I especially want to be better about describing body language, because it rivets me onscreen when I see an actor who uses it well, but so far I don't have the knack for conveying it efficiently . . . and if you use too many words, the effect is lost.
Do you find it easier to describe in characters you've read or watched than ones you've invented?
Improbable-sounding similes are indeed one of the tricks; I'm not sure anybody can explain how to make them work.
You want to look especially at A Fine and Private Place (1960), The Last Unicorn (1968), and The Folk of the Air (1986), then. The last especially has some of the weirdest and yet most precisely evocative descriptions in Beagle's prose, of which the only examples I can remember without the book on hand are "neat as a new ice cream cone" and, a goddess speaking of herself, "I am a black stone, the size of a kitchen stove . . . I am rut and flood and honeybees. Since you ask." (The first chapter also contains some of the best-written action comedy I've read in a novel, detailing a totally unsuccessful carjacking. Some of it is over the top, but I will respect the line "A Winnebago the size of a rural airport filled the windshield" until I die. And the fact that Farrell is worrying so much about whether the reckless driving entailed in scaring the bejeezus out of his attempted carjacker is going to get his lute broken that he fails to notice for quite some time that he is driving recklessly against traffic, which basically does tell you everything you need to know about Farrell right off the bat.) The first memorably describes the air on one of those hot, still summer afternoons as "a block of warm copper fitting neatly around the earth." The Last Unicorn is just full of lines that went into my head so young, I can't calculate how they affected the ways I think about language. "The tide was out, and the bald beach had the grey, wet gleam of a stripped shellfish, but far down the strand the sea was bending like a bow, and Molly knew that the ebb had ended."
I'll post samples from your more recent reviews in another comment (because length limits), but your description of Loki in Thor is one I liked enough to save
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Do you find it easier to describe in characters you've read or watched than ones you've invented?
Improbable-sounding similes are indeed one of the tricks; I'm not sure anybody can explain how to make them work.
You want to look especially at A Fine and Private Place (1960), The Last Unicorn (1968), and The Folk of the Air (1986), then. The last especially has some of the weirdest and yet most precisely evocative descriptions in Beagle's prose, of which the only examples I can remember without the book on hand are "neat as a new ice cream cone" and, a goddess speaking of herself, "I am a black stone, the size of a kitchen stove . . . I am rut and flood and honeybees. Since you ask." (The first chapter also contains some of the best-written action comedy I've read in a novel, detailing a totally unsuccessful carjacking. Some of it is over the top, but I will respect the line "A Winnebago the size of a rural airport filled the windshield" until I die. And the fact that Farrell is worrying so much about whether the reckless driving entailed in scaring the bejeezus out of his attempted carjacker is going to get his lute broken that he fails to notice for quite some time that he is driving recklessly against traffic, which basically does tell you everything you need to know about Farrell right off the bat.) The first memorably describes the air on one of those hot, still summer afternoons as "a block of warm copper fitting neatly around the earth." The Last Unicorn is just full of lines that went into my head so young, I can't calculate how they affected the ways I think about language. "The tide was out, and the bald beach had the grey, wet gleam of a stripped shellfish, but far down the strand the sea was bending like a bow, and Molly knew that the ebb had ended."
I'll post samples from your more recent reviews in another comment (because length limits), but your description of Loki in Thor is one I liked enough to save
Thank you!