Is alliteration distracting and not very valuable/interesting for the reader?
I tend to use alliteration a lot. This is an example from a story I'm writing:
"Let me get this straight," Aru said, sliding on her dress. She always felt frosty after failed fornication. "You're giving me two thousand yen because you couldn't get it up?"
"It wasn't suddenly." Aru sipped her Americano. Its bitterness formed a frown on her forehead. "Have you seen the movie Pretty Woman?"
Aru dashed out of Yuuto's apartment and returned to hers in Ginza. There, sipping a can of beer on her couch, she chewed over her new career path.
Will this be distracting for the reader? Maybe readers don't care so much about alliteration? Maybe I should focus on finding the right verbs, similes, and metaphors?
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I definitely noticed the alliterations. They stood out, and were frankly jarring. If you were writing poetry, or prose which is echoing poetry, I'd tell you to go for it, but if your point is to tell a story, then using poetic tools may get in the way.
Part of the joy of poetry is the sound of the words and how they play against each other visually and aurally. One of my favorite examples of this is from Pope's Essay on Criticism:
These Equal Syllables alone require,
Tho' oft the Ear the open Vowels tire,
While Expletives their feeble Aid do join,
And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line.
Lines 1, 2, and 4 are actually demonstrating the effects he's describing. The last line is dull and plodding because all the syllables and stresses are the same.
If you do this in prose, it can impede the storytelling. The dual meaning of frosty is great; you can do plenty of that. But when you tack on more Fs, now I'm looking at all the Fs and not paying attention to the meaning of the words.
I won't say it would always be in the way — if you were writing something whimsical and funny, where the prose is deliberately silly, you could probably get away with it. But that's because the tone of the entire book would be playful, allowing the reader the freedom to consider the sounds of the words along with the meaning.
In a regular book, though? No, not superior. Showing off.
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The word choices you make have to work for your story. An alliteration is a tool, like a rhyme, and if you use it without a purpose, it will sound strange and unnatural, if not jarring.
Why do you use them? To show off your eloquence? To set the tone of your prose? To illustrate personal quirks of a character (not the case in the excerpt given, just in general)? How does it help your storytelling?
P. S. I am reasonably sure, though, that a certain number of your readers might not even notice it. :-) For me "sipping a beer can in her couch" hints at a slightly bigger problem.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26130. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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