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  (—Jim Harrison)

  Blonde. “My hair is the color of chopped maples.”

  (—Carolyn Forché)

  * * *

  EXPAND YOUR PALETTE

  How do some of the best writers upgrade their Crayolas? The following techniques show up in their lovely scribblings:

  Fresh visual metaphors.

  Striking out clichés like lobster-red is easy enough; the challenge is to find brand-new visual imagery that also fits the style and tone of a piece. Landscapes must be scoured for offbeat but recognizable objects to denote particular colors—and perhaps something more.

  Almost any setting, however prosaic, yields unusual or symbolic items. Waiting in a dentist’s chair? Note the color of the chair’s upholstery, the mouth rinse, hygienic masks, plaster gums, anything familiar. Later, you may find yourself describing a bedroom “repainted a dentist’s-office mauve,” as Gary Shteyngart does in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, or a rainy day the color of dental X-rays.

  Color imagery should be fresh and inventive, but not constantly over-the-top. A “man with skin the color of boiled newspaper” pushes the envelope, but Michael Chabon got away with it in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, his sometimes-farcical novel of the 1940s comic book world. Here, images of a building “the color of a stained shirt collar,” or of somebody’s “lung-colored socks,” have the feel of Sunday funnies. But in less-comical moods Chabon scales back, describing “skin the color of almond hulls” and “a sunrise the color of bourbon and ash.”

  The sky makes for a good practice canvas. Every mood suggests a different swatch, whether “ash-bourbon” (Chabon), “indecipherable- lilac” (van Gogh), or “like the pink tongue of a thirsty dog” (Isaac Babel, Odessa). But too much image can bring on the clouds. It’s hard to picture a sky “as blue as the ribbon on a prizewinning lamb,” as Chabon describes it. The blasted lamb keeps getting in the way.

  Sandra Cisneros, imagist supreme, colors the world of her novel Caramelo through the sensibilities of its Mexican and Mexican-American characters. A church isn’t beige, but “the color of flan”; a washerwoman is a “fried-tortilla color” Mexican shawls are “as black as Coyotepec pottery, as black as huitlacoche, the corn mushroom, as true-black as an olla of fresh-cooked black beans”; a door has yellowed to “the color of Mexican sour cream.” Even if some readers miss the precise shade, they’ll still get the flavor and texture.

  Inventive abstract metaphors.

  In The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, Álvaro Mutis writes of a ship’s dirty white surface as having “[a] coat of grime . . . the color of misery, of irreparable decadence, of desperate, incessant use.” As color consultants will chirp, every hue suggests certain abstract qualities. In literature it works the other way, too: abstractions evoke colors. (Happiness registers blue, right?) Writers can avoid color clichés not only with fresh concrete imagery, but with well-wrought abstractions. What color is an airport baggage claim area on a bad day? For Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections, not gray, not yellowish, but “the color of carsickness.”

  Adjectives with personality.

  Colors can be anthropomorphized—animated with adjectives usually applied to people. But overused pairings like angry red won’t knock anyone out—better to go with ballistic red or berserk red. In About This Life, Essayist Barry Lopez unleashes a rainbow of behavioral tints to describe fired anagama pottery: “[H]ere . . . are raucous purples, coy yellows, prosaic blues, belligerent reds, and what . . . poet Denise Levertov called ardent whites.”

  Technical names.

  For the color cognoscenti, pigment-based technical names like “cerulean blue,” “Naples yellow,” and “alizarin red” conjure a specific image—no further modification necessary. But for general audiences, such specialized names serve less to delineate than to create lyrical effects. A poem in a literary journal might thus use the terms solferino (purplish-pink) or vitelline (egg-yolk yellow), precisely for their esoteric feel.

  Thesaurus and word-menu lists.

  Though most color terms provided by such resources are worn or arcane, some will serve nicely for workaday assignments. Roget’s, for example, reminds us of tawny, saffron, ochre, and jaundiced yellows, and Word Menu recalls such reds as claret, rose madder, and garnet.

  Designer nomenclature.

  Writers can take a few cues, if not specific nomenclature, from the companies and designers who create names for product colors—names such as Winestone Pearl, Sandstone Metallic, Dusty Olive, Oatmeal Heather, Putty, and Peacock. The commercial color “Stonewashed Indigo” resonates for a jeans-buying audience, just as the phrase “washed duns” does for readers of a Barry Lopez essay about the Mojave Desert.

  Armed with an extended palette, the writer must now exercise the usual skills of strategic deployment and restraint. Resist such redundancies as “bright fire-engine red” and “blue-gray Wedge-wood.” Still, as you set out to paint with words, consider fearlessly the century-old epithet in Nathalia Crane’s The Vestal: “Every gaudy color / Is a bit of truth.”

  SIX

  JOLTINGLY FRESH ADVERBS

  “He cumbrously consulted a file he withdrew from a briefcase of achingly sensible utility,” wrote novelist Will Self in How the Dead Live.

  Cumbrously. Achingly. Amazing what a smart -ly will do. These attention-getting modifiers represent a new and fashionable version of an old friend: the adverb.

  Adverbs, you might have learned before nodding off in class, are the things that modify whatever adjectives do not. Adjectives modify nouns and pronouns, as in “I released the emergency brake, silly me.” Adverbs put a spin on everything else—verbs, adjectives, other adverbs: “I half intentionally released the emergency brake, suicidally silly me.”

  In Composition 101, the adverb came with certain interdictions: Don’t prop up every verb with adverbs. (Not ran speedily, but raced or dashed.) Avoid adverbs in dialogue tags. (Not cried loudly, but howled or wailed.) Delete redundant adverbs, as in glitters brightly.

  Blame such strictures if you remember the adverb as some kind of prosthetic device. But the truth is that certain adverbial forms are among the hottest locutions in contemporary prose.

  THE TELLTALE ADVERB

  We rely on adverbs to reveal all sorts of information about the things they modify. They tell us where, when, how, how much, and so on. Did your manuscript arrive early, late, or never? That’s worth knowing, as is the sense of the arrival: “ridiculously early,” says an adjective-like adverb.

  Most adverbs are formed by the addition of -ly to an adjective— e.g., lavish becomes lavishly. And wherever English is lavishly nuanced, writers have been working this adverbial form into smart locutions. Here’s the method: Take a forceful adjective (say, withering), add -ly to make it an adverb, combine it with the target word (say, cute), and voilà—witheringly cute, a burst of wry wit, a ministatement.

  Critic Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times has been lavish in her use of -ly adverbs, as have many of her colleagues at the newspaper. Some time ago she described a British novelist’s prose as “engagingly demented.” Legions of -ly locutions have followed over the years, including “casually authoritative” and “eye-crossingly voluminous.” Meanwhile, her colleagues have come up with “beguilingly Boswellian” (Joseph J. Ellis), “laughably archival” (Dinitia Smith), “jesuitically contradictory” (Bruce Grierson), and “genetically goofy” (David Carr).

  Arts reviewers (and blurbists) everywhere seem enamored of the device, and little wonder; it offers an alternative to shopworn critical adjectives like brilliant, gripping, or plodding. It can also tweak such adjectives toward fresh meanings, as in yawningly brilliant.

  MANNER AND DEGREE

  These examples feature what grammarians call “adverbs of manner.” They reveal the way in which a thing or quality is distinguished. According to yet another New York Times critic, Allesandra Stanley, a new television show was “deliciously horrifying,” distinguishing it
from other modes of horrifyingness. Writers also toy with so-called adverbs of degree, which answer the question “how much”? Performances are routinely described as “hugely boring” or “minutely entertaining.”

  When a term and its modifier seem paradoxical, like horrifying and deliciously, they form the rhetorical device known as the oxymoron. Oxymorons can produce any number of effects: sarcasm, incisiveness, archness (i.e., roguishness, sauciness). But not all adverbial zingers employ the incongruity of terms in contrast. Many reach for metaphor, as in lashingly funny, or hyperbole (exaggeration), as in woundingly beautiful. In addition, critics often find -ly forms suited to the put-down. Slate’s Gary Lutz called the grammar chapter of the fifteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style “perversely unhelpful”—though I deviantly disagree.

  For an especially mannered tone, some writers pile up the syllables, as in “hilariously epigrammatic,” Nancy Franklin’s way of describing a campy sitcom character for The New Yorker.

  AWFULLY DECENT OF YOU, JEEVES

  No one is sure when and where the -ly adverb acquired such mannered traits, but nineteenth- or twentieth-century England is a fair bet. One can visualize the ivory cigarette holders, the stiff upper lips, the awfullys and terriblys drawled with ironic intent. “So frightfully rich,” remarked Lady Redesdale, Diana Mitford’s mother, in 1928 of her son-in-law-to-be. The -ly adverb of manner remains as British as actor Stephen Fry, who in the film Cold Comfort Farm blubbers to his heartthrob: “I’m engorgingly in love with you!”

  Evolving from the suffix -lich, which meant “like,” the -ly adverbial ending has been around for centuries in English. Some six hundred years before the Schweppes tonic “Ambassador” launched the advertising catchphrase “curiously refreshing,” Chaucer was there with “curiously arrayed.” Adverbs modifying adjectives, as in “curiously dainty things,” show up as early as 1570.

  In the American idiom, national figures ranging from Richard Nixon to Microsoft’s Bill Gates have helped propagate this mannered locution. Nixon’s “perfectly clear” was echoed in countless imitations. And when Gates described his products as “insanely great,” he pushed an overused adjective about as far as it can go by using an adverb of degree. Not that America’s youth culture, with its totallys, incrediblys and amazinglys, needs any nudge toward adverbs of manner and degree—but some fresh ones wouldn’t be so bad.

  * * *

  MATCH THE-LY ADVERBS WITH THEIR MATES

  What makes a winning -ly locution? It might be a paradoxical or farcical relationship between the adverb and what it modifies; it might be a strikingly apt relationship. Novelty, rhythm, and sound also weigh in. See if these virtues help you match the adverbs on the left with the verbs, adjectives, and adverbs on the right. (The phrases in parentheses indicate the subjects of these -ly locutions when they originally appeared in print).

  ANSWERS:

  1. d (Patricia Marx, The New Yorker); 2. j (Kirkus Reviews); 3. b (Sarah Miller, The New York Times Book Review); 4. i (Judith Thurman, The New Yorker); 5. a (Janet Maslin, The New York Times); 6. g (David Denby, The New Yorker); 7. f (Bruno Maddox, The New York Times Book Review); 8. h (Richard Eder, The New York Times); 9. e (John Updike, The New Yorker); 10. c (Lydia Davis, Granta).

  * * *

  FARCICALLY ADVANCED

  The adverbial form got a big, if farcical, boost when satirists Henry Beard and Chris Cerf gave it a name in their Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook (1992). Calling it the “adverbially premodified adjectival lexical unit,” they defined it as

  the most frequently used linguistic form in the construction of culturally appropriate language. “Physically inconvenienced,” “involuntarily leisured” . . . are examples.

  Perhaps those who are “follicularly challenged,” such as this writer, are partial to the form. But at any rate, quirky adverbs tend to make the most striking -ly locutions, whether used in farce, feature writing, or even the occasional work of literature. Common adverbs such as wonderfully and fantastically have lost their original force. Along with terrifically, genuinely, and actually, such adverbs moil to intensify bland words like nice and good, only to subsume them in a hum of white noise.

  Exhausted adverbs cannot intensify weary adjectives. Recent attempts seen in book reviews result in such babble as “genuinely invaluable,” “deeply pleasurable,” and “thoroughly readable.”Such adverbs work better when, instead of trying to prop up words, they jerk the rug out from under them: profoundly vapid, or “delightfully tacky” (the Hooters restaurant slogan)—that sort of thing. But even these constructions are facile oxymorons, and soon they join the heap of clichés. Locutions that work too hard can grow as tiresome as facile ones. Again in desperation, reviewers stock such phrases as “thunderingly banal” and “bracingly ironic” in their lexicons—becoming, in the locution of one movie critic, “poundingly predictable.”

  Other writers forge -ly locutions that are good for one use only, as a quick way to delineate something or deliver information. In Esquire, for example, Will Blythe described a novelist who burned himself out on drugs as having died “in 1978 as a gloriously used-up forty-eight-year-old speed freak.” And with that, Blythe’s slick locution was “used up”—not gloriously, not outrageously, but aptly so.

  Texture

  WRITING INTO THE MOOD

  SEVEN

  TENSE: A STICKY CHOICE

  The raft sinks. He clings to her. She shoves him away.

  The raft sank. He clung to her. She shoved him away.

  Every narrative has a base tense, the one that moves the action forward. Which one is best for your story—past or present? It’s like choosing between potential spouses: Past is well established, admired for its self-control and sense of perspective; Present is a relative upstart, not universally liked—but with an in-the-moment quality that can be thrillingly edgy.

  In the short run—say, for chapter drafts or short stories—you could flirt with each and see how it works out. For a love saga or memoir, Past’s amplitude of time might win your heart. For a thriller, Present’s nervous uncertainty might be endearing. Brief commitment is involved here, but no sacred vows.

  For book-length projects, however, choosing a base tense is akin to walking down the aisle. In the long course of your writing, your choice of tense will affect every page. It will lock in a mood that may or may not be right for the story; it will steer editors’ reactions and resonate among reviewers and readers.

  Which shall it be as you launch sentence one? Sylvia Plath might have chosen “It is a queer, sultry summer” instead of “It was a queer, sultry summer” to begin The Bell Jar, changing the tense and mood of all that followed. So must you decide: Tried-and-true past, or exciting, trendy—but high-risk—present?

  TESTS OF TIME

  Past tense is the traditional storyteller’s medium, the cornerstone of the classic once-upon-a-time framework. The characters have acted out their destinies. The teller has sorted the events and put them into perspective. Readers feel both the comfort and poignancy of expired time. The author is saying, “now that it’s all over, let me tell you what happened to Don Quixote,” or “this is how fate treated Madame Bovary.”

  Present tense, on the other hand, imparts a live-camera mood that is relatively new to literary prose, as well as to journalism. Critics call the effect “immediacy”: You are there. This is all unfolding as you read. No telling where things might spin out of control. Immediacy has all the voguish appeal of live coverage, video gaming, and reality entertainment. And with writers and editors seizing upon it as the Hot Thing, there’s enough immediacy out there to rattle the space-time continuum.

  Masterly writers like Carol Shields, Jhumpa Lahiri, and J. M.Coetzee have used present tense in a transparent way. The immediacy feels gravitational, not grabby, as their characters explain themselves and escort us through their stories—including through the use of past-tense flashbacks. Others, like Donald Westlake, keep readers on edge with m
enacing narrators speaking in real-time present.

  But in lesser hands, present tense can diminish the spell of storytelling. It can seem affected, breathless and flighty, or just plain flat. Think of the everyday present tense used to describe past events: So I wait for a bus and go downtown and buy a few things and eat and take the bus home. Such here-and-now immediacy can make the there-and-then look good.

  When present tense describes past events, it is called the “historical present tense,” a staple of much contemporary writing. Like everyday narrative, the historical present tense has a natural directness, even a banality that good writers transcend or exploit. The Stuart Dybek story “Que Quieres” (TriQuarterly 117), for example, follows two brothers as they return to their childhood neighborhood and confront the Latino gangs now controlling it. Dybek alternates use of a lyrical past-tense background—one brother’s ragged history—with taut, present-tense updates of the forward action:

  [Past:] That was the permission—the omen—to start anew as Jimmy Delacroix, to move to New York in the dead of winter and enroll in the Actor’s Studio. . . .

  [To present:] “Que quieres?” . . . The Disciple removes his sunglasses, as if for emphasis, then rises to his feet like someone tired of sitting, in need of a stretch.