Acts/ Dictates/ Mandates/ Mantle - Amy's Thread (Page 41 of 77)

I have, in Albany WA (as in, Western Australia). I'm really going to lose my badge.

When Alina's staff exploded, and all the linked staffs separated and survived, was that 'natural' or was it the result of someone/something intervening?

Oops, right.  Kat got the Mistress's wand.  But what's happened, and to happen, is not the result of intervention.  Hmmm.

Tilly seconded the now-enhanced Anver.  Will she show any effects?  Oh, and is there some kind of truce between her and Kat, or is Anver just the fence between them?

I'm listening, but you have an advantage in that you can see the pieces or building blocks. I can't. What I see is a spare and sparse Wordage that is supposed to mean the same thing as full prose.

Let's try this. Reword this para to your satisfaction. Realize that since this is a description of food, I want to include sensory overtones.

Sam came downstairs to the crisp overtones of bacon hanging on the
air. Eggs sizzled and popped on the nearby stove. Dishes chimed as the table was set, taking their places next to the warm-up cascade of silverware.

I think the crux of my confusion about your style is that adjectives are a communication tool. People understand nouns, but those don't evoke emotions. Adverbs force action, taking the reader someplace they might not want to go. However, adjectives make people drool, describing situations that they relate to.

By my understanding, the sentence above would be rewritten as, 'Sam walked downstairs while his wife cooked breakfast'.  Although I know this isn't what you are teaching, this is how I understand your advice.

Teaching and corrections requested.

You just wrote that she was grilling bacon and eggs on her neck. Look at the tags:-)

;-)

Janet's remarks are on point here.  And much depends on the action and sequence in which this must fit.

You've got synesthesia here.   Sizzle is to the ear, bacon's aroma to the nose.  And bacon's aroma is so strong that it will overwhelm the eggs.

There might be another lesson here.  If you go to art school, even for photography, they'll want you to learn to draw first.  Pencil and paper is the simplest medium and requires the least learning of the medium freeing you to learn the essence of representative art, and that essence is to unlearn, to learn to see with your eyes instead of your brain.  To learn to see a thing as your eyes show it to you, not as your brain says it must be.  Because you are trying to present something to someone else's eyes, not directly to  his brain.

This might be the unwinding of your sorting socks.  Or maybe not.

Let me offer another analogy.  An electrical engineer learns first how to study the behaviour of an electrical circuit as a function of time.  But very soon the study turns to characterizing according to frequency or 'moment'.  The tools are the Fourier and Laplace transform, which have nearly the same algebraic form in practice, and have the great virtue of turning the calculus into algebra.  Hairy polynomial algebra, but algebra still.  (And today we have other transforms, and I don't know the beginning of it: Z transform, wavelets, ... ... ...)

The beginning student sees the circuit either in the time domain OR in the frequency domain.  The accomplished engineer (which I am not) sees it in both domains at once, and understands the effect of a circuit change in both domains at once.

The accomplished artist sees with both the eyes and the brain, at once.  Socks AND their sorting.

Not always true.  'sizzle' is a verb (sometimes noun), not an adjective.  Strunk and White will tell you (perhaps paraphrasing Twain?) that the adjective hasn't been built that can get you out of a tight place.  And in the opening matter of An Exultation of Larks the author points to the glory of English's huge vocabulary, for instance the differing shades of 'paternal'' and 'fatherly'.

Let's see how I might have treated your incident, bearing in mind that grammar mood and grammar flow and topic flow are always involved.

How old is Sam?  It affects how he moves down the stairs.  Is he hungry or sated?  It affects his reaction to the smell of frying fat.  And of course, he is neither a vegetarian nor an observant Jew or Moslem.

Here's a first try:

A bit pointilistic, perhaps, but you might try pointilism as an exercise, just to pull you toward center.

It wouldn't be the same thinning.

Try taking a sequence maybe 30 to 50 words long.  Consider sensation, awareness, emotive response, communication, and action all and each as events.  Place them in order, first to last, cause before effect (efficient causation).  Write first with nouns and verbs, then with modifiers of color, number, and place.  Look for the best description you can with those, and only then seek to flesh them out.  Choose modifiers that are specific rather than abstract.  Look for modifiers that (eep!) synergize with what they modify (but avoid cliche).

There's a wonderful line from a famous writer's description of Ted Williams: "... radiates the hard blue glow of high purpose."  The abstract has been given a feeling as concrete as concrete itself.

In =Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance=, a book that I don't know whether to recommend, the narrator recalls trying to get a student to write with focussed specifics.  He wanted her to write an essay; she chose the USA as a topic.  Too broad he said, forcing her down through her state, her county, her town, neighborhood, and street, past her home and down to a single brick in the front wall.

She filled page after page with vivd descriptions of that brick, its colors and imperfections.

You don't have this fictional student's inability to focus, but your descriptions do not always stand up to close examination of the physics and your logic flow is sometimes irregular.  That's why I'm suggesting this detailed exercise--on the small scale, please!  If it works for you, you'll be able to carry the lessons to your larger work and the questions will nag you when you need nagging--and only then.  They'll pipe up more often at first, but experience will show them their place in the team.

Oh, K (where have we heard that?) you might want to see the revision I put up of my B1 Ch90 (which really belongs in a later volume).  See how it plays on these description and interior description questions.

That's not changing from oblique thinking to linear.  That's wiping the thinking out and writing in its outcome.