Overuse
Last night, with an unexpected windfall of birthday money (woo-hoo!), I picked up a couple of new books. One of my guilty pleasure series had a new release — Envy, book three in the Luxe series. Think Gossip Girl, but set in 1899 - 1900.
This series is interesting to me for how it combines “the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite” with the historical elements of the dawn of the twentieth century. Also, can you beat that cover art? The girls with the cascades of ruffly dresses are fairly spectacular. Only possibly the iconic images on the Twilight books beat out Luxe for cool covers.
This is fun, guilty pleasure reading. I don’t know that I’d recommend it to the world, but if you enjoy historical romance you’d probably enjoy these books.
But, on to my main point. Last night, while reading Envy, I noticed that the author tends to fall back on certain body parts in her descriptions. Foreheads are a big thing for this author — all the girls had smooth foreheads, large foreheads, sweat glistening on their foreheads, or hair sweeping becomingly across their foreheads…
And the other body part mentioned repeatedly was the girls’ clavicles. One girl had masculine clavicles. Dresses were always baring clavicles. And once, a guy actually thought specifically about how lovely a girl’s clavicles were.
Isn’t that odd? First of all, how often does one actually think about clavicles specifically. I notice necklines and busts and a woman’s form in general, but I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever looked at someone and thought, “Wow, what nice clavicles she has!” Foreheads, also, while I notice them as part of a person’s face, not a big seller on their own.
The thing I learned from this is that, while it can be interesting for an author to use something unique (or, perhaps, little used is a better term) when describing people in their stories, a little of this goes a long way. Give one character good clavicles, one character a lovely forehead, and leave it at that. A unique, defining characteristic can be a great way to make one character stand out in your readers’ minds, but when it’s clavicles, clavicles everywhere, it gets kind of absurd!
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Clavicles are sooo sexy!
Seriously, the word clavicle is off-putting to me for some reason. I can only imagine how annoying it would be to read it a million times in the same novel.
I know! I’m totally there with you, Steph. I would have greatly preferred the term collar bone, if she really had to go on and on about the stinking clavicles, LOL.
Ah well — she’s getting novels published and making money, so I guess her editors don’t mind the abundance of clavicles!
Maybe there’s some clavicle fetish group out there that we don’t know about. I’mm make sure to never Google “clavicle” and “amateur” in the same search box.
Hahaha! Sounds like that would definitely be risky, Alex.
Hi,
Speaking of “clavicles” I almost gave up reading a Wilbur Smith novel because of his obsession with all the female characters “tender nipples”. All of them. It annoyed me even more than the fact that he couldn’t seem to write any decent dialogue for them.
So this post moved me to de-lurk.
Good advice though, I have stories due for my Creative Writing course soon and the idea of ONE defining feature for each character was something I’d not yet thought of. So thanks.
Nice to meet you, Jenny! Glad you decided to de-lurk.
I don’t know if I could have made it through that “tender nipple” thing. Yikes!
Good luck with your creative writing class!
[...] out there that still suck me in and there are books with issues that I still enjoy (remember the clavicle thing from the Luxe series?), despite being knocked out of the fictional dream every once in a while. [...]
[...] out there that still suck me in and there are books with issues that I still enjoy (remember the clavicle thing from the Luxe series?), despite being knocked out of the fictional dream every once in a while. [...]