![]() McDonald, Bright Orange for the Shroud (Travis McGee #6)Ģ – Peril – All the time in the world to use one’s expertise to reflect upon one’s inadequacies while fighting for your life.Īs I went around the corner I saw the long shadow I cast, and knew that I was outlined against the single streetlight on the other side of Clematis Drive, and knew it would be a Very Good Thing to get back where I had been. A party, with Boo and his broad making all you nicer folks a little edgy. As loud as good ol’ Boo, and, as soon as she got tight, slightly more obscene. And he came equipped with a non-wife, a redhead of exceptional mammary dimension. An accent from way back in the mangroves. She was, Arthur thought, a lady.īoone Waxwell. Dark, sturdy, pretty-scored by sun and wind-an athlete. The other two were each local.Ĭrane Watts. Moved slowly and with apparent great effort. I had to slow Arthur down so that I could get the other three men nailed down, made into separate and distinct people in my mind. It is vivid.ġ – Expertise – Internal thoughts, in short-hand, sorting out who all the players in a criminal activity are. It therefore puts the reader into the head of the person telling the story, a head which can only look at things that way in that moment. The reason this works is that it mimics, in rhetorical form, the experience of hyper-focus or shock - the ability or need to concentrate, in whole or in part, on single things that absorb all attention in a moment of importance. One of the methods used to convey some of this (action, peril, expertise, suffering) is the use of short sentences, or even sentence fragments. When you read the genre, you expect explosive action, mortal peril, expertise, heroes & villains, suffering, triumph (contingent). Men’s Adventure Stories™ have certain conventions. So let’s look at the examples that irritated me… Part of its toolkit is not just vocabulary, but form. It illustrates a point-of-view, demonstrates a surprise, sympathizes with an injury, lectures a malefactor, etc. Rhetoric in fiction, as I’m thinking of it, isn’t about formal grammar, and it isn’t just telling a story. Since I couldn’t fire back at the perpetrators, I’m taking my rant out on you lot. Not the jacketed kind - the rhetorical kind. I was plowing through yet another Jack Reacher book (Lee Child, lately co-authoring with his brother Andrew Child) when I was met in the face by a continuing hail of bullets. Rhetoric has fashions, just like anything else, and some fiction genres use a sort of conventional rhetoric, a tool box specific to the genre.
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