A sense of Poetics

Okay, I've just read Solvejg's short for the compo, and to tell you the truth I'm flabbergasted. Check it out over at The Maggot Tree. It's very Iain Banks, and I like to think that I at least helped to shape the move by suggesting he read Catcher in the Rye and my mentioning the Wasp Factory - it's irrelevant.

What's relevant is that he's pulled something gripping, marvelous, and wonderous out of the bag, that is colourful and strange and endearing and horrific all at once. What's mine? A sustained emotion that swaps its charge in the final paragraphs.

So, where do I go from here?

I need to invest some time in the poetics of writing. I need to look at the following:
Sound Devices

• Alliteration
• Assonance
• Consonance
• Euphony
• Cacophony
• Onomatopoeia
• Rhyme
• Rhythm

Imagery

• Allegory
• Analogy
• Metaphor
• Simile
• Zeugma
• Others: Irony, Euphemisms, Repetition, Symbolism

What am I conscious of in my own writing? Metaphor and Simile I have licked, I think. I just need to be stronger in my delivery. The repetition and the symbolism also! In my short I have:

1. The daughter tracing her finger across the vase as she waits for her father, and the lady on the bed tracing her finger in a circle upon the quilt
2. The daughter 'teasing' the teatlike strawberries and the engorged nipples of the lady on the bed.
3. The strawberries and the colour of the hotel room. The strawberries and flesh. Finally the flavouring becoming sour.
4. The lavender scent as possession - wreathing, then masking, then invading; sickly.
5. The swans, of course.