Royal wedding

[igenlode]

Another 'sample rewrite' that seemed worth saving: an exercise in trying to pull out the essential from amid a mass of detail to create the desired atmosphere.

The talented chapel choir above the pews starts to sing a Nordic hymn as the entrance opened, and at last, the royal strawberry-blonde bride appeared in the mirror's view. She was grinning with twinkled, peacock eyes and rosy cheeks towards her smiling husband-to-be while walking towards the altar, holding an elaborate bouquet of colorful flowers with her dainty hands while her long veil trailed after her on the crimson carpeted aisle.

Her vivid wedding ballgown, which comprises a milky close-fitting off-shoulder bodice with flowered shoulder drapes around her bare, freckled shoulders, sweetheart neckline, and a full bell-shaped plain skirt, was certainly eye-catching, reflecting the cheery atmosphere of the chapel. And the golden tiara atop her round head that resembles the crocus of Arendelle made her look shinier.

"At long last the bride came into view. The roses in her cheeks echoed those in the bouquet she held pressed to her breast, and the smile in her eyes matched that of the husband who awaited her. She came down the aisle as if the creamy sweep of her skirt weighed nothing at all, and her small head, held high, was crowned with a tiara like the gold at the heart of a crocus."

Comments

[betweensunandmoon]

I love how you condensed two paragraphs into one.

Kristoff/Anna, I'm guessing?

[igenlode]

Anna/Hans, I think, going by the description earlier on ("He seems the perfect example of a prince charming and a future husband with his slicked-back reddish-brown hair, trimmed long sideburns, and dressed in an exquisite dark uniform"). Although he gets called "that weasel", so possibly the Duke :-p

[erimia]

I get so thrown out of stories set in supposedly non-English speaking countries that use the epithet "strawberry-blonde".

The style of your rewrite reminded me of Wilde's fairy tales a bit.

[igenlode]

I get thrown out of any stories that describe anyone as 'strawberry blonde' (or 'dirty blonde'!) in any context other than, say, a late twentieth-century fashion magazine article ;-p
Perhaps because those epithets were simply not part of my experience growing up; you wouldn't walk along the street and think 'there goes a strawberry-blonde girl', although you might look over a fence and see a strawberry roan mare:


The "sweetheart neckline" is a definite anachronism, which I think comes from looking for the perfect word to define the details of a specific costume sketch, without being familiar enough with English to be aware which bits of dress jargon are appropriate for the era and which (most of them!) are modern innovations. (See also 'messy up-do' used by fanfiction writers to describe a 19th-century hairstyle, apparently unaware that hair was assumed to be put up by default -- well, apart from a brief fashion for cropped hair in women thanks to the French Revolution!)

[watervole]

I massively prefer your version.

The original is truly painful!

[watervole]

I think 'peacock eyes' was the worst.

The visual image that created was - umm...

[igenlode]

To be fair, there are two completely different issues going on here, the major one of which is working hard to be descriptive when English isn't your native language... with the second one being working *too* hard to be descriptive and putting in too many adjectives on everything, which was the point I was trying to illustrate when I wrote this.

'Peacock eyes' are what you get (I strongly suspect) when you rely on a dictionary/thesaurus to translate different shades of blue into English. A lot of the problems with this passage beyond the basic structure are obviously the result of choosing a word that means approximately the right thing in English, but isn't suited to that specific context (e.g. 'grinning', 'cheery atmosphere', 'shinier') -- and I wasn't trying to critique those, but just to show how you could do it shorter to more effect.

[watervole]

Agreed, it might be a thesaurus problem.

It always pays to do a backwards translation on these things.

[(Anonymous)]

Hey! It's me again — Mei. :)

I remember reading this a long time ago, and it looks as if I never got to comment on it.

I like your rewrite so much! And I love how you kept some of the original elements and reworked them into this new iteration. Somehow, it feels like the right balance between description and everything else. It's evocative without being overbearing.

I must say I fully agree with you that it's difficult to write descriptions in a second language. I mean, peacock eyes sounded lovely to me. XD I find the author's effort to create vivid imagery admirable.

Re. descriptions in a second language, I'm quite lucky I decided at some point that I prefer minimalistic descriptions, since I'm now considerably less exposed to the temptation of coming up with awkward wording. :P

[(Anonymous)]

Also, I think this is a great example for 'you don't need to describe every detail of a character's appearance and attire and so on to bring up the right image in the reader's mind' or simply 'less is more'. :P I'm thinking here in particular about the description of her dress.