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That old saw about hammers and nails

by Matt on May 21, 2008

Have you ever noticed that:

When you nail a point, it’s the same as when you hit the nail on the head? Both imply precision, even though nailing a picture to the wall is much different than squarely hitting a nail once. Congrats on not hitting your thumb, I guess.

Then you can hammer something. If you nail a question, you got it right without difficulty. If you hammer your point home, you engaged in rhetorical brutality, pushing your position over and over until you succeeded. But how often do you use a hammer without a nail? Shouldn’t their respective metaphors be the same?

If a baseball player nailed the ball, the phrase implies he swung the bat accurately and skillfully. If he hammered the ball, he struck it with a powerful swing.

It goes to show how two tools that work together for a single purpose (to attach one thing to another thing) can take on different connotations. Once that divide occurs, the metaphors begin to diverge even further. After all, what would you think if someone said, “Man, I got so nailed last night, and then I hammered this chick?”

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The Universal Rule of Writing (That You Should Discard)

by Matt on May 16, 2008

in Writing

“Show, don’t tell.”

At first pass, it’s the solution to 90% of bad writing. It’s such a vague, catch-all instruction that if you’re in a writer’s workshop, you can prove you critiqued your peers by writing “show, don’t tell!” all over their stories. Strident red letters work best. I prefer to replace the “don’t” with “not,” so I can refer to the phrase as SnotT. That acronym should tell you how highly I regard the overused criticism.

“Show, don’t tell” is shorthand for Immerse your reader in the story through detail. Turn your nouns, adjectives and verbs into people, emotions and actions. In Science Fiction, a particularly good piece of SnotT is called an eye kick, referring to vivid imagery that shocks the reader with just how futuristic the future is.

SnotT is absolutely necessary, and you should forget it exists.

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