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[MUSIC PLAYING]
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People living an everyday
life, it's just an everyday--
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it's the regular thing.
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I got up.
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I put on my pants one leg at a
time and went out to the car,
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started the car.
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I drove it down the street.
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You don't want any accidents.
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You don't want to run over any
children on their tricycles.
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You don't want the police to
stop you and pull a gun on you
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and maybe shoot
you for no reason.
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You just want to put on
your pants, get in your car,
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drive to work.
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But when you're reading
a novel, you really
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want to understand the
jeopardy that every person is
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in when they're in a
novel and in that story.
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And vivid language helps us
become a part of that story.
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It brings us into the story.
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The beginning of "Moby
Dick" is, "Call me Ishmael."
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Now you could have
just as well written,
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"His name was Ishmael."
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But that doesn't do very much.
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When he says, "Call me
Ishmael," he's talking to you.
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He's saying, come on.
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I'm walking down the street.
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It's raining, it's cold.
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And I'm tired of being on land.
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I want to get out
on the sea again.
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I want to get on a boat.
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I want to get on a whaling ship.
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That's powerful.
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And it really makes
you, you know,
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want to follow him and see
what's going to happen.
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Because you're used to
putting on, you know,
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one pant leg at a time, going
to work, and doing your job,
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you know, at the
book keeping shop.
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You know, you don't
like what you're doing.
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But when you read
this novel, it's
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going to help you transform
yourself into another world.
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And so the language in
novels, not all of it,
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but vivid language helps
you to really experience
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what's happening.
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
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I talk to so many people, and
I say, wow, I love that piece.
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It was so pedestrian.
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And they get mad at me.
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They say, I'm not pedestrian.
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I'm important.
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I'm special.
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I'm royal.
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And I say, well, yeah,
maybe so, but if you
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want me to believe that,
first, you gotta be pedestrian,
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you know.
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Pedestrian in fiction means
that you're seeing characters
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that do things that you do.
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They cook some rice.
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They lit a cigarette.
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They got some bad news,
and they had a drink.
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This is stuff that
we all know about.
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We all do.
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Once you have
introduced a character
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in a world that has a
pedestrian cast to it,
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then you can start to
build on that to bigger,
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much more wild things.
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So this is hopefully
a good example
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of using the
pedestrian in a novel.
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And again, I'm going to read
from "Devil in a Blue Dress."
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"At 4:00 in the morning, the
neighborhoods of Los Angeles
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are asleep.
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On Dinka Street, there wasn't
even a dog out prowling
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the trash.
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The dark lawns were
quiet, dotted now and then
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with hushed white flowers that
barely shone in the lamplight.
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The French girl's address
was a one-story duplex.
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The porch light shone on
her half of the porch.
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I stayed in my car long enough
to light up a cigarette.
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The house looked
peaceful enough.
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There was a fat palm
tree in the front yard.
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The lawn was surrounded by an
ornamental white picket fence.
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There were no
bodies lying around,
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no hard-looking men with
knives on the front porch.
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I should have taken
Odell's advice right then
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and left California for good."
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Easy is not only
experiencing seeing
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a pedestrian kind of life,
he's also yearning for it.
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So I would much rather this
just be a normal everyday scene.
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I don't want to
see no dead bodies.
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I don't see anybody
pulling a knife on me.
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I don't want to have
that experience.
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And when he realizes
that, he says,
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you know, I should
just get in my car
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and drive out of
this city and never
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come back and live a
normal life, right?
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Now that's where we end,
but he doesn't do that.
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He ends up going into the house.
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And all of a sudden, we
elevate from the pedestrian.
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
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There are two kinds of images
that you can use in writing--
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the simile and the metaphor.
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The simile says, this
was like something else.
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And the metaphor says,
this is something else.
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So you might say, Joe was
like a big black bear.
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That's a good simile.
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He was like a big black bear.
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You can also say, Joe
was a big black bear.
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Now we take on.
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You say, he's not like a bear.
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He is not something
that I can get around.
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He was immovable.
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He was inescapable.
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He was a big black bear, and he
was going to claw me to death.
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That's how powerful
the metaphor is.
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Well, the problem both with
similes and with metaphors
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is, they can be overused.
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They can be mixed.
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You can say, he was like a big
black bear, a shark swimming
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in the deep ocean.
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So well, no, either he's a big
black bear, or he's a shark.
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He's not both, you know.
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I'm lost now.
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You know, it's like--
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I don't know-- I'm watching
"Sharknado" or something.
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I don't know.
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And so that's the first thing.
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You shouldn't mix either
similes or metaphors.
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And also, you don't want
to create too many images.
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You want to create one image,
and you want to stick with it.
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Because you're telling a story.
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And every element of
that story has a place.
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You don't just, you
know, plop it down
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and then jump to another one,
then jump to another one,
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then jump to another.
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So there has to be dialogue.
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There has to be, you know,
other things that you're using.
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Similes are nice, you
know, when you're--
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you don't want to be
an immediate threat.
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You know, it's like, you
know, he was, you know,
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as fat as an apple.
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All right, OK, fine.
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We know he's round.
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Good, we got it.
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We'll get an image for it.
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That's cool.
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And we can go on from there.
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
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It's always better to
say, "Clang, clang,
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clang," rather than, "There
was a loud noise of metal
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on metal in the next room."
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You know, it's always
better to make us feel it.
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You know, in the
previous thing that I
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read when Easy hears that
Daphne Monet is Black,
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he says, "I've only felt an
earthquake once in my life,
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but I felt it again
when I heard about her."
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That's the thing.
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You want to feel what it was
like, how it-- his response
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is just not, "I was surprised."
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It's, "I felt like I
was in an earthquake."
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That's what you
want to let people
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know as much as possible.
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I mean, a lot of times, you're
going to have to be expository.
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A lot of times, you are
going to have to just say,
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"Joe said he loved
Jeanette," you know.
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But as much as possible,
you want to get beyond that.
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You should show me
what is being seen
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by the main character, what's
being seen by the narrator.
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You don't need to tell
me what's happening.
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He looked into her
eyes, and his heart
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started beating at an
extraordinary rate.
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That's better than saying, "He
looked at her and got excited."
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You've given me a feeling.
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You've given me something
that I can hold on to.
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You're giving me
something that I know.
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You're giving me
something that's
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both passionate and pedestrian.
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That's what you want.
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13739
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