Alice Hoffman Here on Earth pgs. 27-28
	Truman Capote A Christmas Memory
	Rick Bragg All Over but the Shoutin' pgs. 29-30
	Kristin Hannah On Mystic Lake
	Ernest Hemmingway "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" and "Hills Like White Elephants"
	Dean R. Koontz How to Write Best Selling Fiction

An Example of Denotation - dictionary or encyclopedia definition:

An eagle has imperforate nostrils, legs of medium length, a hooked bill and four-toed feet with round and sharp claws. Land eagles are feathered to the toes but fishing eagles only halfway to the toes. An eagle is three feet long and the wing span is seven feet. Their nests are placed on some inaccessible cliff. The eggs are spotted and there are never more than three.

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely hands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls,
He watched from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
                          Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

Example:

Miranda's heart palpitated as she harkened to the eloquence of Bernard's utterance extolling her perfection. His arms became encircling appendages as they entwined about her; his eyes affixed themselves upon her scintillating visage.

The object of a writer should be to use language that illuminates the subject but not distract the reader. A writer should choose his words carefully and consider the shades of meanings attached to the words; strengthen his writing with vital verbs and nouns instead of relying on weak adjectives and adverbs. The following is an example of how the Miranda scene should have been written. It is from Kristin Hannah's brilliant and compelling novel, On Mystic Lake:

          When Annie fell back to earth, amid a shower of stars, she landed with a thud. She lay naked beside Nick, her breathing ragged. Overhead, the sky was jet-black and sprinkled with starlight, and the night smelled of spilled wine and spent passion.
          Very slowly, Nick pulled his hand away from hers. Without the warmth of his touch, her skin felt clammy and cold.
          She grabbed one end of the blanket and pulled it across her naked breasts, sidling away from him. "Oh, my God," she whispered. "What have we done?"

As Dean Koontz says:
Less is More.
Five adjectives are better than six.
Four adjectives are better than five.
Three are better than four.
Two are better than three.

By using fewer words to obtain the effect you desire, you will force yourself to use more accurate and powerful words. Communication is the primary job of the novelist. The kind of prose that most powerfully communicates ideas is simple and direct. You can't entertain a reader if he doesn't understand the story-line. You can't affect your reader emotionally if your prose is so dense it weighs him down.

Good prose contains vivid metaphors, similes, and striking images. A novel would be flat and dull without them. But if you are using them every third sentence, or your similes are so involved it takes a whole page to present them, you are not communicating with your reader.

There is an old example journalism teachers use about a city editor who once sent an inexperience cub reporter to cover the Johnstown Flood. After waiting hours and hours for the reporter's story to come over the wire, the editor was beginning to get very angry. Finally the teletype began to clatter, and the kid's story, ten thousand words long, began to print out. It contained very few facts and was written in a melodramatic style. The first sentence over the wire was: "God sits tonight in judgment at Johnstown." The city editor was furious, but had a great sense of humor. He wired back to the cub reporter: "Forget flood. Interview God."

Now, this does not mean your fiction should be as spare as a newspaper article or as straightforward as nonfiction. Novelists can go into character minds and journalist cannot.

Dialogue should be clean and without melodramatic tags. An example of poor dialogue:

"Did he hurt you?" Jack asked worriedly.
"No," Sandy gasped. She was shaking.
"But his knife-"
"I managed to knock it out of his hand," she quaked.
"My God!" he exclaimed.
"I'm just bruised," she assured him.
"Did you see what he looked like?"
"He was big. Dark hair."
"What color were his eyes?" Jack queried.
"Gray," she declared. "They were spooky, too."
"Did he have any scars?" Jack probed.
"Yeah. Now that you mention it…at the right corner of his mouth. It was a little half-moon mark."
"Great!" Jack erupted jubilantly.

Dean believes there are four reasons why new writers resort to exotic dialogue tags:

1. They don't know any better because they have not developed a sensitive ear, one where they can hear how jolting substitutes for said are.
2. They think that repeatedly using said is dull and using colorful substitutes shows how clever they are. All it shows it that the writer knows how to use a thesaurus. If you use too much variety in your dialogue tags, it calls attention to them. It is like grabbing the reader and conking them on the head and saying "This is not real conversation between real people; it's dialogue in a novel. It's all made up."
3. Many new writers seem to think that a melodramatic tag makes the dialogue more exciting. If it isn't clear that the characters are involved in an exciting scene, then the whole scene needs to be fixed. Colorful dialogue tags are not going to do it.
4. New writers are afraid their readers will not understand the tone of voice in which a line of dialogue is spoken, and therefore not grasp the speakers emotional or mental condition. If an exchange of dialogue should be tense, showing fear, rage, or other strong emotions, those feelings must be inherent in the dialogue itself, in the writer's choice of words.

You can find published novels in which authors use flashy dialogue tags time and time again. Such tags don't prevent you from being published, they just prove the author is not a good writer.

Jill believes a novelist can foreshadow, enlarge the events, and mold the story so that every word reflects what the novelist has to say. Be sure you carefully select the very best adjectives and cleanest metaphors to convey your point. Do not eliminate adjectives altogether. A great example of clean writing is Ernest Hemmingway's work. He told simple stories in a straight-forward style. His work was hugely powerful.

An example is the following excerpt from, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, where two waiters inside a café are talking about an old man.

"Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said.
"Why?"
"He was in despair."
"What about?"
"Nothing."
"How do you know it was nothing?"
"He has plenty of money."