Download Technique #3—Painting with Appositives

Artist’s Image Palette
Appositives
Writing as Seeing
Developing a style, or voice, the writer must
literally and metaphorically learn to “see”.
When an author lacks a visual eye, his or her
writing has no heart and soul: images lie
lifeless like cadavers in a morgue.
Compare the following two images, the first
written by a high school student, the second
by well-known novelist Brian Jacques.
It was winter. Everything was frozen and
white with snow. Snow had fallen from the sky
for days. The weather was horrible.
Mossflower lay deep in the grip of midwinter
beneath a sky of leaden gray that showed
tinges of scarlet and orange on the horizon. A
cold mantle of snow draped the landscape,
covering the flatlands to the west. Snow was
everywhere, filling the ditches, drifting high
against the hedgerows, making paths invisible,
smoothing the contours of earth in its white
embrace. --- Mossflower by Brian Jacques
Mossflower lay deep in the grip of midwinter
beneath a sky of leaden gray that showed tinges
of scarlet and orange on the horizon. A cold
mantle of snow draped the landscape, covering
the flatlands to the west. Snow was everywhere,
filling the ditches, drifting high against the
hedgerows, making paths invisible, smoothing the
contours of earth in its white embrace. --Mossflower by Brian Jacques
Jacques writes with an artist’s
eye, using details and color to
tease the reader’s visual
appetite.
It was winter. Everything was frozen and white
with snow. Snow had fallen from the sky for
days. The weather was horrible.
The high school student writes
like house painter, ignoring
details and using color to simply
cover the surface.
Brian Jacques’ ONE word of advice to writers:
PAINT
Novelist Robert Newton Peck explains "show
versus tell" in his Secrets of Successful
Fiction:
Readers want a picture---something to see, not
just a paragraph to read. A picture made out of
words. That's what makes a pro out of an
amateur. An amateur writer tells a story. A pro
shows the story, creates a picture to look at
instead of just words to read. An accomplished
author writes with a camera, not with a pen.
The amateur writes: "Bill was nervous."
The pro writes: "Bill sat in a dentist's waiting
room, peeling the skin at the edge of his thumb,
until the raw, red flesh began to show. Biting the
torn cuticle, he ripped it away, and sucked at the
warm sweetness of his own blood."
If a student writes, “Mary was tired,” the reader
arrives at a mental dead end, left with no
imaginative opportunities for envisioning.
Compare this to a description such as :
“Mary shuffled into the kitchen, yawning and
blinking. Collapsing into a chair, she closed her
eyes, crossed her arms for a pillow, and slowly
tucked her head onto the fold.”
The weird, old man is reaching for something.
From Stephen King's Thinner:
And before Halleck can jerk away, the old Gypsy
reaches out and caresses his cheek with one
twisted finger. His lips spread open like a wound,
showing a few tombstone stumps poking out of
his gums. They are black and green. His tongue
squirms between them and then slides out to lick
his grinning, bitter lips.
Mark Halprin uses details to portray an old man
in A Soldier of the Great War:
Limping along paths of crushed stone and tapping
his cane as he took each step, he raced across
intricacies of sunlight and shadow spread before
him on the dark garden floor like golden lace.
Alessandro Giuliani was tall and unbent, and his
buoyant white hair fell and floated about his head
like the white water in the curl of a wave.
Just as a painter combines a wide repertoire of
brush stroke techniques to create an image, the
writer chooses from a repertoire of sentence
structures.
Image Grammar
• Good writing features a variety of
structures.
• We will learn four major techniques for
improving writing through the use of
certain grammatical structures.
• These structures can be viewed as
brushstrokes, or techniques used to
create art.
• Our first technique will be appositives.
Technique #1—Painting with
Appositives
What is an appositive?
Remembering our “image” metaphor, an
appositive is like a double exposure.
An appositive is a NOUN that adds a
second image to the PRECEDING noun.
• The appositive expands details in the
reader’s imagination.
• By adding a second image to the noun
raccoon in the sentence “The raccoon
enjoys eating turtle eggs, “ the writer/artist
can enhance the first image with a new
perspective.
• For example, the writer might paint the
sentence “The raccoon, a scavenger,
enjoys eating turtle eggs.”
• Scavenger follows raccoon in the
sentence; because it is not necessary to
the sentence’s meaning, it’s set off with
commas.
To add more vivid details, writers frequently
expand the appositive to an appositive
phrase with added details such as:
• The raccoon, a midnight scavenger who
roams lake shorelines in search of
food, enjoys eating turtle eggs.
7th grade students use appositives
to add a second noun image:
• The volcano, a ravenous God of Fire,
spewed forth lava and ash across the
mountain.
• The old Navajo woman, a weak and
withered lady, stared blankly at her
tapestry.
• The fish, a slimy mass of flesh, felt the
alligator’s giant teeth sink into his scales
as he struggled to get away.
Try adding a “double exposure”
using an appositive or appositive
phrase to create an image in the
reader’s mind:
Try another appositive description,
a noun that adds a second image,
of this photo:
You’ve created an appositive with a
person and a “thing”. Now, try a
place:
You’ve created an appositive with a
person and a “thing”. Now, try a
place: