telophase | (no subject)

This is why you shouldn't stick slavishly to various bits of writing advice*. I've just finished Tim Moore's Travels with my Donkey, his account of walking the pilgrimage routs to Santiago de Compostela with a donkey, and this is a sentence that is highly appropriate:

A farmer's wife with a basket of eggs strode past us and into the last house of the last hamlet, and thereafter, first with gentle stealth and then with callous indifference, the path began to climb.

Personifying the path like that is a perfect example of the mindset you get on long, dreary journeys when you're tired and cranky and start taking every little setback or obstacle personally. Plus, it's funny. But I've seen just one too many things telling writers not to personify inanimate objects, as if the reader was too stupid to realize that no, the path was not actually animate.**

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* Not that I really need to tell any of you that, actually. Mostly making conversation.

** Yes, yes, I know, there's doing it badly and doing it well, plus things like that are guidelines and not rules, but by God I AM GOING TO COMPLAIN ABOUT SOMETHING TODAY.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Tanith Lee is a true master of the inanimate personification, particularly when it comes to slyly inserting it in an otherwise serious passage. I don't know if you're familiar with her Kill the Dead (one of my favorites), but at one point, we get a bit of personification of the main character's lame leg. She does it so that it is both brilliantly funny and also a very effective way of emphasizing that he ignores this deformity as much as possible and doesn't really consider it part of him.

I've read quite a lot of Tanith Lee but not in recent years, so I've forgotten most of her work. XD I'd read Kill the Dead but remember absolutely nothing - maybe it's a good excuse to dig it out and reread. XD

You should! It's a very fine and decidedly strange ghost-and-exorcist story, told alternately from the POV of the exorcist and that of a hapless schlemiel of a musician whose path keeps crossing the exorcist's.

The best piece of writing advice I ever got was from a Literary Theory professor at UNT, who told me that voice should be customized to the audience to which you are writing. Too many writing books assume that you want to write a certain type of writing, and never mention the mindset of the reading audience.

I think it's an essay by Samuel Delany in which he talked about the difference between SF audiences and non-SF, and the example he used was "crocodile bus" in referring to a bus taking people across the tarmac at an airport. The non-SF people he showed it to understood it as a metaphor for the kind of buses made of segments joined by accordioned rubber stuff, but the SF readers took it more literally, because their reading was tuned to building pictured of fantastic stuff in their minds, and were confused. :D

I just have to comment, because after a long day of backpacking while carrying a 30 lb. backpack, it seems like the trail is mocking you. In short, I agree with you that it's the perfect way to put it.