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

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.

7 th 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: