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Saturday, October 15, 2005
The Storyteller’s Art: Wordings
Brace yourself, Gentle Reader. You're about to read heresy. For your Curmudgeon is emphatically not of orthodox opinion -- orthodox among persons who write about fiction writing, anyway -- when it comes to one's finer-grained stylistic choices. In this regard, he's either a radical or a reactionary, depending on one's baseline.
And damned proud of it, baby.
1. Modifiers.
The fashion among today's "stylists" -- yes, those are sneer quotes -- is to suppress modifiers and overload on images and devices. Now, there's nothing inherently objectionable about the use of imagery or image-evoking devices: similes and their more elaborate offspring. Whenever one compares anything to anything else, he's trying to invoke an image from the reader's experiences and harness its power to his story. But writing that completely eschews conventional modifiers -- adjectives and adverbs -- yet insists on deploying comparisons in every sentence takes the reader on a visit to Simile Hell.
Simile Hell is where the analogically obsessed writer is fated to spend eternity. It's a murky place, where one can never be sure whether one is looking at the conscious focus of one's attention, or at something that's merely like it.
Similes are of varying quality, of course, like the goods on a department store's shelves. Good similes expand upon the reader's perception and understanding of the thing being compared, like a magnifying glass that also clarifies color and fine detail. Bad similes are irrelevant comparisons that jerk the reader away from the scene being described, as if one had sat down to a fine Italian dinner only to be grabbed by the necktie and hauled down dark, dank steps into a dungeon, where one is compelled to endure a lecture about the evils of Rosicrucianism and the importance of flossing.
Then there are the hilarities of simile, best exemplified by Douglas Adams's classic: "Huge as office blocks, silent as birds, they hung in the sky in precisely the way that bricks don't." That simile, once read, embeds itself in the memory like a barbed splinter.
Simile Hell is a place of indistinct borders and indeterminate shapes. Nothing there is ever allowed to have its own characteristics, but is described merely as being like something else, as if some malevolent god had decreed that the denizens of that cruel place could only see one another, and the things around them, as reflections from one another's clouded, distorted surfaces.
Clearly, a writer who permits similes to proliferate without limit, like John Wyndham's Triffids, will end up feeling like a slave chained to a runaway machine of unknown purpose. His ability to describe founders under the weight of constant comparisons, and his prose diction becomes as repetitious, as indistinct, and as ineffective as, you know, like, whatever.
Done laughing yet? Well, then let's proceed.
One of the reasons similes and other image-evoking devices get out of control is the prevalent fear of conventional modifiers: adjectives, adverbs, and modifier phrases. While these, too, can be overused, the vacuum they create by their exclusion has obvious detrimental effects.
From your Curmudgeon's own, ridiculously insignificant and distorted perspective, what offends him most, sending his fever-addled brain careening through the borderlands of irreal malice and into the many-shadowed canyons of homicidal insanity that lie beyond, is the obsession with modifiers.
There are two varieties of obsession with modifiers. The first is to avoid them religiously. The second is to drown the reader in them.
The really maddening cases are those writers who, seized by an ineffable ambivalence about the entire, controversy-strewn topic, ping-pong between the two opposed poles. In perusing these, the reader finds himself at times swimming lugubriously through a chow-mein sea, strewn, as though by some malevolent god from the depths of Lovecraft's unrecorded nightmares, with every conceivable kind of adjective, adverb, participial, gerundive, and ablative absolute known to the logophilic hordes. Sentences of a complexity that would have choked William Faulkner, involute as the general theory of relativity and twice as opaque, festooned with terms of that obfuscatory anfractuosity that characterizes the inferior mind struggling to pass itself off as a temple of erudition, wrap themselves around the reader's forebrain in braids of simulated profundity seldom properly equipped with the appropriate punctuation marks which after all are supports to both reading rhythm and comprehension and really shouldn't be dispensed with no matter what the effect the writer is striving to create. Then will come a paragraph break.
After the break, the writer is gripped by the other pole of the obsession. His sentences are all simple declaratives. His writing becomes as terse as a first-grader's primer. No commas are required. Your Curmudgeon's read a lot of stories like that.
Okay, you can go back to breathing normally again.
Is there a "rule"? Not really. What matters, and all that matters, is the effect your words have on him who reads them. This is extraordinarily difficult to judge, even if you've formed a clear profile of your reader, his experiences, his preferences, and his level of reading comprehension. It's one reason -- admittedly, far from the only one -- that fictioneers are always looking for "test readers," who'll deliver a not-too-painful opinion on whether their latest bit of prose "works."
Words and devices are the storyteller's tool. Like all tools, they must serve the application or be set aside. So what you want is for each word to "carry weight." None of your words should be disposable, and none of your devices irrelevant. Conversely, a word or device required to achieve your purpose should not be omitted, even if it is one of those dreaded adverbs.
If you can transform that somehow into a reliable rule for evaluating your prose, do please send it along. Thanks in advance.
2. The Tom Swifty.
When your Curmudgeon decided to make fiction writing into one of his studies, one of his first investigations was into the abjuration of adverbs alluded to above. There are only eight parts of speech; to eliminate adverbs from the writer's toolbox would deprive him of 12.5% of the available tools. It struck your Curmudgeon as absurd. So he plumbed the matter until he found the reason editors wince over adverbs in the works of awkward writers.
What he found was the Tom Swifty.
The Tom Swift books feature some of the very worst prose ever written, but in particular they overuse tonal attributions -- that is, the use of an adverb to color a line of dialogue -- to such an extent that the reader finds himself desperate for a simple, undecorated "he said." A trivial example would be something like:
"You can't talk to me like that," she said angrily.
"Angrily"? Really? Not lovingly or boredly or thoughtfully? What an incredible surprise.
The adverb in that example is not only an unnecessary word; it's an insult to the reader's intelligence. Why is it there?
Because the writer knew his line of dialogue was cliched and weak, that's why. Because he preferred to hack it with a tonal attribution rather than give his character and his story enough thought to come up with something strong enough to carry itself. In other words, because he's a lazy bum.
Lazy bum writers don't attract a lot of readers. The ones they do get are less than penetrating.
Of course, the classical Tom Swifty, for example as celebrated at this site, is the intentional use of an adverb to create a humorous clash with the dialogue, as for example:
"My girl prefers lamb's-wool sweaters," Tom said sheepishly."What our team needs is a man who can hit 60 homers a season," Tom said ruthlessly.
"I'll have another martini," Tom said drily.
The tonal attribution in the hands of the inept writer doesn't entertain as those do. It merely makes the reader more conscious of the weakness of the attributed dialogue. Clumsy tonal attributions are probably the most common reason for an editor to reject a submitted story without reading it to the end.
But this is not sufficient reason to excoriate all use of adverbs.
Consider the following passage:
The strangeness of the district disturbed his rhythm. It caused him to shift his attention away from his pace and footing. Inevitably, moving too fast for the surroundings while gawking at the mysteries around him, he tripped and fell.He collected himself painfully, brushed the dust from the arms of his windbreaker, and looked about for the cause of his tumble. A pace away, a large black cat, the sleekest specimen of felinity he'd ever seen, sat staring at him as if amused at his clumsiness.
Must've tripped over her. Haven't done that in a dog's age.
Despite his pratfall, the internal play on words caused him to smile. He nodded courteously to the cat, who stared at him a moment longer, then turned and slinked away with a cat's typical sinuousness into the open door of a shop he hadn't yet consciously registered.
[From "The Gift Room."]
Your Curmudgeon employed the adverbs "inevitably," "painfully," "courteously," and "consciously" in defiance of the "prohibition." Were they unnecessary? One reader thought so. Did they contribute usefully to the coloration of the scene, and the mental state of the narrator? One reader thought so. It will always be a judgment call, and ultimately for the reader to decide.
Consider again:
Jerome Huygens padded into the kitchen, his burden squirming feebly against his chest. The infant’s eyes were closed. Its limbs moved sluggishly, as if the little body barely contained enough force to move them. He laid it down on the great oaken table, stood a moment looking down at it, pulled out a chair and sat.[From "Foundling."]
Once again, one reader excoriated the use of the adverbs "feebly," "sluggishly," and "barely," while another praised the passage as one of the most evocative openings to a short story she'd ever read. The reader will decide; the writer must use his judgment -- what E. B. White called his "ear."
To develop that "ear," you must read. In particular, you must read extensively within your chosen genre: dozens or hundreds of books by the authors who dominate it and who set its measure. There's no other way to internalize its customs and standards. Many writers, surprisingly, find this hard to do. In the process, some discover that they're unsuited to writing in the genre they've always enjoyed most. It happened to your Curmudgeon.
3. Active, passive, and cognate voice.
One of the most frequent bits of detail advice given to developing writers is to prefer the active voice. Strong verbs in the active voice, we are told, give a story drive and pace. Passive verbs and cognates -- verbs of the "to be" family, and related verbs such as "seem" and "appear" -- don't provide that propulsion, and lend themselves to convoluted sentence structures as well.
This isn't wholly false, but like most unconditional rules, it omits a sheaf of important cases:
- Scenes where one wants to maintain a slower pace, or deliberately "wash out" the picture to provide contrast with more dramatic scenes;
- Scenes where the viewpoint character is himself acting passively;
- Scenes where the viewpoint character is being manipulated by more powerful others.
Words are tools, not dictators. You should prefer whichever of the voices is appropriate to what you're narrating at the moment. Consider:
Carl Harris stuck his clipboard under his right arm and shouldered open the door of the little storefront. The assortment of unrelated objects he'd seen through its grimy front windows told him nothing about what kind of business it was. He hadn't targeted this shop specifically. It wasn't on his rolls, and that was enough to warrant a look. When he let himself see and smell the place, he regretted his decision to enter.The shop was small, dank, and dimly lit. The air hung still and dusty. No one else was in sight. The bare counter he faced from the doorway stood unattended. Harris scanned the room for some indication of what kind of business was transacted here.
The place was wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed to their edges with junk. An old chrome toaster stood next to a battered teddy bear, which leaned precariously over an antique shaving mirror. Beside them stood a jumble of shabby jewelry boxes, their fabric hinges frayed to uselessness, and a matryoshka doll whose painted surfaces were more chips than paint. There were tarnished candleholders of rococo design, and decorative candles in fanciful shapes, some that had been lit, some that had not. Ancient clocks and watches abounded. Commemorative plates and mugs were everywhere, proclaiming the glories of places no one in his right mind would ever visit. Over all of it hung an odor of mildew and decay.
The driftwood of innumerable lives had washed up on this lower Manhattan beach. It was a junk shop, not even a pawn shop, and there was nothing more unpleasant for a retail inspector.
You'd be hard pressed to find a "strong" verb in the above. More, the dominant verb is "was," of the dreaded cognate voice. But the passage above describes the viewpoint character's dour assessment of an unpleasant-looking little store, which he's about to enter in the thin hope of a little graft. Are the chosen verbs appropriate to that setting and mission? Would "strong, active" verbs have performed it as well, or would they have detracted from the musty, static, futureless atmosphere of the shop?
There's more to say, of course -- your Curmudgeon has omitted a section on idioms, cliches, and the difference between them, in the interests of brevity -- but that's enough for one day.
Probably the most important personal attribute a fiction writer can have is confidence. It allows him to write without agonizing, and to face chores such as rewriting, editorially mandated alteration, and the sneers of critics with equanimity. But no writer's confidence is perfect. Oftentimes the chinks in his armor come from his knowledge that he's violating some loudly, widely trumpeted rule. So your Curmudgeon is here to tell you:
- In fiction, there are no absolute rules.
- Rule 1 is not binding.
Be not afraid.
Comments
There should now be here a series of atrocious examples, funnily. But your poorly self-disciplined friend wandered down his perpetual road to tangentialality, providing time for those priceless samples you provoked to escape into the dusty recesses of what you have charitably ascribed to as his worthy mind, before he could capture them printally.
One thing though. Why did you insert metaphor among your outrageous string of similes? It almost provided sufficient relief.
Posted by Pascal Fervor on 10/15/2005 at 11:04 AMRegarding modifiers and similes:
I dont go around criticizing your style, do I?
Posted by akaky on 10/15/2005 at 02:35 PM"The general theory is the more similies, the better or more colorful the writings, while of course truth is the simile is a boob trap. What is amounts to is that the writer, unable to think clearly enough or write well enough to say what he means, gets around the impasse by cutely changing the subject.”
-- James Gould Cozzens
Posted by Greg Hlatky on 10/15/2005 at 10:31 PMNo rule should be followed off a cliff. Not to mention that any reader hunting that thoroughly for adverbs is necessarily missing the whole point of fiction, having forgotten (or had brainwashed out of them by English teachers) the notion that language exists to serve meaning, not the other way around.
Too often we criticize the tactics (such as Swiftian adverb overuse) that bad writers use to hide their faults from the critics in their own heads, rather than properly criticizing the original faults (such as a poor sense of dialogue and narrative) themselves.
Posted by Matt on 10/18/2005 at 02:31 AM
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