Last month I was asked to lead a workshop on style in children's writing. It had been awhile since I wrote for children or read their books, so I assigned myself time in libraries and bookstores pulling kids' books off the shelves and scanning their pages at random for beautiful writing. Immersed in the magical world of kidlit, I felt like the ten-year-old I used to be, the one who read ten books a week during the lazy, unscheduled summers of childhood.
One of the books I plucked off the shelf simply because of its lovely title was Snowbone, a heroic fantasy by British writer and storyteller Cat Weatherill. Her energetic writing demonstrates the power of simple but vivid verbs to bring a story to life so well that modifiers become unnecessary. Here's an example describing a fire that has broken out on the deck of a pirate ship:
"It spat and clawed like a flaming tomcat. It pounced on the shattered crates. Mauled the decking. Snapped the bones of the ship. It hissed and growled. Whipped an angry, fiery tail till the hold fizzed with sparks. Then it crept forward on its belly and started licking at the remaining crates."
Weatherill can also wax poetic, as in this passage, where assonance, alliteration, repetition, rhythm, similes, and word order turn prose into music. Nothing "prosaic" here:
"Over the waves, under the moon, into the east he [flew]. Over sailing ships that snailed across the ocean, leaving their trails behind them, silver as starlight. Over islands, secret-sleeping, scattered like cushions on the wakeful waves. Over sage whales, barnacle blue, singing sea songs older than time."
I love the use of "snail" as a verb; it makes the metaphor more subtle than it might have been ("they looked like snails"). And that wonderful compound "secret-sleeping"--like a kenning from Beowulf.
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