Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Moon, June, Croon...Goon? Is that right?

Good writing consists, sadly, of more than good grammar and sheer volume of words.
The good writer should be able to dash off lovely, moving, accurate, pithy descriptions of persons, places, things, ideas and actions to give the reader that all important feeling of
VERISIMILITUDE.
Verisimilitude enables the reader to feel as though he sees what the author is describing, feels the action, etc., etc., etc., blah, blah, blah.
Take, for example, the following description of a moon coursing its way across the night:
The moon strolls at her leisure across the evening sky. She sheds the robe she wore on arising, because bright orange makes her look fat. She opts to slip into a cool, silver little number that emphasizes her remote and elegant figure.
The Prude struggles with descriptions. She chooses instead to drown every word picture in a plethora of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs and leave the poor reader to struggle through it all on her own.
For instance, a beautiful rising moon emerging from a bank of clouds inspired The Prude to set the lovely scene to words.
Hey! Look at the moon! It looks like a wedge of pie. Maybe lemon meringue. No, more like orange meringue. But not a bright Valencia orange. More like a muted Mandarin orange. That’s it! The moon looks like a wedge of Mandarin Meringue pie with all the meringue scraped off because it got sort of moldy greenish gray, and it’s piled up all around the edge of the pie.
Oh yeah. Now that is beauty.
There you have it. Can you almost see that moon? No? You say you are feeling a bit nauseous? It’s OK. The Prude can help. She is working on her illustrating skills.

3 comments:

Suef said...

Everything is right with this! A perfectly delightful reading experience!

Susan said...

Hahah! Love this!

Joanie said...

Too funny!