Monk

“Fiction must compete with first-rate reporting. If you cannot write a story that is equal to a factual account of battle in the streets or demonstrations, then you can’t write a story.”

-- John Cheever (Image Credit: John Cheever at home in Ossining, New York, 1979. Photograph: Paul Hosefros/Getty Images)

“But isn’t it time to lay down the sword? Or is English to remain a language whose spelling varies from country to country, publication to publication—and even within the same publication if you happen to catch it at different times or different editorial reigns? Gray or grey is the least of the problem.”

-- Maria Konnikova at The Atlantic

I don't know. Maybe there's something to be said for multiple choice. It only has to feel natural and good to the writer and be readily comprehensible to the readers, though this does not negate the idea of an 'official' standard, if we could get around the querulous and sticky issue of who gets to be the official voice, hah!

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”

-- Margaret Atwood

The novelists I find myself attracted to are those who cannot resist the extra adjective, the additional image, the scale-tipping clause. It feels necessary to assert and celebrate this, for we are living in puritanical times. The contemporary preference seems to be for the economical, the efficient, for simple precision (though there is of course such a thing as complex precision). Books, it appears, should be neat and streamlined. Language shouldn’t be allowed to obscure a good story. There is a craving for easily relatable and sympathetic characters. Among critics and reviewers, the plain style is more likely to be praised than the elaborate or sprawling. Embellished prose is treated with suspicion, if not dismissed outright as overwritten, pretentious or self-indulgent. Drab prose is everywhere.

-- Ben Masters at The New York Times

“Before I start a novel I make a dossier for each character, even minor ones. Life history, curriculum vitae, oddities of culture and taste and background, appearance, gait, voice: it all goes in there. These dossiers can grow quite extensive, and some get completely out of hand. I’ve had to train myself not to keep expanding them endlessly when I should be working on chapters. Even so, with the book I’m working on now I’ve almost driven myself mad, writing dossiers.”

-- Norman Rush

“The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote. By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.”

-- Walt Whitman

Well, I doubt that such writing would make for a good novel, but it may serve for a good diary, or maybe for blog posts.

“There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three – storyteller, teacher, and enchanter – but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.”

-- Vladimir Nabokov, "Lectures on Literature"

And what can be more enchanting than stories about banging young girls?

F. Scott Fitzgerald has some hard advice on what it take to be a literary writer.


_ _ _

Dear Frances:

I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories “In Our Time” went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In “This Side of Paradise” I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.

The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming—the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is “nice” is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the “works.” You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

In the light of this, it doesn’t seem worth while to analyze why this story isn’t saleable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,

Your old friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent—which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.

Sarah Miller rants against the excessive use of 'literally':

People use 'literally' because they feel like all their stories have to be exciting. "I literally had to sprint to my class." Okay, who gives a fuck? "I literally ate the whole hamburger." Again, unmoved. Here's one you hear a lot: "Oh my God, my best friend's apartment is literally right across the street from…" …whatever.

Jen Doll adds a note favoring 'actually':

While 'literally' and 'actually' can be used interchangeably, 'actually' has a bad attitude. 'Literally' can be mocked and laughed at, because literally almost no one uses it correctly. 'Actually' is more sneaky, a wolf in sheep's clothing. 'Actually' is the word that you use when you're actually saying, "You are wrong, and I am right, and you are at least a little bit of an idiot."

I have always been more of an 'actually' person myself.

(Source: Sully's Dish)

Anybody who has ever logged on knows that online writing begets exclamation points. A lot of exclamation points!

-- Ben Yagoda at The New York Times

Is that true? For myself, even before I heard of the Internet, I always liked using what punctuation marks I could get my hands on and using them freely and exuberantly and without apology. What's the point of getting the big box of 64 crayons if you are not going to use all the colors?

In any case, we are given a fancy theory for this supposed punctuation craze:

David Shipley, the executive editor of Bloomberg View and a former Op-Ed editor at this newspaper, and Will Schwalbe, authors of “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” speculate that the trend stems in part from the nature of online media. “Because email is without affect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be,” they write. But what if a particular point needs to be stressed beyond where it would normally be? Well, you need to kick it up an additional notch, with another exclamation point, or three. The unsurprising result has been Weimar-level exclamation inflation, where (it sometimes seems) you have to raise your voice to a scream merely to be heard, and a sentence without blingy punctuation comes across like a whisper.

And sometimes one just wants to have fun, with the challenge being not to sacrifice clarity for your grammatical zeal. If this has shown up more in Internet use, it may be because people felt like they were not bound by their English teachers and bosses when zipping off fun e-messages to friends and co-workers, and one could feel like a teenager again - wild and crazy with no thought for the morrow.