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  Make the diction authentic or authentic-sounding. Can you create convincing diction for an eighteenth-century British naval commander? Or, as novelist Mark Haddon did in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, for a fifteen-year-old math genius suffering from a form of autism? “Write what you know”—or at least what you can research or guess at convincingly—is the rule that applies here. Modern locutions like “have a nice day” should not creep into dialogue of another era unless there’s a farcical element at play.

  Choose dictions that can deliver intended meanings. Don’t box yourself into a type that lacks the nuances you will need.

  Fiction writers who work up profiles for each character—parentage, schooling, jobs, travels, etc.—might consider how much of this background will bear on the character’s diction. A common pitfall is inconsistency—as when child narrators slide into vocabularies beyond their years, or laconic toughs suddenly wax poetic to get the author’s point across. It can also be tricky to deliver visceral meanings in a consistently lofty diction. Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro pulled it off, however, in The Remains of the Day, fine-tuning the vocabulary of Stevens, the butler and narrator, to an aspiring-upper-class British English:

  I must say this business of bantering is not a duty I feel I can ever discharge with enthusiasm. . . . One need hardly dwell on the catastrophic possibility of uttering a bantering remark only to discover it wholly inappropriate.

  This unvaryingly restrained diction delivered the novel’s gut-level feelings—as touchingly as did the profane rant of an ex-con in How Late It Was, How Late, James Kelman’s Booker Prize–winning novel:

  But it couldnay get worse than this. He was really f***t now. This was the dregs; he was at it. He had f***ing reached it now man the f***ing dregs man the pits, the f***ing black f***ing limboland, purgatory . . . where all ye can do is think. Think.[Asterisks politely mine]

  ELEMENTS OF DICTION

  Diction colors tone and overall style. Its personality comes from phrases, usages, and grammatical choices, as well as from single words. In her short story “Cakewalk,” for example, Lee Smith serves up a southern variety:

  She’s always making those cakes. You can see her going through town carrying them so careful, her tired plump little face all crackled up and smiling, those Adidas just skimming the ground.

  Dictions can be built also on clichés, circumlocutions, and mannerisms, as Charles Dickens knew so well. But most telling are the words themselves, selected from a wealth of options for such qualities as precision, connotation, and association. Should one use inmate, detainee, jailbird, or con? Every time writers consult a thesaurus or spin alternative words, a diction-related decision is on the line.

  Tarquin Winot, narrator of John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure, is a voluptuary of impeccable tastes in food, with “impeccably correct” diction (as the dust jacket suggests). But Lanchester slowly reveals the true Tarquin through his “poisonously opinionated” vocabulary:

  [T]he menu lies close to the heart of the human impulse to order, to beauty, to pattern. It draws on the original chthonic upwelling that underlies all art.

  Chthonic? Doesn’t that refer to the dark spirits of the underworld? One begins to suspect . . .

  Diction defines a suicidal narrator in “Screenwriter,” a New Yorker story by Charles D’Ambrosio. Dolorous metaphors meet the slick phrasing of a career screenwriter, as the narrator describes

  a shadow that gave off a disturbing susurrus like the maddening sibilance settling dust must make to the ears of ants. . . . [H]er lips were lovely, the color of cold meat. . . . I’m all bottomed out. I’m down here with the basal ganglia and the halibuts.

  To show yourself, to get into your characters and reveal them, be the words. When you’ve got the diction right, you can look at your story and declare, “That’s the only way it could have been spoken.” Or you might hear yourself saying, “Most felicitous.” Or maybe, “Can’t word-up no finer.” It depends on your diction.

  NINE

  THE PUNCHY TROPE

  When authors wrench language and image out of the literal, they create figures of speech, or “tropes.” Metaphors and similes are among the most common figures, along with hyperboles and puns. Although tropes have always been the warp and weft of literature, modern writers have been emphasizing the warp: The more warped, the more attention-getting.

  Novelist Salman Rushdie first drew headlines when Islamic fundamentalists vowed to kill him in response to scenes from his novel The Satanic Verses. Since then, he has kept our attention with magisterial warps of imagination, including tropes like this one from The Ground Beneath Her Feet, describing a rock star’s death:

  Meanings beamed down from the satellite-crowded skies, meanings like amorphous aliens, putting out pseudopods like suction pads and sucking at her corpse.

  ROPE-A-TROPE CONTENDERS

  If you will pull free of Rushdie’s suction pads, I will unleash a million-dollar baby of a trope to advance our point. I now ask you to don a pair of imaginary boxing gloves and think of yourself as a free-swinging pugilist. Got it? Good; then you are ready to contend with today’s heavy hitters. For when it comes to tropes, many favored writers are going for Sunday punches as well as the old stylish combinations. Call it Friday-night-fight-card-comes-to-language, but contemporary writing abounds with comedic hooks, sarcastic jabs, and hyperbolic haymakers.

  When journalists go for the big trope every third paragraph, it brings to mind the famous “rope-a-dope” trope of boxer Muhammad Ali. Ali would stand against the ropes, “rope in” an opponent, and let the “dope” swing wildly, wearing himself out; then Ali would finish him.

  To rope a trope can be just as flashy—and risky. For that’s how it is in the trope game: Connect, and bask in cheers; miss, and you’re flat on the canvas. Here, for example, is a roundhouse punch from Lynne Truss, our friend from the previous chapter. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, her best-seller on punctuation, she suggests this cure for writers addicted to semicolons: “Knightsbridge clinics offering semicolonic irrigation.”

  Whoops—that one came up empty, didn’t it? Such double-meaning tropes, of course, are called “puns,” lowest of the figurative blows. Not that Truss has to worry; she delivers enough loopy tropes to delight a world of fans (including me), as with this metaphor:

  [The comma evolved into] a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog . . . [that] tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organizing words into sensible groups.

  BEST TROPE FORWARD

  Poets can wave their tropes proudly, staking whole poems on them and winning glory for such figures as “the wind’s like a whetted knife.” (John Masefield, Sea Fever). But prose writers are told that their figures of speech, while stimulating readers, should not call attention to themselves. This may be true in the long run; yet in many contemporary passages the trope is the thing, the signature dish, the bell-ringer—much as it is in our pop culture, conversation, and online chats.

  Notice how often, in reviewing a work, critics select tropes as representative excerpts; for example, New York Times critic Janet Maslin in describing Walter Mosley’s Little Scarlet: “One woman in a blue checkered dress is said to have ‘looked like a well stacked pile of black pears held in place by a farmer’s tablecloth.’ ” These tropes then become the measure of an author’s appeal—one more reason to mind your rhetorical figures.

  Today’s contenders show their figurative stuff mainly with so-called comparative tropes, such as similes and metaphors. (A simile, you will recall, makes an explicit comparison: poetry like sludge; a metaphor implies it: that sludge heap of poetry.) Comparative tropes heighten the meaning or clarity of a subject by relating it to something more vivid. When the comparison also tickles the reader’s fancy, you’ve got a winner.

  “Her head dropped by degrees,” writes Martin Amis in his novel Yellow Dog. A bit plain, this action; but here comes the simile to make it vivid: “Her head dropped by degrees, like the resilient j
olts of a second-hand.” Not only do we see the head tick-tocking downward now, but we can delight in that precise image—maybe even borrow it to impress the lunch crowd.

  But can Amis’s trope be reused in print? Probably not. A good trope is factory-fresh, unpredictable, economical, and custom-fitted. For all that work—because of it, in fact—the trope has a shelf life of about one use. After that, it joins the family of what author Robert Hartwell Fiske calls “moribund metaphors and insipid similes.”

  Is a good trope worth the work? Certainly, as is any locution that regales the reader with fresh images, novel connections, and lucid meanings. It catches the critic’s eye. It helps readers remember you. And besides, creating punchy tropes—comparative or otherwise—is as entertaining an activity as will ever occupy us tortured wordmongers. Reading I’m a Stranger Here Myself, I could just hear Bill Bryson chortling over his figures: “a man whose prose is so dry you could use it to mop spills”; a gift sweater with “the sort of patterns you get when you rub your eyes too hard.”

  For better or worse, fun-to-write tropes are going to call attention to themselves. And if the reader gets in on the fun, all is well. Writers have long been entertaining themselves with “extreme” metaphors for extraordinary phenomena: smash-mouth football, moral black hole, and so on (see Chapter 3); readers, too, seem to like them. Now, authors are discovering the fun of over-the-top tropes for ordinary things as well. How ordinary? Well, as unexceptional as commas, dry prose, a sweater—or, what Carrie Karasyov and Jill Kargman describe in The Right Address: a knickknack collection that looks “like Bangkok exploded in the foyer.”

  * * *

  IS MY TROPE HOT OR NOT?

  You may have noticed that Web sites such as “Am I Hot or Not?” and “Rate My Implants” have invited visitors to judge people and their, er, attributes by the numbers. Everything is getting mass-rated these days; so why not figures of speech, or “tropes”?

  Long before the Internet, classical critics considered tropes a key measure of an author. Plato, for one, took a pounding for his “drunken” metaphors. And next to creating tropes, what could be more fun than extolling or bashing someone else’s? But until RateMyTrope.com gets off the ground, writers may need to appraise their own efforts.

  As much as authors adore the figurative darlings of their own imaginations, they must expunge any that are facile, confusing, discordant, or overwrought. The final judgment is how the figure might play to one’s intended audience.

  Here, I’ve rated a few tropes using a scale of one to ten, ten being the best. See if you agree. (At the end, I’ve included several extras for you to appraise on your own.)

  “He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.” (—Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon)

  Rating: 9. Three good tropes bring P. I. Sam Spade to life: a paradox (“pleas-antly”), a simile (“like . . . satan”), and an oxymoron, or seemingly contradictory statement (“blond satan”).

  “As he advanced . . . all his [fat] bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown.”

  (—Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon)

  Rating: 2. Overloaded. Hard to visualize. “In the manner of” and “through which” are out of tune with gumshoe diction.

  “[Gangsta-novel writer Donald] Goines’s pimped-out plots gleam like custom rims on an Escalade.” (—Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times)

  Rating: 7. Good image if you’ve seen a gangsta-ish Cadillac Escalade SUV fly by on luminescent wheels. The trope’s consonance (p’s, n’s) and rhythm suggest gangsta rap.

  “Norah Jones and her foot soldiers are organic, grass-fed artists taking back the castle from the injection-molded, poly-blend popbots.” (—Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker)

  Rating: 5. Passionate, but a huge load of metaphor even for pop-music buffs.

  FOR YOUR APPRAISAL:

  • “The penguins tottered and clucked and dived, slipping off the habitat rocks like amiable hams but living under water like tuxedoed muscles.” (—Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones)

  • “I felt like an undeveloped photograph that he was printing, my image rising to the surface under his gaze.” (—Janet Fitch, White Oleander)

  • “[Michael Moore is] too eager to throw another treated log onto the fire of righteous anger.” (—David Denby, The New Yorker)

  • “Within minutes of my first kiss I was stripped like a squid . . . and something inside me hardened, turned into a chunk of cement. A girl becomes a comma like that, with wrong boy after wrong boy; she becomes a pause, something quick before the real thing.” (—Lisa Glatt, A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That)

  • “. . . [a woman who is] now thin enough to tread water in a hose.” (—Eric Garcia, Cassandra French’s Finishing School for Girls)

  • “[The album] sounds like the work of someone who’s recently had her heart pressed into service as an ashtray.” (—Alex Pappademas, “Happy Woman Blues,” Spin)

  • “[M]y reflection . . . stopped and stared—hair on end, mouth agog in idiotic astonishment—like a comic book character konked on the head with an anvil, chaplet of stars and birdies twittering about the brow.” (—Donna Tartt, The Secret History)

  • “Today’s gourmet Bobos want a 48-inch-wide, six-burner, dual fuel, 20,000 Btu range that sends up heat like a space shuttle rocket booster turned upside down.” (—David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise)

  • “But [John] Daly is as sober as an Amish librarian.”

  • “. . . Melania Knauss, who is just so damn centerfold beautiful she ought to come with staples.” (—Rick Reilly, Who’s Your Caddy?)

  • “The unease . . . seemed to rise with the turbulent brown river swollen by the April rains, and in the evenings lay across the blacked-out city like a mental dusk which the whole country could sense, a quiet and malign thickening.” (—Ian McEwan, Atonement)

  • “Sex, it seemed, was as forgettable as a dinner out; set asideable as a floppy disc. Relationships got remembered: they were there on the hard disc.” (—Fay Weldon, Worst Fears)

  * * *

  COMEDIC TROPES

  Suddenly everyone’s a comedian. And audiences are in love with the comedic trope, especially the stand-up style inspired by film and television entertainment. In writing, efforts range from high wit (truth through wit) to what Dorothy Parker called “calisthenics with words”—the hard-working wisecrack. The genre dubbed “chick lit” abounds with such calisthenics, to the delectation of its readers: “One good kiss from the right guy still makes you more radiant than a year of dermabrasion.” (Janice Kaplan and Lynn Schnumberger, The Botox Diaries)

  If attention is what you want, such outrageous tropes are a way to get it. And few writers can resist all the nutsy, trope-ready phenomena out there: the latest cosmetic torture, misbehaving celebrity, or failed enterprise. Troping such topics to the edgy boundaries is one way to avoid clichés; the trick is to not alienate your audience. Admirers of gentlemanly British tennis player Tim Henman, for example, must have been put off when the London Daily Express said he was “as likely to win Wimbledon as Osama bin Laden,” even if the rest of the tabloid’s readers guffawed.

  Some critics like to disparage comedic tropes as “jokey,” even as they borrow several of such jokes to juice up their reviews. Jokes may no longer be funny at airports, but the last I heard they still play to the general reader. Just ask Dave Barry, whose jokey hyperboles have come by the planeload: “Compared with the Japanese, the average American displays . . . all the subtlety of Harpo hitting Zeppo with a dead chicken.” (Dave Barry Does Japan)

  When not quoting comedic tropes, critics are often showcasing their own. They are writers, after all. Of an actress playing warrior Guinevere in the film King Arthur, reviewer Josh Tyangiel of Time cracks, “[Keira Knightley] wears so much blue war paint that she looks like the world’s most ferocious Smurf.”

  LITERARY LAUGHS

/>   Can jokey be literary as well? Well, here’s just one trope from Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, part of the Library of America’s collection of Literary Classics: “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”

  This hyperbolic simile, one of many from the master, dates from the 1930s. Jokey, you see, wasn’t always a liability. After all, the jokey trope was validated in the third century by Cassius Longinus, Greek rhetorician and presumed author of On Great Writing, a classic of criticism. Defending hyperbole, Longinus said that “[a work’s] actions and passions that bring one close to distraction compensate for and justify every boldness of expression.” Noting that “laughter, too, is a passion which has its roots in pleasure,” Longinus cited this one-liner: “His field was shorter than a Spartan’s letter.” (Bada-boom!) Longinus did warn, however, that “the use of tropes, like all beauties of language, always tends to excess,” as if the writer were drunk.

  TROPE CONTROL

  In A Poetry Handbook, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Mary Oliver also cautioned against excess, focusing on the images contained in tropes. She warned that too many “ ‘jolts’ of imagery may end up like a carnival ride: the reader has been lurched, and has laughed—has been all but whiplashed—but has gotten nowhere.”Such excess occurs in prose, too—especially in genres like travel writing, where so many unfamiliar experiences beg to be compared with known, concrete images. The temptation often leads to “conceits,” or metaphors that are extended beyond one or two comparisons. In his generally moving Prague Pictures, John Banville describes the title city as a place where