Years ago Leonard Michaels, upon seeing the phrase "Her eyes dropped" in one of my stories, wrote in the margin, "Did they bounce?" Well, you could be sure I never did that again. But now, teaching writing myself, I see it all the time: characters' eyes all over the place. They travel around the room, climb up the walls, but rarely do they stay in their sockets. And that's just the beginning of the problem with eyes. Portals of the soul, round like marbles, pools of water: I've never seen a body part that so welcomes cliche. I'm not sure what it is, but even in the best of my grad students, eyes bring out the maudlin and the canned. In fact, I'd be just as happy if I never heard anything about the characters' eyes. Let me know about their nostrils, their ankles, their clavicles, their toenails, but enough about eyes unless the writer can do it originally.
There is an expression in Russian that is inevitably translated as "screwed up his eyes". the expression is used by all of the classic Russian prose fiction writers, and sometimes it seems a chapter can't go by without it. I've always wondered what the hell it means. Delving into the Russian doesn't seem to help. Maybe it's just something easy to throw in that seems significant if you don't think about it-- very handy for an author.
Posted by: Willem Vanden Broek | November 14, 2007 at 05:58 AM