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4 Ways to Brighten Up the Language, Characters and Themes In Your Novel With Literary Devices
Tips for flourishes to add in your rewriting and polishing drafts
I’ve written before about literary devices that can add extra layers of imagery, meaning and impact in your novel — in a first draft we want to get the story down and show who our characters are. But in subsequent drafts, look for opportunities to add these little touches. My advice is not to slather them on with a spade, but to dig in small seedlings that might grow in the reader’s mind.
Here are four more that you can make good use of — look for examples in what you read and see how other writers use them, too. This writing thing is always a learning process!
Personification
Put most simply, this is likening an inanimate object to a human, in terms of description or characteristics. E.g. the sunflower lifted its face to the sun. Why is this personification? Because flowers don’t have faces, humans do, but in using personification, we relate to the description because we, too, have lifted our faces to lovely sunlight.
In the same way, you might read “the clock scowled at me as I crawled out of bed”, “that car was a great friend to me, carrying me everywhere I needed to…
