The most important figures of speech, as we have seen in the article on How to Write Prose Like a Poet, are similes and metaphors.
They are the ones that come most naturally to us, without us even having to think about them.
Some of the figures of speech that I discuss below are not so well known, meaning you will need to be more deliberate in your use of them - that is, if you use them consciously at all.
To be honest, good writing happens instinctively - you do it without particularly thinking about it.
The best strategy, then, is to familiarize yourself with the material below and then forget about them. Later, as you write a chapter in your novel, you will find yourself using them without even being aware of it.
This is where you take an inanimate object and animate it - that is, give it human qualities...
Fred loved his Alfa Romeo but the car didn't always love Fred. It chose the worst days possible to fall sick on him and refuse to move a muscle.
Mary waded out into the sea but was shoved back to the shore by a great bully of a wave.
On a stormy night like tonight, the jagged rocks in the river mouth chewed up many an unsuspecting fishing boat and spat them out in splinters.
Personification, like all of the other figures of speech, should be used sparingly. Where you do use it, though, it is an excellent way to take a flat description and transform it into something far more dynamic.
Hyperbole is deliberate exaggeration, often for comic effect. There is a great example of it in Martin Amis's Money that has stayed with me for years. He describes the difficulty of crossing the street in Los Angeles like this...
The only way to get across the road is to be born there.
Here is another example I have made up myself...
Jack was the hardest worker the factory had ever employed. He could put in an eight-hour shift before the morning tea break.
Because hyperbole generally has a comic effect it is best used in comic novels, or at least not in deadly serious ones. Otherwise, it's like cracking jokes at a wake.
Onomatopoeic words are ones which sound like the actions they describe. Batman is full of them...
However, if you don't want a scene in your novel to sound like a sequence from Batman, you must use onomatopoeias more subtly...
John was hopeless at golf. The ball rarely ended up where he had intended to hit it, but he loved the good thwack of the driver sending it on its misguided way.
Emily loved the sound of her son's pony clip-clopping down the lane.
The gulls kept up their terrible squawking all through the night.
Cadence is the repetition of words or phrases for lyrical effect. It is more associated with poetry than prose, and yet all great novels contain examples of it.
Here is William Gay using it to describe a setting in Provinces of Night:
The citrusy smell of the pine woods, the raw loamy earth smell of a field turned darkly to the sun by Brady's tractor, the faint call of distant crows that was all there was to break the silence.
Here is my own example...
Mary worried all the time. She worried when Steven was five minutes late getting home. She worried when the children ran through the school gates in the morning, and again in the afternoon if she didn't immediately spot them running back out. She worried if what she had planned for dinner tonight would turn out okay, worried afterwards if everyone had really enjoyed it or just made out they had. She worried...
And here is a more extreme example from John Irving's Last Night in Twisted River...
As for the river, it just kept moving, as rivers do - as rivers do. Under the logs, the body of the young Canadian moved with the river, which jostled him to and fro - to and fro. If, at this moment in time, Twisted River also appeared restless, even impatient, maybe the river itself wanted the boy's body to move on, too - move on, too.
Cadence is not one of those figures of speech you can particularly plan on using - it just happens.
Sometimes, as you write or revise your novel, you will notice a rhythm emerging from the prose. When you do, your job is to encourage it, to coax it, to fine-tune it until the words become musical.
(That last sentence, by the way, is an example of cadence.)
Alliteration is the repetition of similar sounds in a sentence (like the "s" sounds in this sentence).
Again, it might be more commonly associated with poetry but, used sparingly and in the right places, it can enhance a piece of prose just as much.
To illustrate, here is one of the most famous sentences ever written. It is the final line of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Notice the repeated "b" sounds...
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
To my mind, alliteration is potentially the most beautiful of all the figures of speech.
Next Step: And that concludes this entire section on narrative and descriptive writing. The next kind of writing you will need to master is Writing Dialogue...