And I don’t mean of the alcoholic variety.  Although rum punch wouldn’t be such a bad thing when we are facing revision. Instead I am talking about adding spice, pizzazz, a certain something that makes the reader say, “Now that was good!”

Think about it.  Haven’t you ever picked up a piece of writing, read it and thought, “That author has got it.”  Just what is that elusive it?  Can be lots of things, right?  Pacing, characterization, mood, tone, structure –we could go on and on about what makes writing good.  But I’m going to limit my “punchiness” to using imagery and figurative language.

Imagery and figurative language –  such English teachery words.  I know you are envisioning your former teacher in her jumper and SAS shoes…and shivering. But, never fear. I’m betting that unlike my former students, you will put this to use.  Imagery, in essence, is using words to create a mental picture in the reader’s mind. Think five senses – you’ve heard plenty of harping on that from your contest entires, right?  There’s always one judge who says, “Need to use your five senses more.”  So, how do you do this? You’ve got to do a little transporting – go to that beach, to that garden, to that bed of tangled sheets.  What do you hear, see, feel, taste, smell?  Come on now, stretch that brain – you don’t just see waves, you see, “the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.”  You don’t just hear birds, you hear “swallows circling with their shimmering sound.” Okay, I used Tennyson and Teasdale, but I bet you can come up with just how those sheets feel, right?  My point – place yourself there and search for the words.  And not just the overused, trite variety; find the good ones.

Figurative language – using similes, metaphors, and personification.  Taking you back to that dreary English class, aren’t I?  Well, trust me – we can make dreariness disappear with these three puppies.  Below are some good examples:

“The sky is low – the Clouds are mean,”  Emily Dickinson

“I wandered lonely as a cloud.”  William Wordsworth

“Darkness covered everything blacker than a hundred midnights down in a cypress  swamp.”  James Weldon Johnson

“His absurd little whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse, his feet like small leaves,  little lizard feet.”  Theodore Roethke

“The startled little waves that leap in fiery ringlets from their sleep.”  Robert Browning

“Hard and sharp as a flint and solitary as an oyster.”  Charles Dickens

“Worst of all, her hair was uncoiling from the Aqua Net curl by curl, with the hair spray weighing it down just enough so that the escaping locks hung lank around her face like bedsprings that had been tossed from a tenement window and left in an alley to rust.”  Susan Elizabeth Phillips

“Draping a Biasia bag over her shoulder and putting Claudia Ciutis on her feet was like putting a silver-trimmed saddle on a big fat mule.”          Jane Graves

“. . .the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.”  Joseph Conrad

From timeless authors and poets to current ones, all give good examples of different ways you can use figurative language.  But don’t forget, figurative language is like salt:  Add only a little, or it will be unreadable.

Now  for a little homework.  (You didn’t think you were getting off that easy, did you?)  Look for good use of figurative language in the works that you read.  Note them and then ask yourself why they work or don’t work.  Then take a look at your own writing.  Have you made a comparison that is flat or worse – clichéd?  Have you missed an opportunity to give your words impact?  Take a hard look at your language.  You don’t have to go purple prose, but you can make word choices that make your readers stand up and take notice, or better yet, deliver the TKO

So let’s take Autumn’s nouns and stretch them to adjectives, verbs or, heck, give me some adverbs. And please, share. Let’s get interactive and show what good writers we ALL are. Or how we can help each other make every word count.