Hands are hard to draw--they can twist and turn in so many ways, they often look wrong.
They're hard to write, too. I don't know why writers don't leave them alone, like artists who tuck hands in pockets.
Here's another example, from a novel I browsed at the Airbnb, The Girl He Used to Know, by Tracey Garvis Graves (2019). The writing is bad from the start, but writers seem to rise to their very worst when describing actions involving hands.
Just try and draw that.
They're hard to write, too. I don't know why writers don't leave them alone, like artists who tuck hands in pockets.
Here's another example, from a novel I browsed at the Airbnb, The Girl He Used to Know, by Tracey Garvis Graves (2019). The writing is bad from the start, but writers seem to rise to their very worst when describing actions involving hands.
"Hey," he said when he caught up to me. "You forgot your book."
He thrust out his hand and I spotted my dog-eared copy of Sense and Sensibility nestled in his large palm.
Just try and draw that.
How big are those hands???
ReplyDeleteI am guessing that the copy of S&S is a paperback but still those would have to be really large hands if it was nestled in his hands.
The editors should have caught that.
Kirsten
This must be a scene from Gulliver’s Travels. There’s also a problem in that Sense and Sensibility hadn’t been written yet.
ReplyDeleteA writer who does hands really well: Willa Cather. They’re an index of character for her. Here's a passage (cut and pasted from online) from her story "Neighbor Rosicky," with Rosicky and Polly, his son's wife:
After he dropped off to sleep, she sat holding his warm, broad, flexible brown hand. She had never seen another in the least like it. She wondered if it wasn't a kind of gypsy hand, it was so alive and quick and light in its communications,—very strange in a farmer. Nearly all the farmers she knew had huge lumps of fists, like mauls, or they were knotty and bony and uncomfortable-looking, with stiff fingers. But Rosicky's was like quicksilver, flexible, muscular, about the colour of a pale cigar, with deep, deep creases across the palm. It wasn't nervous, it wasn't a stupid lump; it was a warm brown human hand, with some cleverness in it, a great deal of generosity, and something else which Polly could only call "gypsy-like,"—something nimble and lively and sure, in the way that animals are.
Yes... "nestled" is all out of proportion.
ReplyDelete"He thrust out his hand" seems unnecessarily dramatic too...
And then, "spotted" next to "dog-eared" made me think of a Dalmation!
There was so much writing along these lines in this book, a keen editor would have been left with nothing but a handful of the's and and's!
MICHAEL: Your reply came in as I was responding to Kirsten.
ReplyDeleteGulliver's Travels. Ha! Good one.
Oooh---there's a well-drawn hand; I can almost feel it.
Twice "warm", twice "flexible", twice "brown", twice "gypsy", and in-between, comparisons to "huge lumps of fists, like mauls", etc.
It makes me think of the hands of the men I work with, real hands that have done physical labor all their lives--Mr Furniture, for instance, has shown me his boxer's fists:
"Every knuckle has been broken."
You say "just try and draw that"...well, drawing it would be easy...a freakishly big hand, holding a ratty book. However, making it looks even slightly realist--unless the man really is a giant--would be impossible. Why don't people have editors who catch this kind of stuff? Why don't they catch it themselves?
ReplyDeleteBINK: True, it would be easy to draw as a cartoon.
ReplyDeleteIf an editor cut mistakes like this from this book, there would've been no book. It was full of them!