Literary devices are the various techniques writers employ to create stylistic effects, convey deeper meaning, evoke emotion, and enhance the overall impact of their work. They infuse language with meaning, rhythm, and resonance, transforming simple narration into art.
Whether a writer is crafting vivid imagery, building suspense, or sculpting the cadence of a sentence, literary devices help illuminate the deeper layers of a text. In this article, we’ll explore a variety of literary devices and how they are used, and I will offer you a Story Weapon on how to get through your rough draft and delve into the craft of writing further in the rewrite.
Literary devices are techniques writers use to add meaning, emotion, and style to their work, helping shape how readers experience a story. This article explores a range of these tools, focusing on imagery and syntax as examples, and shows how different authors use them to create distinct voices and powerful effects.
Examples of literary devices
Here are some common, and a few uncommon examples of literary devices:
- Red herring – something used to mislead or distract the reader or audience from the main issue or plot point, often used in mysteries or suspense thrillers to create twists and false leads.
- Motif – a recurring element with symbolic meaning for your characters
- Exposition – this is used to provide background information on characters, settings, or other key parts of the story (typically found toward the beginning)
- Tricolon – a series of three parallel words, phrases, or clauses often used to create a rhythmic effect for greater impact. (Example: “You are talking to a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom, and chuckled at catastrophe.” [The Wizard of Oz])
- Zeugma – a single word, usually a verb or adjective, applied to two or more nouns in a way that blends grammatically or logically different ideas. (Example: The pup chewed up Carol’s favorite book and her patience.)
There are many different kinds of literary devices. (You can find a much more exhaustive list here.)
“Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.”
– Kakuzo Okakura
“Do I need to use all of the literary devices?”
When approaching literary devices, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. You might feel the pressure to check certain boxes for your work to be considered “literary.”
Novice writers are often taken in by the literary devices employed by the writers they love and, in attempting to mimic them, adopt their form rather than exploring the various functions these devices serve. The best approach is to consider your own story, and find what works for you.
Imagery and Syntax examples
To help unpack the use of literary devices, let’s take a look at two writers who take very different approaches, focusing on their imagery and syntax.
Charles Dickens’ Bleakhouse
We’ll start with Charles Dickens, whose style is richly textured and bursting with imagery. Here are the first few sentences of his novel Bleak House:
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.
In two consecutive sentences, Dickens conjures up the image of a giant dinosaur in the streets of dreary London and suggests that the soot raining from the chimneys are snowflakes mourning the death of the sun. Dickens picks images rife with humor and oddity. We get to imagine, in the span of a few lines, big lizards and black snowflakes.
It’s also worth noting the varying sentence lengths, another literary device used to build rhythm. The word counts of the sentences here are, in order: 1, 13, 3, 43, 32, 4, and 8. In terms of musical notes, it’s like he’s alternating long and short sounds.
It is well known that Dickens was paid by the word. He participated in the birth of the modern novel by releasing chapters in serialized form. With little incentive for brevity, Dickens kept his readers hooked by creating compelling narratives with richly textured prose and sumptuous set pieces.
Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea
To contrast Dickens, let’s take a look at Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is known for his terse, punchy, declarative sentences. However, his prose does not lack literary devices. Here is a section from The Old Man and the Sea:
The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.
Though the imagery here is still rich — especially when Hemingway takes our attention from the skin blots on the old man’s flesh to the reflection of sunlight on the sea to the scars on his hands and the cords that scarred them — you sense a simplicity here that would be uncharacteristic of Dickens. The word choice is sparing. It lets a sentence like the last one stand out. We get to think of the ocean as a fishless desert.
By the time Hemingway had published The Old Man and the Sea, a century had passed from the publication of Bleak House. There were many more writers by 1952 and the public imagination was full of stories. There were plenty of long sentences and colorful literary devices passed around the world. By then, Hemingway’s lack of verbosity was a refreshing antidote to the fiction of the times.
Your story weapon: Get the rough draft down first
Finding your voice is an organic process, and while each writer’s process is different, I want to offer some points that will lead you to the literary devices that belong in your arsenal.
There is the first draft, and then there is the rewrite, and these are two entirely different animals. The first draft is where you let it rip and don’t concern yourself with a result. And while there are no rules, here are three strenuous suggestions that may save you years of toil on a given project.
Writing your first draft
- Write your first draft quickly. and get to the end in three months or less.
- When writing your first draft, do not rewrite or edit as you go.
- Let it be messy. Let it be incoherent at times. Don’t concern yourself with the quality of the prose. Just get the first draft down.
. . . And now the rewrite!
Here is Stephen King’s advice on the rewrite: “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
Don’t mistake style for substance. You love your favorite writers not because of their marvelous prose, but what that prose says. Think of literary devices as a reminder that there are many paths to the same destination. Your style might be full of anaphora, analogy, and alliteration, but remember this: “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration.” – Ernest Hemingway
When you need them, literary devices are there to serve you and not the other way around.
Are you starting your first draft, or are you lost in the murky middle? Come join one of my workshops and find out more about the writing tools available to you: The 90-Day Novel, The 90-Day Memoir, Story Day
