“The sun was now below the horizon and the red glow at the rim of the world faded into pink. The sky above turned slowly from azure to the delicate blue-green of a robin’s egg, and the unearthly stillness of rural twilight came stealthily down about her. Shadowy dimness crept over the countryside. The red furrows and the gashed red road lost their magical blood color and became plain brown earth … In the strange half-light, the tall pines of the river swamp, so warmly green in the sunshine, were black against the pastel sky, an impenetrable row of black giants hiding the slow yellow water at their feet.”
With text this dense, it’s no wonder that “Gone With the Wind” is such a large book (or such a long movie.) Under circumstances such as these, I usually find myself skimming through the details in order to get to the plot, the point, I tell myself, of the book. But description like this isn’t just words telling us what the scenery at the plantation of Tara looks like. It’s the sound of the words that made me read this paragraph through several times, and even aloud. Phrases like “the red glow of the rim of the world” and “red furrows and the gnashed red road” just beg to be read out loud.
When faced with a book full of description (Hugo, anyone? Or Tolkien?), don’t plan to skim through it, if that’s your habit. Give a few sentences a chance and look for the artistry in the words … after all, the words more than anything else are what can make a writer an amazing writer.
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