LATRAME

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#writingstyle10 scenes

LATRAME

Authors. Readers. Characters.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

1w ago

We learn figures of speech the way we learn a list of dead vocabulary. Metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron. Ticked, recited, forgotten.

The trouble is, a figure isn't a decoration you lay over a sentence to make it pretty. It's a shortcut for thought.

"He has a heart of stone" doesn't only say he's cold : it makes you touch the coldness, the weight, the inertia, in four words, without explaining. A good metaphor doesn't replace an idea : it makes you feel one that literal language would take a paragraph to pin down, and badly at that.

The test of a living figure : does it make you see something, or does it dress something up ? "Rosy-fingered dawn" is three thousand years old and still works, because you really see the fingers, the light stretching out like a hand. "A radiant sun" makes you see nothing at all. Same length, two worlds.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

5w ago

You don't find your voice the way you find your keys, somewhere you left them. You write it, text after text. And then one day someone tells you "I knew it was you by the second sentence." And you don't even know what they recognized.

Do you ? Do you know what people recognize in your sentences ?

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

4w ago

The whole world is purging its em dashes. Too associated with machines, apparently.

Emily Dickinson's dash. Woolf's. Céline's. The machines didn't invent it — they learned it reading the same books you did.

We'll let you decide who has to give it back.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

4w ago

You were taught to hunt down repetition. Find a synonym, vary, elegance.

Except. "I waited. I waited some more. I waited long after waiting had stopped meaning anything." Replace a single one of those "waited" with "lingered" and the whole thing collapses. Repetition isn't always a mistake : sometimes it's a hammer, and it hits the same spot on purpose.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

4w ago

Flaubert had a room for shouting. He called it his gueuloir : he would yell his sentences out loud, alone, for hours. Any sentence that failed the shouting test got rewritten.

The pretty word flatters on the page and dies out loud. The right word survives both.

Try it, nobody's watching. Read your last paragraph out loud and listen for where your own voice stumbles : that's the spot.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

4w ago

Punctuation is the stage direction of the sentence. The period says : lower your voice. The comma says : breathe, but stay on stage. The ellipsis says : look away while you finish your line...

And the semicolon, the least loved of all, says something nothing else can say : these two sentences are independent ; they still refuse to be separated.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

4w ago

Three paragraphs of impeccable, formal, almost ceremonial prose. And then, right in the middle, a word from the street.

The effect is physical. Not because the word is vulgar : because it comes from outside, like someone walking into a silent room without knocking. A register only has power if you know how far you're dropping it from.

Popular science

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

5w ago

The same door opens three times.

"I opened the door. My hand was shaking, I think." — The reader is locked inside. They know only what the character knows ; they doubt when the character doubts.

"She opened the door. Her hand was shaking." — The reader sees the shaking, but from outside. Watching someone who can't see themselves shake.

"Across the hall, someone opened a door." — The reader no longer even knows who's shaking. Just a silhouette, and maybe that's exactly what's needed, for now.

One door, three cameras. And it resets with every scene : nothing forces chapter twelve's camera to be chapter one's.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

5w ago

Telling : he was lying.

Showing : he answered a little too fast. Then he repeated the question, as if buying time for the next answer.

The word "lying" appears nowhere, and yet the reader knows before the character across the table does. That's the whole exercise : remove the label, keep the gesture, and let the reader reach the conclusion half a second before you hand it to them. That half second is the pleasure of reading.

Author

LATRAME

@latrame

5w ago

A long sentence moves forward, piles up, refuses to stop, stacking commas the way you stack the thoughts of a sleepless night, until it finally falls.

A short sentence hits. Then stops.

A chase written in long sentences runs out of breath before the reader does. A grief scene chopped into short ones reads like a telegram. But flip it at the right moment : one endless sentence in the middle of a chase, and time hangs : the character sees everything, too much, at once. A three-word sentence in the middle of a grief that kept stretching, and that's the sob finally coming out.

An exercise, if you want one : reread the last page you wrote looking only at sentence length. Not the words. Just the lengths. We're curious what you'll find.

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