(no subject)
Sep. 29th, 2008 12:11 pmThis 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:
--
* 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.
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.**
--
* 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.