I’ll take my blood in black and white

You have to hand it to crime dramas in the 21st century. They know their skeptical viewing audience. 

We aren’t gullible. 

Don’t just tell us the victim is dead. 

Show us.

Crime drama execs have complied. When someone is killed, there is no doubt. 

The corpse is deader than dead. 

The Prude sees (peeking though fingers in front of her eyes) that the dead person has a tinge of blue in the face, eyes departed from sockets, innards that are no longer innards but outards, and is lying any-which-way in a pool of what The Prude keeps telling herself is ‘tons of catsup, just tons of catsup’.

But there is absolutely no doubt that the dead person is really most sincerely dead.

How naive we Perry Mason fans were! We caught a glimpse of a dead person in the black and white world lying on the floor, eyes neatly closed, possibly a slight trickle of catsup from a tidy hole somewhere in the head, or a smear of catsup on a white shirt.

And–silly us– when that dead person was pronounced dead, we believed it! 

Why did it never occur to us to look more closely and wonder, “But maybe they aren’t really dead. Maybe that person is just sort of dead. Clearly there is not enough catsup, all their internal organs are still neatly encased internally, and the eyeballs are right where eyeballs are meant to be. Hence, I do not believe that victim is dead.”

We are no longer wet behind the ears. We no longer are required to suspend our disbelief. We’ve entered the wonderful world of verisimilitude. 

And doesn’t it give you pause to wonder:

When Dorothy ‘killed’ the Wicked Witch of the East, was there any gristle or gore? Well? 

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Us cynical sophisticated types of the 21st century require much, much more.

Remember:

‘No tombstone until it's gruesome.’

REALLY most sincerely dead?

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.