Sometimes I wish I was clumsier...

[desperance]

I really do, sometimes I wish I was clumsier. In the literary sense, I mean. In my person I am entirely clumsy enough already, thank you. I dropped the Laptop of Heavenly Perfection this afternoon. Or let it fall, rather. Luckily it was in the backpack and sufficiently swaddled, so no harm has apparently been done, but even so...

Anyway, the gist of this? Why do I want to be a less-good writer than I am (for whatever values that you want to apply to such a massively egotistical statement)?

It goes like this. I have quite an ornamented style, when I choose to use it; like it or loathe it, there's a rhythm to my prose. Phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph and page to page, there's an inherent flow that I work for constantly. It's in the beats and the pulses of the language, and often in the words themselves, wordplays and repetitions that carry you onward in what's meant to be a smooth and seamless fluency.

Which is all well and good, but it really ought to be the last thing I attend to, the final polish. In earlier stages, it just makes things more difficult.

As, for example, this.

I have what I persist in calling a novella, despite all evidence to the contrary (it's already too long for that category, and all my ideas for redrafts involve more material). It's pure SF, set in the same universe as my story Terminal, but that's not relevant here.

Point is, it really needs disassembling and putting back together again, major structural rearrangement. I know more or less what it needs and where it's needed; I can remake it quite convincingly in my head. But as soon as I approach it on the page, I find myself lured hypnotically into that rhythm and flow, paragraph to paragraph and page to page, seduced to the point where all I want to do is fiddle with the punctuation. Major reconstruction will mean hacking into that superficial gloss, where really all I want to do is ride its sweet curves like a wave...

Etc. I think really I'm just feeling sorry for my pretty-but-incomplete boy of a story, that it will have to become a great big hairy man-story with added complications and an adult complexion. [Editorial byway: why do we still write complexion without a second thought, when connexion just looks sooo old-fashioned?] But honestly, it would be so much simpler if my first drafts were just great rude rough chunks of text that were amenable to being hacked about and restacked and thrown away and suchlike. Like an artist's first sketches, a sculptor's first maquettes, and so forth. Comes down to process, I guess. I do think I fuss too much, too soon. But I won't be changing it now. That close attention to the language, to the actual words, that's what gets me through, page to page and day to day. That is the writing, that's the heart of story.

Comments

[irishkate.livejournal.com]

give it here - I'll hack it to death and give it back - you'll have no beauty left so you'll have to fix it


::evil grin::

[sboydtaylor.livejournal.com]

Complexion looks pretty strange to me. But I'm an American. We don't use a lot of X's.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Really? Would you write complection? (I have to tell you, that's not even in my English dictionary, which is usually quite good on American alternatives.)

[sboydtaylor.livejournal.com]

I didn't say it wasn't spelled right, only that it looked weird ;)

[takrann.livejournal.com]

Amen to the rhythm and the ornamentation in prose, Chaz.

I wrote this (as part of a long diatribe against too much literary complacency in recognisable 'mainstream fantasy'- but then pulled it, not wishing a flaming fight!):

'And here's the thing: literature is not life, it is like life, but it isn't. It is an artistic representation of life. Literature is the creation of meaning through words and in order to do so those words by the very act of choice need to have attention drawn to them through the artifice. And very often being aware of that artifice is indispensable to the meaning conveyed.'

There is a mania for the eradication of prose that draws attention to itself (and I partly blame the American market - if you can make it there you've made it everywhere, to paraphrase Frank):

'This insane striving for the maximisation of product and profit with the logic that if you make of something most things to the maximum number of people you achieve just that. It isn't about art, it is about the real world folks, and in the real world businesses have mouths to feed. Yes, it's all very well being arty and ornate and exploratory but people have lives to live for God's sake; they haven't got time to ponder over such things, please inform them, say what you have to say with clarity and brevity of execution so that it is accessible to a thirteen-year-old and a fifty-year-old alike.'

I know, they must be right, I just don't get it:

'In the real world it is about sales, you dummy. Because - and this is how the real world works, you dummy - if a publisher doesn't sell then there is no money to take on new authors. But this is how it really works: they make money out of such-like best-sellers and take on the authors who seem like the authors who already sell or like those who have had a proven record of having sold. Or they simply market them as such. Publishers are not there at the service of the writer and their art, art and the writer are at the service of the publisher. It is about profit foremost, not inner enrichment. For without profit first there can be no chance of inner enrichment. If you want inner enrichment, join a religious denomination or a hobby group, but don't be so bloody silly as to try and do it through art!'

So what are we left with?:

'clarifying and simplifying the prose, being perspicacious, not being so pretentious; that is, not striving to explore the power of language and phrase as meaning, inherent to and elucidating upon what is happening. Too many adjectives. Too many adverbs. Too many commas in that sentence. If you write a sentence you really love you know it has no place in the whole - this last the worst crock that persists in sticking to the editorial wall, a neat formulation that an author or poet said once and has been reeled off repeatedly, unthinkingly ever since - like so many eventually fascistic doctrines that get set in stone to be followed fanatically in order to stand a chance of joining the party of published authors out there (or to be allowed to continue supping if you are already at the table). All that just gets in the way of telling a good story. And that is the only ultimate purpose of a work of fiction. That it is 'a good read'. (So that it sells. Lots.)

You know, it isn't. It is one purpose but it is not the be-all and end all. Language is too fantastic an invention to throw most of it away at the altar of above all 'telling a good story', above all being 'a good read'. And in order to do that, the very vehicle you use to do so - the language - must perversely enough, not get in the way. It must absent itself. But something may not be 'a good read', rather a great read. Go and pick up some Conrad and bloody well work a bit and find out the difference. Develop the muscles of your brain, stretch it with sinewy thought. You don't want to? Fine. But don't cudgel me with your inverted snobbery! It's time to get pre-emptive.'

I salute you for taking care with the cadence of a sentence, Chaz.

[ogre-san.livejournal.com]

How does one turn style on and off anyway? To me it's either there or not; it's not something you add later. Besides, if you told the spare, just-the-facts-ma'am version, all you'd have would be a synopsis. By the time you had that fixed you'd be right back where you are now.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I knowwww... I keep telling myself that: that I couldn't do it any other way, this is just the way books happen for me. But, I dunno, I'm just feeling today like I've been fussing over the smoothing of a flank when there's a major problem with the skeletal structure and the whole damn' leg is gonna have to come off. And I keep getting distracted by the lovely skin of the thing, to the point where I don't want to make that first heedless cut.

[/extended medical metaphor]

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I love your word worship, and I am grateful for your tender care with language. My eye is assaulted constantly by people who aren't so aware and so careful. But while words carry the story, and shape the story, they aren't (quite) the same thing as the story. Just very nearly so, and essential to the survival of the story--and--I'll stop, because I doubt I'm helping.

At least you're not chopping this up, so you could fit a larger mattress in it.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Not the thing itself, to be sure - but the blood of the thing, all-suffusing and oxygenating. I am full of bad medical metaphors tonight.

And the thing is, I contemplate the radical surgeries that I know the piece needs, if it's going to be truly healthy, and I look at this extant form in all its pallid beauty, and I worry about scar tissue. For cryin' out loud! But "can't cut here, that's too lovely ... can't cut there, see that angle? We'll never recreate that angle..."

Bah. I am feeble and infirm of purpose. And too easily seduced by superficialities, by skin. But I think we all knew that already.