Hi everyone, and welcome to my latest (and first) issue of Sunday meditations, a chance for us to discuss fun, random things in the comments.
Today's question: what is your #1 writerly device? Meaning, some trope, image, theme or figure of speech that keeps showing up in your work, unbidden, unknown to you until the editing stage? And would you give it up if you had to?
I'll get the ball rolling: mine is the humble semicolon. I've yet to meet two sentences that can't be truncated and rejoined.
Hmm...that's a tough one. It's probably a bad sign that I don't know one off the top of my head (haven't delved to deeply into editing in some time). Friends of mine might say "fiery pirates," but I swear that was just that one novel. haha
ReplyDeleteThematically, I suppose, many of my works have some greater, overarching secret about how their world works that the characters have to discover. But, considering many of them are sort of grand in scope, that's inevitable.
Image-wise/descriptively, I try to vary things up. The only thing I can think of is that my descriptions of pain probably sound fairly similar. I haven't been through most of what I put my characters through, so hard to change that.
If nothing else, this question will recur to me when I'm writing next... Even if I don't have a good answer here, thinking about it as I write will be worth gold to me as a writer. Thanks.
-- Peter