ROSES ARE RED....

Well we've just survived Easter. There was too much food, too much chocolate but never too much family (which is what it is all about). We had my son, his partner and three young ones up for the day.  There was old fashioned fun...hide and seek...penguin bowling (with interference)...and of course the obligatory Easter Egg hunt.

There is nothing like watching small children - with the helpful hints of bigger children - scramble around searching for those gaudy decorated eggs.

I mean they do stand out...how hard is it to find some of the above nestled amongst books or sitting in a pot plant?

Then I remembered a book I read recently. It was a Young Adult, it was set in a futuristic society...there were vampirish like creatures..the world was a dark and bleak place.

Or was it?

Half way through I had a niggle that something wasn't working for me. Three quarters of the way through and I discovered there was no colour.

Don't get me wrong- I didn't expect flashes of neon orange amongst sickly lime green. Not even streaks of sapphire blue but...it was meant to be a dark story.

So where were the greys and the blacks? Where was the contrast? These kids were trapped in a cage like place...so why not compare their grey stone cells to the blue sky they can't stand under, the trees they could see in the distance....all that meant freedom?

It was interesting and something I had not really thought about before.

Colour of course is all around us- and frankly we mostly take it for granted.

So why do we use so little of it in our writing?

Must admit I rarely do.  Does it add extra depth to a piece of work? I think so...(Unless one wants to write a hunk of purple prose celebrating the sun).

Perhaps I will look at the next few things I write differently- to see if I avoid colour entirely - maybe even make it the central character. But it's something to think about.

How much colour do you use?

Vicki
http://vickithornton.weebly.com/