Adjectives
Nov. 23rd, 2023 08:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo My writing is post-Hemingway and I'm sparing with the adjectives. I'm not saying it's wrong to use them, only that they're tricky things and if you're going to use them you need to be sure you're using the right ones. If you use the wrong ones (by which I think I mean redundant ones) they fur up the system.
I'm reading de la Mare and it's a feature of his prose that he loves his adjectives. He loves them so much that he applies them in multiples- mostly twos and threes. Here are some examples, picked pretty much at random from the collection of short stories I've got on the go:
"shivery, languid, feverish"
"apple-cheeked, nice-mannered, sensible"
"cold, greedy, carressing" (our heroine has fallen into a pond and this is what the water feels like.)
"smiling, seraphic, unchanging"
Finally an example of him really going for broke...
"narrow, vast-skied, vacant, moon-glossed"
It works for him, but I wouldn't dare....
I'm reading de la Mare and it's a feature of his prose that he loves his adjectives. He loves them so much that he applies them in multiples- mostly twos and threes. Here are some examples, picked pretty much at random from the collection of short stories I've got on the go:
"shivery, languid, feverish"
"apple-cheeked, nice-mannered, sensible"
"cold, greedy, carressing" (our heroine has fallen into a pond and this is what the water feels like.)
"smiling, seraphic, unchanging"
Finally an example of him really going for broke...
"narrow, vast-skied, vacant, moon-glossed"
It works for him, but I wouldn't dare....
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Date: 2023-11-24 01:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-11-24 01:48 pm (UTC)