Part I: Personification

What's personification? An easy tool to make your setting really POP! Read on to find out how to use it!

Have you ever written a paragraph of a story you were working on, read it back, and grumbled at how plain, uninspiring, or boring it was? Well, we all have. Even if you’ve got ideas in your head, as great as they might sound inside, sometimes you’ll put them on the screen and completely disappoint yourself. What sounded like an exciting, action packed scene in your mind now looks like a trudging block of exposition. It’s boring.

Don't let your exposition stay looking like this!

    Well don’t let it get you down. It’s just something that’s going to happen when you’re pounding your thoughts into material. Quite often, even if what you just wrote looks terrible to you, it’s still a vital step in the creative process. It’s extremely important to put your thoughts down in written form. So many “writers” have the story all in their heads! It might be amazing and inspiring and wonderful, but no one can see it. That’s why actually filtering the ideas out of your mind into visible form is so important, but it’s of course only the first step.

    Let’s go back to that boring block of exposition. Odds are that you’re going to have to dissect it, chop it up, sew it back together, and send a bolt of lightning into it before “It’s alive!” Silly, but truer than you think. Quite often you will have to remove entire sections of writing, even if your productive ego tells you “What are you doing!?” It just feel unnatural and wrong to delete something you put in your story, but trust me, don’t be afraid of it. Often less is far more, and there’s only one way to find out when that’s true.

    But that still doesn’t say much for energizing that dead chunk of text. If you chop up paragraph cadavers and splice them back together, you’re still using dead word-meat. What do you need next? A bolt of lightning! But where do you find that? Well, there are many viable alternatives to a lightning rod affixed to your roof. Writing is an art, and just as there are a myriad different ways to bring a painting to life, the same can be said when it comes to writing. I’m going to bring out one that I personally like to employ in my work.

    Personification. What’s that? Well, basically it’s when you take an lifeless, inanimate object, and give it active, even human traits. If you cut eyes and a mouth into your sandwich and make it talk, I suppose that’s personification. Thankfully we can be much more subtle when it comes to writing. How can we do this? Well the best way to explain is with an example.

The wind moved the curtains.

This sentence of exposition is to the point, but it’s also pretty boring. I think I just yawned.

The blackened night exhaled a heavy breath against the curtains as they fluttered in a ghostly dance.

Alright, I’ll admit I went a little overboard there, but this looks a lot better, doesn’t it?

    Looking at those two sentences, why is the second one funner to read? It’s hardly because of the dramatic descriptive adjectives. Don’t believe me? Then let’s strip it bare, leaving only the personifications.

The night exhaled a breath against the curtains as they fluttered and danced.

    It still sounds pretty darn good, doesn’t it? Some would even prefer this version to the last. Why? Well that’s a key point when it comes to personification. A writer can pile on all the fancy adjectives he wants onto his work, but when you overuse adjectives, you’re telling the reader what something is like, you’re not showing them what it’s like. That’s probably the most widely preached mantra of writing: Show, don’t tell.

Maybe this is a bit too literal of a visual aid, but I kind of want middle one's number and to have a brewski with the one on the left.

    When you utilize a personification as opposed to a handful of adjectives, you’re giving your setting human characteristics. Obviously, any human is going to more fully connect with human characteristics. It hits home harder, and it wraps us up in the scene. You see? That’s a personification right there “It wraps us into to the scene”. Obviously a sentence or paragraph cannot physically wrap around your body, but through use of a personification, your mind immediately grasps the idea behind that phrase and interprets it in a very literal, visceral way. That’s why personifications are so powerful when read. You might not even see them as you read, but they’re there, and they make you keep reading.

    So now that you understand exactly what personification is, why don’t you try it out? I guarantee that you already use it in your writing, even if you never thought about it before, but now that we are thinking about it, let’s practice and evolve this particular skill.

    Below is a list of random, lifeless objects. They’re lifeless because they’re not breathing and thinking, but you personally can breathe life into them through personification, and they will repay the favor by breathing life into your story.

Wind
Marble/s
Camera
Dress
Xylophone

    So take each of these boring, inanimate objects, and use personification to place them each in a sentence that imbues them with life and human characteristics. Remember to make good use of active verbs, not passive ones (like were, had, and was), and for a twist, try to use little to no adjectives in each sentence. Don’t be afraid of using emotion! Just because a mansion can not feel literal sorrow, it can look very sad and alone as it sits atop a dark, cloudy mountaintop, right?

    Post your practice results in the comments section and let me know how personification works for you!

Comments

enroc

Posted 12 Years Ago AHHHHH! SHUT UP!

MensSana

Posted 12 Years Ago The wind was furious that night. Doors and windows shook and trembled in their frames every time his fist threw another blow at them. Just a step inside the hallway, behind closed doors and outside the winds pulsing rage, a blind, dusty glass jar had committed suicide off of his shelf, the glass marbles it had contained jumping around noisily as if celebrating their captors death and their newly gained freedom to spill and go wherever they pleased. From the same shelf the recently deceased glass container had sprung from, an old camera watched as the marbles enjoyed their clattering, jumping madness as patiently as it ever did, as vigilantly and attentive as it ever did through its eye of glass. Oh, how this unblinking eye would have wept and cried to see the death of its companion and neighbour if it only could. Not out of grief for a live gone or a friend lost, no, pure egoistic self-pity would have brought it to tears because now, after the departure of the oldest inhabitant of the shelf, the dusty camera took that place. As the mad marbles slowly ceased their clattering celebration to rest in their new places and the old photographical device could do nothing to change its fate, a fierce bolt of lightning threw its high-voltaic gleam into the hallway chamber through a small, dirty window and lit the small, dusty room in a flash of red as its light was reflected off the dress hanging lonely from its hook and hanger, saddened, dreaming of former glory of celebrations and festivities, now painfully reminded by the marbles' earlier bouncing and cheering. Yet the most pitiful of them was the xylophone under its layer of dust, sleeping as it ever did. Not once had it played, not once had it been sounded to delight the people it had been made to enjoy or even just to make some noise and see if it was functional at all. Of all the sad, gloomy inhabitants of this hallway chamber prison, this tomb of disuse, the ever-sleeping xylophone had never truly lived. -------- I overdid it, didn't I? Anyway, this is a valuable lesson and a great tool to have at one's disposal. I am very pleased with the results, keeping in mind this is a first try. Two notes I'd like to add: English is not my native language, so what I wrote might be less than perfect. Also I hope the formatting does work out the way I intended, seeing as this was written on a smartphone using some flimsy freeware text editor. I apologize for both imperfections. (Also, my first post! I am very excited to join this website's community, hello everyone! :D)

Holly Soques

Posted 12 Years Ago The dress fluttered and sighed with the wind's caresses before it settled. The camera, undeterred, remained still and staring throughout the entire spectacle, while the bones of the xylophone gathered dust from disuse, not even groaning in protest. A few marbles rolled down the neckline, tempting the complicated lacework into entangling the impossible. Their smooth descent had an air of remorse about, as though they regretted the absence of plump flesh. _____ I tried to work the objects into one continuous extract, but I'm not sure how well that worked out. Any feedback would be much appreciated!

1allove4

Posted 12 Years Ago The xylophone sung as the wind be came intune with the beat the sunny dress glided across the ball room floor as she danced in unison. The camera snapped with joy as he admired the dress from afar.

Idiotekque

Posted 12 Years Ago Thanks for all the participation! I message anyone who participates, so if you take a crack at the practice exercise, keep an eye on your inbox!

jg

Posted 12 Years Ago Hi All. I would love a comment or two (especially a critical one and a suggestion). I´ll return favor. 1. A weak breeze limped through the brush and disturbed the sleeping branches. 2. The jar overturned and the myriad marbles burst into a glassy birdsong as they jumped and bustled against one another on the floor. 3. The camera stole a glance just as her shiny caramel eyes turned to catch it. 4. The waitress´s dress danced drunken and delayed swirls around her ankles at each turn round the tables. 5. The long tinny keys shot off the attacking mallets with violent and immediate accuracy.

angel_07

Posted 12 Years Ago hi.,this lesson is really helpful, refreshing literature lesson i got some years ago, but the words choice.,well so hard to be imagined.. the riders are fast moving as if the wind will catch him When I captured his picture,I felt like the camera was speaking his enchantment the sound of xylophone has anesthetized a thousand of audience

Sleepless

Posted 12 Years Ago how can you apply this to aboring prompth that you have no idea what the reasons will be ?

Michel

Posted 12 Years Ago Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback: Pushing like a large hand on the back of my long wool coat, the wind pushes me forward to receive icy wet flecks, like glass on my face. Pulling my toes out of the cozy faux wool rug I’ve dug them into, I creak out of bed, dragging them to meet the hard coldness of the bathroom marble. Faded brown and chewed on one corner by Ralphie, the Brownie camera took me back to memories in Grandpa’s garage. Hung lonely in the closet, smelling like Chanel No. 5 and cigarettes, Auntie’s dress had flecks of dandruff resting on its royal blue shoulder pads. Rusty and chipped, the rainbow colored keys of a Fisher-Price xylophone stuck out from the side of a pile of old toys my mother refused to donate to good will.

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