Some Scattered Thoughts on the Turn of Phrase: The Idiom

As a writer in ODU’s fiction program, I’m branded like a poet a lot. I’ve been told, even, that I should drop the fiction. They say I should pick up poetry and in good faith, I believe, though I am too ingrained in prose, sentence work, and other forms. Now, as I’ve developed more as a writer, the “poetic” and “lyrical” attribution is mostly always a compliment. It’s a nodding appreciation toward some stark linguistic moves, never backhanded. But the language-oriented fiction writer’s “P” word with its cousin “L” can hint a lot toward the sneaking quality of prose, its clarity, and while I could spend much of my time expressing the pitfalls of lyricism and how it may bog an otherwise legible story, I will spend the rest of this short blog post for something else: I hope to give some background on how I make my idioms.

Ok. I know that I could go into more than just idioms. I know that, in terms of writing, voice is determined by more complex language systems, their idiosyncrasies and structures, it predicated on more than just good zingers, but from my experience, there are a ton of readers and writers who love the vertigo a good turn of phrase knocks. And yes, a turn of phrase can be good or bad. Of course, a bad idiom will not scan and not a single person will understand it but the writer, who will be forever alone in her understanding of its significance. Here, expression is key. This is as idiom serves to convey a powerful feeling where at their root, they are meant for pinning down difficult meanings, like the relation between a hunchback and his Notre Dame, while of course, as writers, we have more at play than idiom. For instance, writers have the power of the five senses (and more of them like time, scale, whatever). But the use of sense can only take us so far where then the metaphor is another step toward higher levels of expression. Beyond the sense, metaphor tends mainly toward higher ordered thought and does not always share the line by line, sentence by sentence nature of the idiom. The idiom can, in this way, sit inside the metaphor. What really gives it identity does much for music and tone, as well as the idiosyncrasies of voice. If an idiom is working best, it needs care to sound, association, sense, and more… The best turns of phrases not only reorient our thought around their subject but stick in the ear. They require these sorts of attentions, cold feet now meaning a lot more than one thing.

FIRST, a disclaimer: when developing a kicking idiom, the writer should first kick themselves about it. What I mean: there isn’t a perfect science. There will always be indiscernible ways toward expressions, hence the kicking. Reading can help. I do not think drugs or other alternative strategies are necessary, either. But being in tune with your body and with words will help the most.

Associations come first. In Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, for the artist, it is best to think of not just the cottage, but also the bird’s nest. In every object, image, or thing – similarities. This is in sight, sound, taste, touch, but also on every other thing that could bind two unalike things together. So, the grooves in the tin soup can are like the hard furrows in an old and irony pork rib. And this could be just as much a simile. What really gives a turn of phrase life is the orientation of the language. A sentence will at once be a whole idiom and not.

Prose poetry can help us, too, so let’s take one sentence from Ocean Vuong’s “Night Walks: On Addiction, Adolescence and Art Making”.

Here is a question on whether Vuong is in the way of a “bipolar episode” or in simply enjoying life. It goes,

“What if I’m running outside because the moon tonight is children’s book huge and ridiculous over the maple line, the sight of it a cool sphere of medicine?”

So, in here, there’s basically one image. Vuong is running outside, looking at the moon over the trees. However, as I just wrote it, there is no evocation, reorientation, or music, where In Vuong’s language, we associate not only the size of our moon subject as huge, but in the spirit of children’s books, or, as any reader may understand it as painted swirls, page-wide, and fizzy. And, even better, we have the “the sight of it a cool sphere of medicine.” There are multiple levels here: the sight, itself, is the subject, entangled as a “be” sentence construction, in the sense that they are made the same: we achieve a new level of meaning, where the sphere is cool (in ways that reflect the coolness of the outdoors or the coolness of a drink downed), is, in fact, a sphere, and is medicine, evocative of healing as opposed to a destructive episode. So, there are logic systems at play here. But notice, too, that the moon is not a freezing softball of cherry taffy. While this would be wrong within the logic of the situation, where freezing is negative, and cherry taffy is more distant from the necessary healing, Vuong’s language is paying attention to meter, as well. The original dependent clause settles on a meter and a sound. Hear how sight and sphere buddy up. Notice how their length of a single syllable does some work, too. And how is it that the polysyllabic word is medicine? It’s all very much a sense of the idiom. Good idiom must have a play with sound, making prose work double duty.

DISCLAIMER TWO: these are just a few ideas on idiom. There are plenty of other ways toward the same end. Thinking about verbs helps, as they convey action, change. Being settled in your body can do it a lot. I personally think talking to yourself at four in the morning can do wonders, too. Keep it in mind.

References:

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space, Presses Universities De France, 2010, pp. 98–98.

NIGHT SKY WITH EXIT WOUNDS, by OCEAN VUONG, COPPER CANYON, 2019, p. 116.