpected words and eavesdropping. To begin, I wrote a post about the very helpful technique I learned about making your writing more vivid and stylish. Read about
Beautiful monsters here. Many readers had a lot to say, and a lot wrote about how they liked this technique. I'm glad to hear it! To start off, let's hear from
Crash, who wrote:
i may well use this in the future.
on the other hand you can't use these just anywhere. over filling a story with things such as this is not something you want to be doing. a reader will not want to hear these things seemingly at random.
That's a good point, Crash, and one that's important to keep in mind about using the two different words in a beautiful monster pair. Pairs like these definitely should not be used randomly; that would create a feeling of incoherence, and you'd feel impatient with a writer who was doing that. You'd think the writer was purposefully trying to mess with you or seem stylish in a very artificial way.
Instead, the two words should both be different, but equally true observations about something. We often have more than one impression of something. For example, a sponge has both that unique squishy feel, and also it has that stale-water old sponge smell. But when we write, for some reason we only give the one impression of the sponge, when it would seem so much more real if you acknowledged the many experiences of a sponge. So give us both. It's like giving us a three-dimensional portrait of something instead of a two-dimensional one.
James Bent brings a psychological perspective to this phenomenon:
Some of the reason for this working is that it creates a "state change". As well as writing offbeat fiction, I do professional business training and facilitation, and I am led to believe that attention spans of learners generally comes in waves of approx. 10 to 15 minutes, after which they peak and then fade. Which means that every 10-15 minutes a learner will drift off and naturally lose their ability to focus.
Therefore, a technique used by trainers is to make a "state change", which is essentially throwing in something different, unexpected or unusual. It doesn't have to be much, but just enough such that it makes learners "wake-up" or pay attention again.
Thanks for that insight, James. I agree that there seems to be something going on here that wakes up again as readers. A sentence "pops" for us when it stands out, making us notice the writing again. Writers have myriad ways of getting us to sit up and take notice in this way, and the beautiful monster pair is definitely one of those tools they pull out to get our attention.
Eddie has a bone to pick with my word choice:
Like most of the people (writers, speakers, TV talking heads) in this country, you can't tell us that things are the same. Apparently, "same" isnt good enough any more. Things that are the "same" have to be the "exact same."
Thanks, Eddie! I agree this is a term that is frequently overused, often incorrectly, and in
most cases, it's redundant. But in this case, I'm standing up for my use. When talking about writing techniques, we have to be very precise, and sometimes that means using expressions in unconventional ways. The point I was making was not just that we have the same feeling from the two words. With the beautiful monster pair, we
also have the same feeling -- the clean-scrubbed, but dull, blank feeling of a kitchen. Here, though, the pair is dull because the words are "the exact same" -- they both fill exactly the same niche. So I'm sticking to my guns, Eddie.
After the jump: I respond to comments about eavesdropping.