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What authors’ style of descriptions do you all appreciate or dislike?
Two of my favorite authors when it comes to description are Tolkien and Dickens. They are also two of my top favorite authors period, but hey. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I like them.
Dickens does a lot of characterization of the objects he is describing, as in the time (in A Christmas Carol, I think?) when he likened onions in a market window to fat gentlemen in purple waistcoats winking across the street at the blushing, rosy plums… or something like that. Heh heh. It’s been a while since I read it.
With Tolkien, it’s not so much the unique style of the descriptions themselves as the flow and pacing of the words, and the words themselves. Only in Tolkien will you find words such as ‘fen-reek’ and ‘dolven’ (as in delved). The words used are old words, almost archaic, and together with the slightly reversed sentence structure it gives an overwhelmingly delicious sense of soul-chilling age and majestic beauty. And then wham! Out of the blue, Tolkien hits you with some commonplace observation (usually from Sam Gamgee’s perspective) that brings you back to earth and makes you sit up and take notice of even the littlest things.Speaking of unique words, I think the words themselves can play a key part in description. Not the adjectives and adverbs, but the nouns themselves. For instance, a castle, a palace, and a citadel are all pretty much the same thing, but each word has a different image attendant upon it. When I think castle, I think solid round towers, high walls, grey stone, and an iron portcullis with a drawbridge and a moat. Palace? Something with a more elegant architecture. Something with high spires, peaked roofs, arches and arbors and portals of stonework and statues. And citadel is a mixture of both, with a few gargoyles thrown in for good measure.
I side with Kate on the Dickens. And I’ll see her Dickens, and raise her a Lewis. (I fold on Tolkien.)
I love Dickens and Lewis’s description, because (guess what!) they do it in a very…entertaining way. (In fact, for most of my future work, I’m going to be imitating them…).
It’s like…it’s like the author is sitting down next to you on a cough, and puts his arm around you, and points at something nearby, and is like, “See that? See that thing. Let me tell you something funny about that thing. Let’s have a laugh about it eh? Just you and me.”
Tolkien is like, “Hello students, welcome to History Class 101.”
I love Tolkien. I skim SO MUCH of his work.
SKIMMING TOLKIEN’S WORK! OH HORRORS! So much of the beauty is in the details. But I do see what you mean. I guess I like Tolkien because he is un-apologetically unique, and there is something about his description that just speaks to me on a deeper level than Dickens’s and Lewis’s ‘See that? See that thing. Let me tell you something funny about that thing. Let’s have a laugh about it eh? Just you and me’. (I so get what you mean by that, by the way! Haha!)
Tolkien has had me nearly in tears on several occasions from the sheer beauty and un-apologetic sentiment of his descriptions. I can sense that whatever it is he is describing means the world to him, and is full of age upon age of hidden significance. We see a mountain, he sees something entirely different, and it shines through, somehow.
Sniff. Sniff. I need a tissue.Hey, but I’m the lucky one!
I’ve read LotR at least ten times, and every time I have read something new.
Pretty cool, am I right?
You’ve read a series ten times! … and I thought I had good time management skills. There are only a few (1 or 2) single books that I have read more than once (aka twice). Pray, how do you do it?
By the way, if you ever happen to catch anyone lying down on a cough, ask them how the do it. I would like to know. Its rather impressive.
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