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Updatery and yet another writing rant
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 07:16 pmSo, the earache -- has subsided. The doctor finds no evidence of infection, which is sorta what I thought we were going to find, but is reassuring anyhow. I have anesthetic drops, to treat the pain, should it return, which we of course hope it will not. Kind of a wash at the doctor's office, except for the verified no-infection. That's a win.
Among the many reasons that I don't often write about writing in this LJ, we have this: The blogosphere is full of people who have thought more deeply than I have about all aspects of writing and are telling everyone they know, and large numbers of people they don't know, all about it. With so many thoughtful and talented people expounding, who's going to care what I think?
Occasionally, however, I care what I think, as in the question of jewel-colored eyes. And I also care what I think about what we'll call Absolutist Writing Advice. "Don't use cliches; they're a sign of amateurish writing," is an example of such advice. Sounds simple enough on the face of it. In practice...a little dicier. Sometimes, the cliche is what you want, really. If you're clever, you might twist it a bit, to suit the vernacular of the world you're working in -- science fiction's pretty forgiving that way -- and hey, presto! you have world building. Sometimes, a character will state a cliche, and then you have characterization.
See, the thing about writing is that there are no Absolutes. Even "start every sentence with a capital letter and end it with a period" is subject to flaunting if you can pull it off. By "pulling it off," note, I don't mean "being cutesy-clever and thinking no one will notice." I mean pulling it off by producing work that is so damn good, it's obvious to even the meanest intelligence that there was no other way to do [whatever it was you did], and that, yes, it Needed to Be Done.
The other problem with Absolutist Advice is that it tends to focus on a single "problem" of writing, as if that thing exists in a vacuum. The notion, for instance, that topaz is just a fancy brown, so why not just say brown, ignores such things as the demands of the rest of the sentence (and the paragraph in which that sentence lives), the viewpoint of the character describing whatever that brown object may be, and (again) the world in which this observation-and-description occurs.
Sentences have rhythm. "Brown" has one syllable; "topaz" has two. It is not at all inconceivable that you will wish to write a sentence in which the word topaz will make the words around it sing.
It's not easy, what we're doing here on the page, and behind the words. It is art -- small "a" art, but art, just the same -- and as such it is not rule-bound. Such rules as we have are...more like guidelines, really, and almost begging to be broken.
Yes, we can write simply, but we should not write stupidly. And for the love of ghod, let us not write boringly.
Progress on Mouse and Dragon
Among the many reasons that I don't often write about writing in this LJ, we have this: The blogosphere is full of people who have thought more deeply than I have about all aspects of writing and are telling everyone they know, and large numbers of people they don't know, all about it. With so many thoughtful and talented people expounding, who's going to care what I think?
Occasionally, however, I care what I think, as in the question of jewel-colored eyes. And I also care what I think about what we'll call Absolutist Writing Advice. "Don't use cliches; they're a sign of amateurish writing," is an example of such advice. Sounds simple enough on the face of it. In practice...a little dicier. Sometimes, the cliche is what you want, really. If you're clever, you might twist it a bit, to suit the vernacular of the world you're working in -- science fiction's pretty forgiving that way -- and hey, presto! you have world building. Sometimes, a character will state a cliche, and then you have characterization.
See, the thing about writing is that there are no Absolutes. Even "start every sentence with a capital letter and end it with a period" is subject to flaunting if you can pull it off. By "pulling it off," note, I don't mean "being cutesy-clever and thinking no one will notice." I mean pulling it off by producing work that is so damn good, it's obvious to even the meanest intelligence that there was no other way to do [whatever it was you did], and that, yes, it Needed to Be Done.
The other problem with Absolutist Advice is that it tends to focus on a single "problem" of writing, as if that thing exists in a vacuum. The notion, for instance, that topaz is just a fancy brown, so why not just say brown, ignores such things as the demands of the rest of the sentence (and the paragraph in which that sentence lives), the viewpoint of the character describing whatever that brown object may be, and (again) the world in which this observation-and-description occurs.
Sentences have rhythm. "Brown" has one syllable; "topaz" has two. It is not at all inconceivable that you will wish to write a sentence in which the word topaz will make the words around it sing.
It's not easy, what we're doing here on the page, and behind the words. It is art -- small "a" art, but art, just the same -- and as such it is not rule-bound. Such rules as we have are...more like guidelines, really, and almost begging to be broken.
Yes, we can write simply, but we should not write stupidly. And for the love of ghod, let us not write boringly.
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