Hyperbole

Growing up, my dad would have occasion to pin me with his laser stare and ask, “Are you stretching the truth?” How could I possibly deny my exaggeration under his interrogation? I could only hang my head and mutter, “Yes, sir.” But now that I’m grown up and a writer of fiction, I find that exaggeration can sometimes be a good thing. In fact, I’m delighted that it has earned a name—hyperbole. That sounds so much nicer than fabrication or embellishment or just out-and-out lying, doesn’t it?

I get a kick out of hearing people use hyperbole in everyday conversation. Recently, my friend Pat told me, “I either have to get a haircut or a dog tag.” She’s a writer too, so we can forgive her for overstating the shagginess of her coiffure. And we’ve all heard the clichés:

“I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.”
“She’s as big as the side of a barn.”
“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times ….” (Oops. There’s my dad again.)

But when used sparingly in writing, hyperbole can be an effective tool in adding color and humor to our stories.

For example:

In Macbeth, Shakespeare wrote:

“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No. This my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.”

I think it’s unlikely that Macbeth’s blood would actually turn the ocean red, but by using hyperbole, Shakespeare sure lets us know how guilty his character feels.

And then there’s Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court:
“There did not seem to be brains enough in the entire nursery, so to speak, to bait a fishhook with.” Much more effective than writing, “The children were not too bright.”

Flannery O’Connor (in “Parker’s Back”) wrote: “The skin on her face was as thin and drawn as tight as the skin of onion and her eyes were gray and sharp like the points of two picks.” What a picture O’Connor painted!

So go ahead and stretch the truth every once in a while. You’ll add some spice to your writing, you’ll have fun doing it, and it’s perfectly okay – so long as you call it hyperbole.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Reviewed by Lynn Schneider

I don’t remember how I heard about this novel. I am a member of Goodreads so it might have been there, or someone mentioned it in a blog or a comment to a blog. Whenever I see an opinion about a book, that it is “beautifully written”, I’m intrigued and if it’s even remotely within my genre-comfort-zone, I investigate.

The Sense of an Ending was short-listed for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, which is awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe. It is a very prestigious award, and the winner can be assured of international success. It is a mark of distinction to be included in the shortlist, or even to be nominated for the longlist.

The novel takes place over a span of forty years, beginning in the sixties up to the present. Now I’m really intrigued, because that is exactly the time frame for my own novels. It’s written in first person POV, which is probably my favorite, and the main character is a very likable, if a somewhat dull, boy/man.

The first section is the backstory, in the sixties, and is a very amusing, frank account of coming-of-age as only men can do it. Men seem to be so forthright about that time in their lives when they write about it, I often wish I could enjoy the same candor.

The story takes place in London, so notwithstanding the subtle language differences as written by an English author, it is, in fact, “beautifully written”, and comedic and insightful, yet puzzling. Tony is constantly told that “he just doesn’t get it” and I must admit, I didn’t get it either, and still don’t and I think the author probably intended it that way. It’s one of those stories where, once you know how it ends, you figure out what probably happened to cause it to end the way it did.

Tony is involved with a girl, who is a PITA when she’s young, and after she comes back into his life forty years later, it’s clear she hasn’t improved, and in fact is worse than that, as if her life between then and now has been filled with sadness and hard times or both.

The book starts out with the sixties timeframe for less than half, then jumps to present day, with Tony narrating what has happened to him, as he remembers it. This is an important point because, memory, or lack of, or imperfect, is a big part of the story. How much of what we remember is true, and how much is what we have always told ourselves is true, and embellished and exaggerated as time goes on? How much of memory is what we wished had happened, so over time it morphs into being that way?

Here are some of Tony’s thoughts about memory:

 Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.

What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from that future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been.

We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient — it’s not useful — to believe this: it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

 In the present day part, we discover that Tony had written a letter to a friend, which seemed out of character for him, in that it was cruel and unnecessary. This part bothered me, that he would do such a thing and I didn’t think it rang true. Also, did anyone use the term “control freak” during the sixties? I am always very careful of this, in my writing, did they really say this or that back then? Because, language has changed over the years and phrases we use commonly now weren’t necessarily used back then.

The letter was my main issue, I can forgive the control freak part, but it seemed like we should have been given more of the answers than we were. Everything was a bit of a puzzle. And the woman, Victoria, who kept saying he didn’t get it, I wanted to tell her, of course he didn’t get it! How could he? He wasn’t privy to the information.

But it was an enjoyable read, and once I had read it, I discovered that I needed to read it again, knowing what I now knew and when I did that, it seemed less puzzling but still, it’s clear it has been left to the reader to figure out what happened.

The observations made by Tony are priceless, and I’ve included some here that I marked while reading.

 Most people didn’t experience “the sixties” until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties  — or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.

There’s nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there’s something wrong with the young who can’t be fascinated by a genius.

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid the bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain? Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt — and inflicted for precisely that reason.

I would recommend this book to anyone. It’s a short read, can be done in one sitting. It is an example of how an everyman, who pictures himself as uninteresting, boring even, is far from it. As if every life has had interest and drama along the way, even if you don’t remember that it did.

2012 – The End of the World or a New Era?

Much has been said about the year 2012. For several years around the turn of this century there were those who believed that the end of the Mayan and other Mesoamerican long count calendars, projected for December 21, 2012, must mark the end of humanity. Most of this doomsday conjecture has been put to rest as scholars studied the suppositions and found that there had been more than one long count calendar cycle, consisting of 5125 years, recorded in the past, and indeed that the Mayans themselves appear to have expected with great anticipation the coming of the new cycle. Many believe this new cycle heralds an evolvement in human consciousness, and many of those are involved in a kind of spiritual activism. Perhaps the peaceful dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Almost certainly a shift of some sort in the way of being of humanity.

So as the year 2012 rolled over, I began thinking about where we are and if there were a ‘New Age’ coming, where we might be headed.

I thought a lot about the digital age and what that might mean for humanity. I contemplated my own experiences with new technology. For whatever reason, I embraced this new technology right from the beginning. I know nothing at all about the mechanics of it but each new discovery of faster/easier/more versatile seems magical to me.

It is difficult when a New Age is upon humanity to see the bigger picture through the pain and chaos of the present, but I believe we are in just such a transition. When I look at the big picture I envision that we are on the leading edge of a new era of Renaissance. And just as with any other renaissance, times are tumultuous as people cling to their old ways and fight for their beliefs. But for the first time in recorded history, we have the benefit of hindsight and are able to study and compare events leading up to a renaissance, and recognize we may be perched on the precipice of one.

A Renaissance by its very definition is a revival or rebirth, especially of culture, art, literature, learning and other intellectual pursuits. Right or wrong, the renaissance I see is allowing humanity to express ourselves in ways heretofore never seen, at least in recorded history – and without the gatekeepers of the past. Even in many countries which still control what their citizens are ‘allowed’ to do, we are able to use our creative juices to post videos to such places as YouTube which can be seen instantly around the world – videos as diverse as animated mini-movies, artists who become instant superstars, and pictures of brutality by authorities taken on smart phones. We are maintaining relationships with our friends and family however far removed they may be, through social media such as Facebook, with photos and discussions. We make new friends in far off places and discover that humans the world over are not so different from one other. We tweet and retweet our successes and our failures and perhaps most importantly, we gain knowledge we could never have learned in a lifetime, even a decade or two ago. This renaissance will be vastly different from those of the past. It will not be contained to a small area of the cultured world as others have. This renaissance, for the very first time in recorded history, will affect the entire planet. Though assuredly to different degrees, every human will have a chance to be involved in some way.

As mentioned, such a renaissance will not come without cost. 2011 saw several upheavals. The ‘Arab Spring’, sometimes called the ‘Arab Awakening’ brought a wave of revolutions that ousted such despots as the relatively benign Ben Ali of Tunisia, Mubarek in Egypt and the brutal regime of Muammar Gaddafi. Several other Arab countries experienced uprisings and protests. In many cases, social media was used to get the word out. The hated terrorist Bin Laden was found and killed. Perhaps most significantly, the US officially ended the war in Iraq at the end of the year. Social media played a part in several of these upheavals as more and more of humanity demanded freedoms long suppressed.

Though I would posit this to be a Renaissance of expansion of invention and creativity as all others have been, this one is different. Where in the past we had benefactors who would feed us while we struggled to express ourselves through art, music, or literature, we now have the freedom and tools to create and co-create ad infinitum. But with freedom comes responsibility. Though connected reasonably easily to the other seven billion or so individuals on the planet, we often feel we are on our own, adrift in a sea of change so profound no one seems able to lead the way. But through it all, we are inspired to create: storytelling, animated and ‘live’ video films, digital art, poetry, dance, literature, music, information, intellectual pursuits, all expressed easily and instantly through the power of the digital world. New and imaginative devices are created every day that illuminate this magic to us as if from thin air.

This will not come easily. We will need to have courage and faith – and perhaps a sense of wonder at Life itself.  We need the wonder and boldness of children and young adults, to be sure. But most of all we may need the kind of wonder and tenacity which makes Baby Boomers, with their acquired wisdom, poised to lead the way…