The Power of Personification

I don’t know about you, but with all this social distancing I’m finding it difficult to get close to some of my writing. A little trick I sometimes have to play on myself these days is to simply concentrate on just one literary technique at a time. Just one, so I don’t get overwhelmed whether I’m revising or writing something new. And one of my favorite literary devices to play with is personification. Personification is a power-wielding giant, because it can carry a great deal of weight and multi-task. (Did I just personify personification?)

Personification is the giving of personal or human qualities/traits/thoughts and feelings to non-human entities/objects/abstractions/gods/forces of nature. In some dictionaries anthropomorphism is similarly defined, though children’s book authors tend to think of anthropomorphism as giving human qualities/traits/thoughts and feelings to animals.

What personifcation can do

It can make the setting come alive

• by helping the reader identify with the story’s world. A kind of, “Oh yeah, this feels familiar” feeling.
• by speeding up slow-moving sections or slowing the reader down to ponder a while.

It can foreshadow

• by creating mood. (Anxiety, fear, hopelessness, joy, etc.) This is especially important to emotionally heavy writing like horror, romance, etc.
• by creating humor, as well as tragedy. Letting the reader get an inkling of what’s to come and what kind of book it is that s/he is reading.

It can act as a symbol

• by choosing what is personified and how often it is woven through a narrative. And if you assign a gender to that symbol, there can be more depth to the personification. Why is Ice always a queen? Or why are the messengers of the apocalypse always horsemen?

It can be a powerful character

• by personifying an abstraction intense and interesting characters can be created. Even narrators.

Some examples

In A Monster Calls, by Patrick Ness, anger literally comes to life becoming a monster and taking on human qualities. I love the first two sentences—so much told in just a few words: “The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do.” We know, right away, this will be one of the main characters. And it is punctual, maybe even concerned that it shouldn’t be late.

The setting is also personified. In the first pages of the novel, curtains shush each other. And we hear wood groaning, “… like the hungry stomach of the world, growling for a meal.” What foreshadowing! What mood setting!

For many reasons, this book is one of my favorites. In addition, the monster is a symbol—a symbol of Connor’s anger at his mother’s cancer. Personification at its most powerful.

Take a look at Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief. Like anger in the Ness book, death is a character. He is also the narrator. This is from Death’s diary in which he discusses having to see to the dead of WWII: “It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to name just a few. Forget the scythe, Goddamn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a vacation.” You can really sense the tiredness and anger of Death as he does his job. Also, there are wonderful bits of personification sprinkled throughout, such as: “The bomb took a bite out of the street.”

A couple of foreshadowing examples: “Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.” William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. (Uh-oh, love is not going to go smoothly here.) “Pink is what red looks like when it kicks off its shoes and lets its hair down.” Tom Robbins in Wild Ducks Flying Backward. (Uh-oh, you’re in for a wild ride!)

It’s everywhere

And just because personification invades our everyday life so much, (See. I did it again.) in terms of common usages such as duty calls, the budget demands, and on and on, doesn’t mean that you should belittle this figure of speech. More than anything, the very commonness of it is an indication of how it resonates with us. Think of the popularity of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin. Those zany letters are the epitome of all little kids — of us.

If used wisely, placed early to foreshadow, and thoughtfully deepened into symbols personification is one of the hardest-hitting tools you’ve got in your writer’s toolbox. Finally, just in case you need to review personification, as well as any other literary device here’s a couple of good sites:

• Literary Devices Net
• Lit Charts (by the creators of Sparknotes)
• Poetry handout (multiple techniques)

Now, I’ve gotta skedaddle! The day is languorous and lazily beckoning me outside …