When Tigers Attack

Here are today’s Wonderful Words:

The temperature is thirty below zero and yet, here, the snow has been completely melted away. In the middle of this dark circle, presented like some kind of sacrificial offering, is a hand without an arm and a head without a face. Nearby is a long bone, a femur probably, that has been gnawed to a bloodless white…Seven men have been stunned to silence. Not a sob; not a curse.

The Tiger, John Vaillant, page 15

Background

The Tiger is the true story of a man eating tiger terrorizing the people of a tiny town in remote Russia. This passage comes early in the book. It’s describing the carnage the tiger hunter saw when he and his men arrived at the scene of the first attack.

What makes it wonderful?

This writing is wonderful because it perfectly portrays exactly how terrifying the tiger is.

For anyone raised in a winter climate, you remember the snow days you spent outside building snow forts and snowmen. You flopped down and flapped your wings to make a snow angel and, sure, the snow moved around, but it didn't really melt. And that’s in reasonable winter temperatures.

To see a circle of snow completely melted away while the temperature is 30 degrees below zero, that tells you something. Only an enormous creature could create enough heat to melt Russian snow. And only after laying in it for a long time.

Then we learn what the creature was doing while he was melting the snow. It was picking the bones clean from its latest kill, like a dog cleaning the peanut butter from a Kong toy.

But the words that struck me most were what the tiger left behind: a hand without an arm and a head without a face.

Soldiers talk about struggling to process grizzly injuries on the battlefield. When your eyes see body parts missing or rearranged, your brain doesn’t understand what it's seeing. The words from this passage gave me a similar feeling.

A hand without an arm? Something is terribly wrong.

A head without a face? An unthinkably bad situation.

The way Vaillant described the carnage gave me a visceral feeling of fear. He made me grasp the gravity of the situation in several simple sentences.

Let's get technical

This passage is a perfect example of what I call technique stacking—where a writer layers multiple techniques in short succession.

Vaillant uses a simile to describe how the remains were presented: like some kind of sacrificial offering.

He uses alliteration to emphasize the effect of the scene: seven men have been stunned to silence.

And he also uses a technique we haven’t covered yet: parallelism. Parallelism is when phrases in a sentence have similar grammatical structure.

The result?

A pleasing pattern and rhythm for the reader.

When describing what the tiger left behind, Vaillant wrote: a hand without an arm and a head without a face.

Notice how those two phrases have the same structure? It rings when you read it.

Imagine if instead he wrote: a hand without an arm and a mutilated head.

The message is the same, but the delivery is different. It’s not as eloquent. It’s not as pleasing to the reader.

One simple way to level up your writing is by practicing parallelism. It’s a subtle shift that makes your message more pleasing to the eye and the ear. And it seems to be these simple shifts that separate the good writers from the greats.

Happy writing,

Joe

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