# Creative Literary Devices **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 7, 2014, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creative-literary-devices/706543 "2014-12-07T01:51:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![dataguy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/eada6e/32.png) [@dataguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dataguy)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2014, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creative-literary-devices/706543/1 "2014-12-07T01:51:51Z")
I read a book called The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. There were a couple of devices the author used that I thought were creative. 1. Instead of: “Blah, blah, blah” said Tate. “Blah, blah, blah” said Reich. He used: Tate to Reich: Blah, blah, blah. Reich to Tate: Blah, blah, blah. 1. The one that really got my attention was a passage where one character does something that surprises the other character. Following is the response of the surprised character, exactly as written: “?” When reading this, the meaning was perfectly clear. The character had a look of surprise on his face. I thought this was brilliant. And it only works when you read it on the page. Has anyone encountered similarly creative devices? ---
**Author:** ![Isilder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/cc9497/32.png) [@Isilder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Isilder)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2014, 3:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creative-literary-devices/706543/2 "2014-12-07T03:13:24Z")
> [@dataguy](#): > > Following is the response of the surprised character, exactly as written: > “?” > > When reading this, the meaning was perfectly clear. The character had a look of surprise on his face. I have seen ??!! which means suprise , or puzzled suprise combined. Maybe it really was pure puzzled, or the questioning twitching ? This may be routine… ---
**Author:** ![WordMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e8c25b/32.png) [@WordMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WordMan)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2014, 2:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creative-literary-devices/706543/3 "2014-12-07T14:56:27Z")
Alfred Bester was a fun genius - love that classic, along with The Stars My Destination/Tyger Tyger - both great reads. ---
**Author:** ![Balance](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ccd318/32.png) [@Balance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Balance)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2014, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creative-literary-devices/706543/4 "2014-12-08T03:37:07Z")
The colon convention is a good approach to dialogue in a setting with telepaths, because it provides a clear way to distinguish narrowcast lines from broadcast lines. For example, you might want to represent two telepaths having a private side conversation while in a group–with normal speech, it’s presumed that the whole group hears everything, and an author would need verbiage to show that it wasn’t happening each time. Instead, you might see “Tate to Reich:” versus “Tate to All:”, which is easy to follow. It would also work with text communication, when someone sends a private message to someone else in a group chat, but that might be better represented using the actual chat conventions. It might not mesh with all settings, though. I could see it being thought jarring in a fantasy work, for example. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2014, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creative-literary-devices/706543/5 "2014-12-08T14:57:04Z")
> [@WordMan](#): > > Alfred Bester was a fun genius - love that classic, along with The Stars My Destination/Tyger Tyger - both great reads. Agree. In _The Demolished Man_ his depiction of a telepath group-party as a structed series of words on the page suggests something that is rarely brought up – that telepathy is an entirely different means of communication, and representing it as words, or even as images, doesn’t fully capture the new and original aspects of it. His two-dimensional telepathic constructs try to do that in a way I don’t know that anyone else has attempted. Another Literary fillip in TDM is the way names are written using unusual character keys. So “Atkinson” becomes “@kinson” and “Anderson” becomes “&erson” ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2014, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creative-literary-devices/706543/6 "2014-12-08T15:25:04Z")
Bester was a creative genius and it’s too bad he didn’t write more\*: three novels (and the third (The Computer Connection/Extro/Les Clowns d’Eden) isn’t that good) and a handful of short stories. I think another great example of creative devices is John Barth’s novel **LETTERS**. It’s subtitled “An old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers each of which imagines himself factual” and consists of a series of letters. If you take a calendar and turn each month sideways, the cross out the dates the letters were written, it spells out “LETTERS.” If you write the first character of each letter on that calender instead, it spells out the subtitle. The letters are grouped by the characters in the book, so they are not in chronological order (thus the final letter of the first character in the second month is four weeks after the next letter by the second character). The characters are from Barth’s earlier novels, plus one created for this book, and Barth himself as a character (it does help if you read his earlier books, but it’s not necessary). Not everyone likes the book, but Barth deserves a lot of credit for conceiving it and making it work at all. \*He became an editor at **Holiday** magazine and enjoyed that more than writing fiction. ---
**Author:** ![Obnoxious\_Hood\_Ornament](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/3be4f8/32.png) [@Obnoxious\_Hood\_Ornament](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Obnoxious_Hood_Ornament)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2014, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creative-literary-devices/706543/7 "2014-12-08T16:14:11Z")
When I write I have a tendency to go for some “Waiting For Godot” moments where the participants do a rapid fire exchange without much in the way of embellishment. I try to keep it restricted to light-hearted moments with just two characters in the scene. I also like it when people use comic-book-style sound effects like _zap_, “Bonk!” or something similar. ---
**Author:** ![Hal\_Briston](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a9a28c/32.png) [@Hal\_Briston](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hal_Briston)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2014, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creative-literary-devices/706543/8 "2014-12-08T16:31:13Z")
Poster to Mod: “Cafe Society?” Mod to Poster: “Cafe Society!” ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2014, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creative-literary-devices/706543/9 "2014-12-08T16:40:00Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > Bester was a creative genius and it’s too bad he didn’t write more\*: three novels (and the third (The Computer Connection/Extro/Les Clowns d’Eden) isn’t that good) and a handful of short stories. > > \*He became an editor at **Holiday** magazine and enjoyed that more than writing fiction. Three novels and a handful of stories? You’re selling Bester way too short. I’ve got a lot more than that on my bookshelf, and I’m not even collecting his stuff. Even if you ignore later efforts like _Golem[sup]100[/sup]_ (as a lot of people would like to do) his SF output was a lot more than that: > **[Alfred Bester](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Bester)** > > Alfred Bester (December 18, 1913 – September 30, 1987) was an American science fiction author, TV and radio screenwriter, magazine editor and scriptwriter for comics. He is best remembered for his science fiction, including The Demolished Man, winner of the inaugural Hugo Award in 1953. > Science fiction author Harry Harrison wrote, "Alfred Bester was one of the handful of writers who invented modern science fiction." > Shortly before his death, the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) named... [http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?6](http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?6) ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2014, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creative-literary-devices/706543/10 "2014-12-08T16:55:14Z")
Ah yes, forgot _Golem,_ but the ISFDB lists 41 published in his lifetime, a relatively low number (I have 34 listed in my entry). Of course, Bester’s stories contain many great ones: “Adam and No Eve,” “Of Time and Third Avenue,” “Hobson’s Choice,” “Disappearing Act,” “5,271,009,” “Fondly Fahrenheit,” and “The Men Who Murdered Mohammad.” Compared to Bradbury, Asimov, Ellison, or Sturgeon, that’s not a lot. Bester’s fiction output is probably the least of any SFWA Grandmaster, though he certainly deserved the honor. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2014, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creative-literary-devices/706543/11 "2014-12-08T17:26:04Z")
Bester was heavily influenced by modernist fiction, which sought to tear down all the conventions of writing. The standard “he said, she replied” was part of that. And in poetry anything went, with E. E. Cummings being the most famous today. Barth, along with Coover and Barthelme, were the last of the modernists shading into post-modernism. They wrote at the same time as the New Wave writers in SF, who were playing with language in much the same way. Lots of modernism is unreadable today, partly because of the typographic trickery. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2014, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/creative-literary-devices/706543/12 "2014-12-08T18:47:57Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > Ah yes, forgot _Golem,_ but the ISFDB lists 41 published in his lifetime, a relatively low number (I have 34 listed in my entry). Of course, Bester’s stories contain many great ones: “Adam and No Eve,” “Of Time and Third Avenue,” “Hobson’s Choice,” “Disappearing Act,” “5,271,009,” “Fondly Fahrenheit,” and “The Men Who Murdered Mohammad.” > > Compared to Bradbury, Asimov, Ellison, or Sturgeon, that’s not a lot. Bester’s fiction output is probably the least of any SFWA Grandmaster, though he certainly deserved the honor. You’re still selling him short. The ISFDB gives SIX novels and lists 6 short story collections in English. And 47 (not 41) separate listings for shorts. Not to mention a stack of other stuff. Your description of his output is closer to Stanley G. Weinbaum’s. And he died young [http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?64](http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?64)