Worshipping at the Temple of Color
by Michael Waite, Bonefrog Creative
I’m a big fan of color. Monochrome is serviceable, sure, but it just doesn’t have the reverberating depth--the intense flavor--that full-on color provides. I don’t suppose we would even know what monochrome was, had not man begun to communicate by fixing on stone and paper and canvas and film the images around him. What began as charcoal stick on rock progressed to egg temperas on canvas.
Technology brought us the photograph and the television, yet we desperately clawed the edges of science until we had ‘em in full color. It’s natural. What kid wouldn’t choose a sixty-four color box of crayons over a fist-full of the basic eight? We love our color. On red-air days, we even get to breath it.
When I first crawled under the hood of commercial fiction to study how it works, the area that fascinated me the most was writing in color. My favorite authors range from great to average at plotting, characterization, setting, and the like, but they all write in full color. When I read, I like to see more than cause and effect, more than conflict and resolution. When I go to the movies, I want more than Charlie Chaplin and subtitles. I want Fantasia. I want a full-sensory buzz.
Writing effectively in full color is accomplished by making careful choices—metaphors, similes, adjectives and adverbs, descriptive details, phrases, textures, and sounds all chosen and stitched into the story in the right place at the right time. A writer must use the literary color palette with the skill of a painter. Too much color in the wrong place, or the wrong combinations, or any of the hundreds of other mistakes of commission or omission, and you have mud. And overdoing the color screams amateur just as loudly as nasty grammar and sloppy plotting.
For sure, you do not have to be good at writing in color to be a successful, selling commercial writer. There are plenty of authors who rely on and sell on the strength of their plotting, or their action scenes or their ability to communicate and weave a story around the wow-gee technological stuff they know. But if you, like me, love to roll around in color, then the effort to learn how to write it effectively is a welcome challenge. We want color to become a integral cog in our individual style.
Take this little test. Say you’re writing a teenaged character working at a hamburger place. Her boss sends her downstairs to fetch another bunk of napkins. She gets about halfway down the stairs and notices a large puddle of water out in the middle of the basement floor. Something is leaking. She calls up to the boss:
“Hey Diane...”
Now. You want to write this character as a colorful, imaginative, teen-creature. What words would you put in her mouth to reflect that image?
“Hey Diane, there’s water on the floor down here!”
Diane calls back, “How much?”
Your character considers a moment. “Oh, probably several gallons. I don’t know. A lot.”
Nothing wrong with that. But it’s monochrome—what kind of puddle-image could the reader build with that reply? How about this:
Diane calls back, “How much?”
“Ahh, lots. Like a dinosaur pee.”
Here are some color swatches from real, check-getting writers:
Dan Simmons could have wrote: “The scream shook me, echoing everywhere, even scattering the pigeons.” Instead, he wrote: “The scream knocked me to my knees, echoed from every hard surface of the city, and drove the pigeons into wheeling panic.”
Instead of: “...and felt the softness of her as she pressed against him.” Simmons wrote: “...and felt the touch of her long fingers on his cheek and the soft compression of her breasts against him.”
“The sun hung low above the horizon as the day turned to evening” becomes “The sun hung on the horizon like a great, tethered, red balloon while the sky congealed to evening” when Simmons writes it.
Robert Crais might have penned: “I reached down and scratched the cat between the ears.” Instead, we have: “I touched the cat’s head between his ears. It was broad and flat and lumpy with scars. A good cat head.”
“She told me, but reluctantly,” is too blah for Robert. He wrote: “She said it as if the words might catch fire in her mouth.”
Here
are a few Crais similes:
—
the time crept by like a dying thing, heavy and slow and unable to rest.
—
Eddie grinned like a shark with his eye on a fat boy in baggy shorts.
—
O’Bannon smiled the way a fish smiled when it’s been on ice
all day.
Robert Jordan didn’t write: “his disapproval was obvious as he looked at Mat, Rand and then Perrin—before turning back to the women.” He wrote: “he looked at Mat disapprovingly—his gaze took in Rand and Perrin without improvement—then he turned back to the women.”
Tolkien wrote: “As far as he could remember, Sam slept through the night in deep content, if logs are contented.” Much richer than: “Sam slept like a log.”
Here
are more:
— “They’re crazy,” I yelled, “Firing on—” A
second barrage blasted across
my indignation. I hugged the muck and waited.
—
The door creaked, and I did a fast fade down a side branch. (Keith Laumer)
—
If his own childhood seemed so long ago, how must it feel to Prester John,
who wore so many decades?
—
Here and there a feather of smoke drifted upward to shred in the wind.
—
He looked, Simon thought, like a man alone in the wilderness listening
to the hungry song of wolves.
—
The toothy mouth, flesh shrunken and pulled away, seemed to be grinning,
as though the cadaver had
been lying here for weeks enjoying a bleak joke. (Tad Williams)
Try these: How would you describe the passing of the noon hour? “The sun climbed to its zenith, hung there, and then passed on, giving them back their shadows.” (Stephen King)
Or a great laugh? “The laugh came then, a marvelous honking hoorah so infectious that Dill felt it should be quarantined. It was the totally uninhibited laugh of a man who found life an all too brief passage made up of rainbows, blue skies, bowls of cherries, plus a long head start in the pursuit of happiness.”
Or a smile? “The small half-smile that appeared on Spivey’s face was mean for its size.” (Ross Thomas)
Sure, page after page and wall to wall with this kind of color could be quite sickening—like triple chocolate chip cheese cake with fudge sauce three meals a day. You want the reader absorbed in the story, emotionally slaved to the characters and sweating the small stuff, not distracted by the display of your lyrical prose, but, when the place and time is right, lay it on.
Author Leonard Bishop, in his book Dare to be a Great Writer, adds this bit of advice for those of us who do stylized prose: “Every writer fashions himself to be a “prosist,” a talent capable of lyrical flights, able to use prose in a style so grand that he can make great poets seem like senile doodlers. As he becomes more professional, he works to control his vanity.” He counsels using color—lyrical or stylized writing— “when the intensity of the situation is strong enough to withstand the invasion of artistry”...where it “contributes to the disposition without maiming the content.”
Writing in color doesn’t always mean similes and metaphors and their kin. Often, it’s as simple as a fresh, image-fat word choice. Or careful detail selections that speak volumes. Or staying cliche-free and smoking adjectives in moderation.
When you learn to mix and use color skillfully, your novel goes from being a technically sound, okay read to one that is highly recommended, loaned to friends, taken on the airplane, found in the the bathroom, and haunt-the-bookstores-for-your-next-one kind of book.
Michael Waite
Bonefrog Creative
online portfolio: www.bonefrog.com
email: dumpdog@usa.net
phone: (208) 776-5210
Copyright
2006 Michael Waite
(May be reprinted as long as contact information is included)
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