One technique that Frazier uses is to create a special vocabulary that contrasts with normal speech and writing of modern times. This has the effect of inducing people, almost hypnotically, to feel like they are in the time period being described.

For Frazier, it’s not enough to write an historical novel that has some markers, like the names of characters and places, that indicate the historical period. He must keep you there, as best he can, in those times.

Frazier creates local, historical atmosphere by describing the country as a naturalist of the times would when there was more pristine country and a less mechanical kind of farming.

What we focus on here is the writing technique of creating a special vocabulary of the times and interlarding it into virtually every paragraph.

Frazier must have had a list of his made up and researched vocabulary. He says he researched the language of that day, and we are sure he did, since he is a native to the Blue Ridge Mountains, he says. However, show me the dictionary of colloquialisms written in that day and I will believe Frazier did not make up any of his quaint vocabulary and speech.

It doesn’t matter, actually. This one technique is so well done that Cold Mountain is considered a major novel in our day and Frazier a major writer, though other of his writing skills are not really above the more beginning writer, and his story development is weak.

Here is a list from just page 208, paperback version:

- I’m kill’t

- tang in the air

- meat of his fist

- black twist of chaw

- scuffed dirt

- heedful of leaving sign

- clickings of a dry mouth

- he worked his fingers

- bled beyond all reason

- clothes hung heavy and slick like oilcloth

- They guessed he had died

- go spit juice in his eye

- to test him

- He’s passed

- This’uns

- Birch, hush

- lost his mind

- no accounting for


How would you say these descriptors in contemporary lingo or language?

This is a hard-work achievement for Frazier, for he does these descriptors every page, maybe more densely when a scene is meant to be rendered vivid.

Another reinforcing technique Frazier uses successfully is weaving in almost each day of a character’s life the local naturalist sightings of wildlife and plant-life. Thus, regardless of story, you the reader are there with a park naturalist having a relaxing time of it away from the city and your high powered city job.

This appeals to our nostalgia for the past when many animals were not yet endangered species. Ruby, the character, reports that passenger pigeons were so plentiful and tame that she has a child had knocked them to the ground so she could cook and eat them.

Ah, who would not think a writer great if he can bring us into the past to live vicariously and more simple and natural time.

It’s unreal, of course, just as the earlier James Fenmore Cooper is unreal about the Leather Stockings days of contact with Native Americans on the frontier.

Frazier does not give us painful things of the times, unless they are terrible from the Civil War. We don’t hear of child molestation’s or that one in through women were raped, maybe more, or that fleas and ticks and rashes and boils were a problem. Or that people died young. Mark Twain gives us a more realistic description of how people lived at the time.

Well, every writer has to select, you say. Yes, every writer does have to select, and here is one of Frazier’s maybe weaknesses in style. It’s his first novel, after all.

If there is one principle that makes sense to the reader, it is that every description of every going’s on should be directly relevant to a character at that story moment.

Page 211 shows Ruby spotting a great blue heron. Frazier fails the reader here. He describes the heron for us in naturalist detail, but it is Frazier, the naturalist, modern writer, doing so. Ruby’s own reaction is to think of the heron as a stabber and killer. Ada has a different, more literary reaction. The heron reminds her of the story of Narcissus. She tells the story to Ruby but not to us.

Frazier, the writer, is the main character here. Both these young women don’t see the bird as Frazier, the writer, sees it. What is wrong with that, you say?

Everything!

The reader is trying to follow the main characters and be involved with them. When Frazier, the writer, comes in so obviously we as readers have no interest in him or his heron bird. Thus Frazier violates in many places a writing principle that it is often important to adopt.

Principle: never put in and describe objects, scenes and persons which are not directly interactive with that part of the story happening now.

We should have experienced the blue heron only through the eyes of Ruby and Ada, along with their clash of opinion around it. Frazier, the naturalist should have stayed out of it.

Perhaps half the writer’s descriptive paragraphs are primarily Frazier and not a story character. It would have been better story if he had left himself out of it. Why?

Being our Cold Mountain park naturalist just is not what we want from the writer at the time we are trying to be emotionally involved with the story and our main characters.

Without realizing why at the time, I mostly skipped over these Frazier, descriptive passages, because I was excited and involved only with the story characters.

If you put yourself in so directly as a writer into your story, then consciously make yourself a character. Have us the readers visit you in modern times to listen to you talk about your ancestors.

For story consistency you cannot be both the modern writer and one of your story characters back then over one hundred years ago. You weaken reader involvement and make the reader work to skip Frazier to get to the next bit of action, reaction and reflection that belongs to what the character expresses.

This is two different books in one. It does not work as well as it could. Literary intensity is only partially developed.

In terms of The Writer’s Interface, pay careful attention to the narrator’s role and make it clear to the reader. Is your narrator merely a photographer and reporter? Are the characters all important? Then don’t digress, don’t have your narrator doing the descriptive work. Have your character’s do the descriptive work.

My amateur way of working the material:

“Ada saw the blue heron, keeping its gaze down to the water. She thought of the myth of Narcissus, she had read out-loud to Monroe, her father, when he was alive in his declining year.

Ruby saw the bird and noted to herself that his long, straight beak was for stabbing. It was his perfect tool that allowed him to eat and survive in an uncertain world, she thought.”

Writer’s Interface principle: Don’t double your adjectives all that much. Use a single qualifier.

Here is a list of double adjectives from page 211.

- water looked black and cold

- equal parts mineral and vegetable

- wet and dark

- stopped and squared

- black on top and yellow underneath

- as from satin or chipped flint


Need we go on? Frazier is in love with adjectives. Trouble is: there are far too many for the simple reader to “get it.” Whenever readers must slow down most of the time, they will instead start skipping. Is this positive or negative for reader involvement?

Frazier does another thing in the same paragraphs. He uses descriptors when none are needed, and so overloading his descriptions, making them so dense the reader again has to slow down. Here are some of the examples from the same page.

- mountains of the Blue Ridge (mountains is enough. We know by now where we are!)

- smell of river hung in the air (river smell floated)

- fallen some (fallen without some is enough! Writer, please don’t overload me!)

- it was still up (it was up is enough)

- where trees from either bank met nearly in the middle and kept the watercourse shaded all day (where trees from the banks met and kept the watercourse shaded all day, is better, less lush, more open to being filled by reader imagination.


In terms of The Writer’s Interface if the writer intrudes all the time, interfacing between reader and story, then the reader feels unconsciously pushed off because the writer is obviously insisting on steering the boat and the reader has to be only a passenger, fingers dangling in the water, but obviously distracted.

-Sure, use qualifiers, but only some of the time, and not all of the time. An editor with a taste for honey should have gone over this work.

Thus Frazier, maybe by choice, has created a lush style, wonderfully elaborate, to be admired closely for its poetry. Yet he does too much and too often go too far with paired descriptors, thus stealing the show from the reader. You are supposed to admire Frazier more than the story. As a reader I don’t like this. As a writer I understand Frazier’s unconscious need.

We are analyzing only for craft. Please don’t take my analysis personally and rise to defend Frazier. I don’t know him. I do know something about writing well. And so does Frazier, obviously.

Our purpose in reading here is to learn the craft of writing. Every writer who has their work published has by this act presented their work for public scrutiny. Our functional approach is to point to the nature of the writer’s interface, the words and story structures involved.

Tags: story technique, special vocabulary, historical novel, story development