socialpants:

There’s an awful trend in reading that’s this CinemaSins kind of rejection of abstract concepts and suspension of disbelief, that makes people say it’s bad writing when authors use descriptions that aren’t immediately one to one with physical reality.

Like it’s bad when a “tattoo is undulating” (as opposed to… “drawn in a wave like pattern on the skin”?), or when hair is “wet wheat from a late Summer field” (as opposed to “sort of brownish light yellow that dries lighter, but is not actual wheat stalks growing on someone’s head but kind of reminiscent of the color and texture”?), or when when ice cream tastes like midnight at the fair" (as opposed to “ice cream flavour bringing back memories of undefined ice cream flavours that are individually popular but always tied to a memory of late evening at the fair ground and probably smelling vaguely like popcorn and sugar”?).

Please. We have to get back to understanding abstract descriptions that evoke feelings and memories and mental images or things we haven’t experienced yet. This hyper utilitarian way of reading and judging text is killing fiction. it’s robbing you of experiencing things you haven’t actually personally experienced.

the people saying that this indicates “not having paid attention in English class” are largely correct because it suggests a lack of understanding of metaphors

however, we must remember that English class itself (as far back as the 1980’s in my personal experience, and doubtless much further) is where it was drilled into our heads that you “can’t say a character ‘hissed’ words that didn’t contain the letter S”

as if the letter S has anything to do with what the word evokes in that context: the sound of a low, ominous whispered threat

and even the potential animal comparisons

(a cat hisses more like the German pronunciation of “ch,” and a snake’s hiss would be very difficult to replicate with human mouthparts but I think the closest I could get would be “thbpthbpth”)