Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

People living an everyday life, it's just an everyday--

it's the regular thing.

I got up.

I put on my pants one leg at a time and went out to the car,

started the car.

I drove it down the street.

You don't want any accidents.

You don't want to run over any children on their tricycles.

You don't want the police to stop you and pull a gun on you

and maybe shoot you for no reason.

You just want to put on your pants, get in your car,

drive to work.

But when you're reading a novel, you really

want to understand the jeopardy that every person is

in when they're in a novel and in that story.

And vivid language helps us become a part of that story.

It brings us into the story.

The beginning of "Moby Dick" is, "Call me Ishmael."

Now you could have just as well written,

"His name was Ishmael."

But that doesn't do very much.

When he says, "Call me Ishmael," he's talking to you.

He's saying, come on.

I'm walking down the street.

It's raining, it's cold.

And I'm tired of being on land.

I want to get out on the sea again.

I want to get on a boat.

I want to get on a whaling ship.

That's powerful.

And it really makes you, you know,

want to follow him and see what's going to happen.

Because you're used to putting on, you know,

one pant leg at a time, going to work, and doing your job,

you know, at the book keeping shop.

You know, you don't like what you're doing.

But when you read this novel, it's

going to help you transform yourself into another world.

And so the language in novels, not all of it,

but vivid language helps you to really experience

what's happening.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I talk to so many people, and I say, wow, I love that piece.

It was so pedestrian.

And they get mad at me.

They say, I'm not pedestrian.

I'm important.

I'm special.

I'm royal.

And I say, well, yeah, maybe so, but if you

want me to believe that, first, you gotta be pedestrian,

you know.

Pedestrian in fiction means that you're seeing characters

that do things that you do.

They cook some rice.

They lit a cigarette.

They got some bad news, and they had a drink.

This is stuff that we all know about.

We all do.

Once you have introduced a character

in a world that has a pedestrian cast to it,

then you can start to build on that to bigger,

much more wild things.

So this is hopefully a good example

of using the pedestrian in a novel.

And again, I'm going to read from "Devil in a Blue Dress."

"At 4:00 in the morning, the neighborhoods of Los Angeles

are asleep.

On Dinka Street, there wasn't even a dog out prowling

the trash.

The dark lawns were quiet, dotted now and then

with hushed white flowers that barely shone in the lamplight.

The French girl's address was a one-story duplex.

The porch light shone on her half of the porch.

I stayed in my car long enough to light up a cigarette.

The house looked peaceful enough.

There was a fat palm tree in the front yard.

The lawn was surrounded by an ornamental white picket fence.

There were no bodies lying around,

no hard-looking men with knives on the front porch.

I should have taken Odell's advice right then

and left California for good."

Easy is not only experiencing seeing

a pedestrian kind of life, he's also yearning for it.

So I would much rather this just be a normal everyday scene.

I don't want to see no dead bodies.

I don't see anybody pulling a knife on me.

I don't want to have that experience.

And when he realizes that, he says,

you know, I should just get in my car

and drive out of this city and never

come back and live a normal life, right?

Now that's where we end, but he doesn't do that.

He ends up going into the house.

And all of a sudden, we elevate from the pedestrian.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

There are two kinds of images that you can use in writing--

the simile and the metaphor.

The simile says, this was like something else.

And the metaphor says, this is something else.

So you might say, Joe was like a big black bear.

That's a good simile.

He was like a big black bear.

You can also say, Joe was a big black bear.

Now we take on.

You say, he's not like a bear.

He is not something that I can get around.

He was immovable.

He was inescapable.

He was a big black bear, and he was going to claw me to death.

That's how powerful the metaphor is.

Well, the problem both with similes and with metaphors

is, they can be overused.

They can be mixed.

You can say, he was like a big black bear, a shark swimming

in the deep ocean.

So well, no, either he's a big black bear, or he's a shark.

He's not both, you know.

I'm lost now.

You know, it's like--

I don't know-- I'm watching "Sharknado" or something.

I don't know.

And so that's the first thing.

You shouldn't mix either similes or metaphors.

And also, you don't want to create too many images.

You want to create one image, and you want to stick with it.

Because you're telling a story.

And every element of that story has a place.

You don't just, you know, plop it down

and then jump to another one, then jump to another one,

then jump to another.

So there has to be dialogue.

There has to be, you know, other things that you're using.

Similes are nice, you know, when you're--

you don't want to be an immediate threat.

You know, it's like, you know, he was, you know,

as fat as an apple.

All right, OK, fine.

We know he's round.

Good, we got it.

We'll get an image for it.

That's cool.

And we can go on from there.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

It's always better to say, "Clang, clang,

clang," rather than, "There was a loud noise of metal

on metal in the next room."

You know, it's always better to make us feel it.

You know, in the previous thing that I

read when Easy hears that Daphne Monet is Black,

he says, "I've only felt an earthquake once in my life,

but I felt it again when I heard about her."

That's the thing.

You want to feel what it was like, how it-- his response

is just not, "I was surprised."

It's, "I felt like I was in an earthquake."

That's what you want to let people

know as much as possible.

I mean, a lot of times, you're going to have to be expository.

A lot of times, you are going to have to just say,

"Joe said he loved Jeanette," you know.

But as much as possible, you want to get beyond that.

You should show me what is being seen

by the main character, what's being seen by the narrator.

You don't need to tell me what's happening.

He looked into her eyes, and his heart

started beating at an extraordinary rate.

That's better than saying, "He looked at her and got excited."

You've given me a feeling.

You've given me something that I can hold on to.

You're giving me something that I know.

You're giving me something that's

both passionate and pedestrian.

That's what you want.