Updatery and yet another writing rant

[rolanni]

So, 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

3,965 / 100,000 (4.0%)

Comments

[reedrover]

let us not write boringly

My sixth-grade teacher (oh-so-many years ago) used to tell us "If the most interesting thing you can say or write about a subject is that it is "interesting," consider how boring you might be to your audience." Then she would point to the shelf full of dictionaries and thesauri. She was a dynamic and memorable teacher in many ways.

[(Anonymous)]

All of us who read your blog care what YOU think, or we wouldn't bother to do so!

Cathy C

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

The blogosphere is full of people who have thought more deeply than I have about all aspects of writing

What? Blogography has been invaded by people who think deeply? Nah, not a believable plot. As a headline or hook, maybe -- Blogs Overrun by Thoughtful Writing -- but it still seems unlikely, somehow.

Blogology recapitulates Sturgeon's Law, doesn't it? Which calls out for those who can to fight back by posting good, useful stuff sort of like your observations. Someone has to put the 10% in, after all.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Remember that Sturgeon's Law is recursive. Since 90% of everything is crud[1], it follows that 90% of the 10% which you think isn't crud is actually crud, and so on. It may terminate somewhere, but where blogs are concerned (in fact the internet in general -- Usenet, email, web, etc.) probably a long way down. I'd guess around three or four orders of magnitude down.

That's why my LJ flist is small. 50 or so people out of lots of millions is not a high percentage of people whose writing I consider to be "not crud"...

[1] Or some other word, depending which story one believes and the intended audience.

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

But . . . that also would mean that 10% of the 90% is actually good, right? Or maybe 90% of 90% for 81%? But applying our recursion again, 90% of 81% is just 72.9%? And as the recursion spirals, I think we end up somewhere down in the weeds, looking for a contact lens.

I think we're in violent agreement here, incidentally, that Rolanni's writing (and thoughts) are on the "not crud" end of the scale. YEAH!

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I love cliches. They're a cheap and easy way to clue in SF readers that they're not in Kansas any more.

Eyes like diamonds? Turn 'em into eyes made of diamond.

[lavenderbard.livejournal.com]

This is just a generic 'Yeah, you tell 'em, Rolanni!' supportive comment. :)

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I've heard it said that a mark of an expert in any kind of art[1] is that they know when to break the rules. Haydn disliked Beethoven's music because it broke some of the existing rules Beethoven got away with it because he was good at it. Heck, look at Shakespere's mixed metapohor -- who would actually "take arms" against a sea of anything? But it works because he knew when the literal meaning was irrelevant to the imagery.

One of the things I like about your (plural) writing is the way your narration changes style depending on the point of view character. One may be formal and precise and the next uses colourful language and cliches (contrast Miri and Val Con, for example, I can tell within a sentence which of them is PoV in a passage by the styles, without any clumsy explicit statement of who is the PoV character). If a character uses cliches and contractions, or if they studiously avoid them, that's part of the character and therefore is an important source of information. (There are of course some authors who don't use characterisations in narrative, it is all written as an objective author; that is also a valid style, but neither is 'wrong'.)

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Sometimes clichés are the way to go. After all, they became clichés because they worked.

Best wishes, regarding your ear ache.

[angela-n-hunt.livejournal.com]

Amen! And thank you. You just hit it in a nutshell.

Of cliches and eye colors...

[able-spacer.livejournal.com]

Y'know, my experience is that the line between a cliche and a trope is rather blurry.

And the Plucky Young Heroine of the story I'm writing has a roommate with violet eyes, and they're gonna stay violet, by gum!