Author Sounds Like

           Finding words to describe what Diana Wynne Jones’ writing sounds like was and still is difficult.  Thinking about it originally, all I could think about was ‘magical’.  But this could describe many fantasy novels.  But there is one word that I have always thought of when I think of Jones’ writing, and that is ‘colorful’.  In fact, way back at the beginning of this project, when we had to bring in excerpts from two authors, ‘colorful’ is the word I used to describe Jones’ style. 

            By ‘colorful’ I don’t just mean that she uses a lot of ‘color’ words, which she does, but I really mean that her books are always vivid and picturesque.  Her style of writing paints a picture in the reader’s mind of everything they’re reading because everything is colorful.  The dialogues, the characters, even the plots themselves are colorful.  And Jones doesn’t do this just by describing things.  She doesn’t just say, “He had blonde hair and blue eyes.”  In fact, some of her characters’ physical attributes are barely described.  Instead, she uses the characters’ dialogue and actions to bring out their ‘color’ while making the settings very descriptive and literally “colorful.”  In this way, scenes are vividly painted in the reader’s mind.

            For example, this is an excerpt from Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle:

The rest of the castle had to be beyond one or other of the four low black doors around the room. Sophie opened the nearest, in the end wall beyond the bench.  There was a large bathroom beyond it. In some ways it was a bathroom you might normally find only in a palace, full of luxuries such as an indoor toilet, a shower stall, an immense bath with clawed feet, and mirrors on every wall. But it was even dirtier than the other room. Sophie winced from the toilet, flinched at the color of the bath, recoiled from green weed growing in the shower, and quite easily avoided looking at her shriveled shape in the mirrors because the glass was plastered with blobs and runnels of nameless substances. The nameless substances themselves were crowded onto a very large shelf over the bath. They were in jars, boxes, tubes, and hundreds of tattered brown packets and paper bags. The biggest jar had a name. It was called Drying Power in crooked letters.  Sophie was not sure whether there should be a D in that or not.  She picked up a packet at random. It had SKIN scrawled on it, and she put it back hurriedly.  Another jar said EYES in the same scrawl.  A tube stated FOR DECAY.  “It seems to work too,” Sophie murmured, looking into the washbasin with a shiver.

In this, there are clear examples of actual color-black doors and green weed. And there is quite a lot of description used to paint the image of the setting too.  But the only description for Sophie is “shriveled.” Yet, the reader can still get a clear image of her as she winces, flinches, recoils, and avoids because these actions are just so easy to see in one’s mind.  And they tell the reader something about Sophie’s character as well.  Plus, there may be only one line of dialogue, but it only adds to the image of Sophie that the reader is formulating.  It makes it all very vivid and definitely colorful.