Purple Prose:
imagery

Last summer, I bought the YA novel Forbidden, mostly out of curiosity, but then didn’t have the guts to read it:

She is pretty and talented - sweet sixteen and never been kissed. He is seventeen, gorgeous, and on the brink of a bright future. And now they have fallen in love. But... they are brother and sister.

First, there was the Ewwww factor, which made me wonder why I bought the book in the first place. Second, based on the full blurb, I knew there wasn’t going to be a happily-ever-after ending, and those are the ones I prefer.

But last week I decided to finally read the book, and ended up loving it. The problem is I couldn’t stop thinking about it once I was finished. I started to wonder, when I wasn’t sobbing, what made it one of my favorite books, and how could I write such a brilliant story, too. A story that left me an emotional wreck long after I finished reading it. So, I analyzed it with the hopes of applying what I learned to future projects.

Characters You Ache For

This book is told from both the point of view of Lochan and Maya. They are the oldest of five children (the youngest is only five years old). Their father left to be with another woman when Lochan was twelve years old. Their mother turned to alcohol and slowly started to distance herself from their lives. And at one point in the book, she is no longer living with the children. So right away, you empathize with the characters due to the strong backstory.

In addition to raising their siblings, Lochan and Maya do everything possible to ensure social services don’t find out about their situation. If it’s discovered their mother has abandoned them, then their family will be torn apart. This powerful backstory explains why Lochan and Maya never felt like they were siblings, and it provides the motivation behind what happens in the climax. Like the two characters, you don’t see them as sibling, but rather two individuals who fell in love.

Great Writing

But the void yawns open like a cavern inside my chest. I feel so damn lonely all the time. Even though I’m surrounded by pupils, there is this invisible screen between us, and behind the glass wall I am screaming—screaming in my own silence, screaming to be noticed, to be befriended, to be liked.(Lochan’s pov)

The writing in Forbidden is beautiful and the emotion intense. Lochan is extremely shy, to the point that he has anxiety attacks when called on in class. This means he’s treated like the class weirdo. You feel his pain, which makes you want to keep reading.

The writing also helps the reader feel Maya’s and Lochan’s pain as they struggle with their love for each other when they know it’s wrong, and when they make sacrifices to keep their family together, while most of their peers are out having fun and being normal teens. And you feel their pain when their secret is discovered. The writing is rich with symbolism and imagery but is true to who they are as individuals. It’s compelling and makes for a great page turner—even when you’re afraid to turn the next page.

Do you strive to write a book that makes people think about it long after they’ve finished reading it? Have you analyzed a book to see how the author achieved this goal?

Part Two of the post will be go up Wednesday. And then you'll see why the book affected me.

Juxtaposition involves placing objects close together for a contrasting effect. For example: weathered/new, rough/smooth, dark/light. It’s used a lot in photography, and is a great technique for heightening the emotion within a scene of your story.

For example, in my WIP, one scene takes place in the high school hallway on Valentine’s Day. The place is decorated with red and white balloons to symbolize the joyous occasion (for some teens, I guess). As my protagonist and her potential love interest approach his locker (the meaning of the day not lost on them), she notices the principal and a cop standing next to it.

All hell breaks loose and the guy is arrested, further causing my protagonist to question a few things regarding their relationship. I’ve juxtaposed a joyous event with a negative one.

Now, I could have written the same scene, but instead of placing it in the hallway on Valentine’s Day, it could have taken place outside (on a regular school day). In the rain. The protagonist is already grumpy due to the weather. This is your standard cliché setting: bad weather foreshadowing negative event.

Which one do you think will stick out in your reader’s mind? Which one will have the greatest emotional impact?

In the book Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint: techniques and exercises for crafting dynamic characters and effective viewpoints (phew!!!), Nancy Kress explains that there are two basic situations in which a character’s emotions come into existence. The first one is when a character responds to a situation based on his feelings. For example, a six year old might learn that her dog died and starts crying. In the second situation, the character’s behaviour might be contrary to how she’s feeling. So in our example, the six year old might be sad, but instead of crying, she acts indifferent to the news and goes sledding instead.

As writers, our goal is to make the actions of our characters unique and specific to who they are. Just like in real life, no two people react the same way to a given situation. So how do we do that? According to Nancy, our emotions come from our personal histories (backstories), personality and traits, and motivations (why we want something). That’s why we spend time figuring out who our characters are (characterization) before we start writing the first draft (though some writers figures these things out during that draft). This is achieved through interviews, questionnaires, backstories, etc.

To show our character’s emotions to a given situation, we use actions, dialogue, physical reactions (check out the emotion thesaurus on The Bookshelf Muse), thoughts, and imagery. There’s no standard formula telling you how much of each to add. But like sensory descriptions, the more you use, the richer the emotions will be.

The following is an example from Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler (YA contemporary). Sixteen-year-old Anna is still grieving the death of her first love, Matt, who died a year ago. No one knew the two were secretly involved until now. This is part of the scene where Frankie (Matt’s sister and Anna’s best friend) finds Anna’s journal with her letters to dead Matt. I’ve indicated each of the above elements used throughout to show you how Sarah infused her writing with the different ways of revealing emotion:

I clear my throat and find my voice again, stronger this time. (physical reaction) “Give it back, Frankie. You have no right to read it, and you have no right to rip it apart. Give it to me.” (dialogue)

She looks at me with crazed, lost eyes. (physical reaction) “No, I don’t think so.”

I’m desperate. (telling!) “Frankie, please give it back to me. Please. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but it’s all I have left of—” (dialogue)

“Anna, he was my brother. Mine. You have no right to have anything left of him!” (dialogue) As the declaration leaves her mouth, she turns her back to me and runs to the shoreline, arching her arm behind her, the rarest-red mermaid tear sparkling in her bracelet like the stone I gave back to the ocean only heartbeats ago. (action)

“Frankie, don’t!” I run toward her, but my legs feel weighted, like I’m stuck in a horrible nightmare. (dialogue, action, imagery, thought) I catch her and snag the bottom of her camisole, knocking her down to the sand. (action)

But the journal is no longer attached to her fingers.

It’s sailing through the air overhead, landing flat on the water with an uninspiring plop.

. . . . I keep swimming toward it, but the current is too strong, pulling on my legs and arms and burning my lungs until I can no longer keep my head above it without fighting. (action) As I kick and yank myself back toward shallower water, the tide moves the journal completely out of reach, encircling it, giving me one last look at the warped pages before it pulls them down to the depths of the ocean.

My heart pounds in a thousand shattered-glass pieces, each beating separately, painfully. (physical reaction, imagery)

I’ve lost him all over again. (thought)

When I get out of the water, I sit down hard on the shore, put my head in my hands, and weep until I don’t have any bones. . . . (action, physical reaction, imagery)

. . . . The ocean has swallowed up my journal.

And it takes all the strength I have left not to dive back in and follow it down, down, deep to the bottom of the sea, lost for all eternity like the broken, banished mermaid. (thought, imagery)

Take an emotionally charged scene from your wip, and see how it compares to the above passage. Have you used as many of these elements as you can? Is your scene lacking the richness of emotions seen here? If so, I hope this post helps. I also highly recommend reading Nancy’s book. It obviously goes into more details than I can here.

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I'll be taking Friday off like most of the blogging world (even though I'm Canadian and celebrated Thanksgiving last month). I have some serious writing to catch up on, and one of my kids has Friday off school.

Have a great weekend everyone!