Man, for someone in the literary community this thread is kinda depressing.
But to keep it Heavenly, I'll just say that I dislike Hemingway's style (and Rupi Kaur and her ilk if they count as poets) and I think it's good to read things that challenge us even when they make us uncomfy. Sticking with something that is difficult to us is good! Anyone who has studied an ancient language, a thorny contemporary foreign language, or symbolic logic would probably agree.
I read Dickens's Pickwick Papers on an overnight train, when I couldn't sleep. The fact that I was stuck on a train with nothing else to do was the only thing that kept me going through the tediously slow opening. Once I got to about the mid-point, I started to rather enjoy it.
Dickens is good for that! It's good to have experiences that force you to grapple with a different kind of aesthetic.
When I turned 21 all of my friends said they'd go with me to do whatever I wanted. I said I wanted to go to the De Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They dutifully attended, all of them not modern art lovers but willing participants. By the end, they were all enthralled. It's good to experience new and difficult things!
Well the immediacy is precisely the point. You don't see quote marks when you're speaking with someone, so if you're going for immediacy it makes sense to dispense with them.
Well, no, but you don't need quotation marks to tell which bits are them talking, and which bits are actions that they are doing, or some internal monologue, because you hear the noises that they make for the first, you see them doing things for the second, and you don't have access to the third.
If you want an experience that's more like what you get when you're speaking with someone, then what you're looking for is not a novel at all, but a playscript.
Ah, well there we go, closer to the point Perhaps a script and the immediacy it is meant to convey, through actors admittedly, is part of the point.
It's hard to talk about fiction conventions and style without getting into genre and the thorny issues around literary fiction. The danger is comparing apples and oranges: one person is busy with John Gresham's The Firm and the other is immersed in Roberto Bolano's 2666 and those are narrative approaches that don't talk to one another.
I found both Sally Rooney's first fictions (Conversations with Friends and Normal People) easy enough to follow but her flattening effect or distanciation doesn't always come off: that is how I'd read the passage quoted by Trudy. She wants to show a failure of communication, not immediacy or animation. Characters have intense sexual encounters and then slip away from one another. I read some reviews early on and Rooney isn't writing in an Irish tradition, her conscious influences are Sheila Heti's semi-memoirs and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick. So the voice is altogether different from Anne Enright or someone like Eimear McBride who is channeling a Joycean disruptive stream of consciousness (Modernist not realist fiction) in A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, which begins like this:
For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day.
It took me a couple of weeks to figure out the relationship between the narrator and her brother and then I read the novel again a few months later. It is IMO heartbreaking and quite brilliant and while much of the writing is initially infuriating and inaccessible, there is a reason why the reader has to work so hard. We had a virtual book club gathering on Eimear McBride and the different responses were illuminating, it made the book feel inexhaustible. One reader said she had to succumb to the rhythms of the text without trying to make sense of them, the way she listens to Philip Glass or Bartok. Is it possible to enjoy a novel the way one might enjoy De Kooning's art or a piece of music?
I read Dickens's Pickwick Papers on an overnight train, when I couldn't sleep. The fact that I was stuck on a train with nothing else to do was the only thing that kept me going through the tediously slow opening. Once I got to about the mid-point, I started to rather enjoy it.
I think even people who love the Pickwick Papers think it only gets going once Sam Weller turns up.
I found Hilary Matel's Wolf Hall series difficult going until I grasped that 'he' is always Thomas Cromwell and accepted the present tense narrative, which I generally dislike. It does convey immediacy and tension, and, yes, the novels do read like a script. The TV dramatisation was excellent, and, in fact, helped witha re-read.
Well the immediacy is precisely the point. You don't see quote marks when you're speaking with someone, so if you're going for immediacy it makes sense to dispense with them.
Sorry but I don't agree with that at all.
The purpose of writing is to convey a message. It's the writer's job to persuade the reader, not the reader's job to try to work out what the writer is trying to say. That's a fundamental.
If what the writer is trying to get across is quite complex, that task is likely to be quite difficult, without including anything that adds to the obscurity. Whatever makes it harder for the reader to do that is poorer writing than whatever makes it easier for the reader.
There is a convention that direct speech is marked by what are called 'inverted commas' or 'speech marks'. Using some other method to mark direct speech, or not marking it at all makes life unnecessarily harder for the reader. However clever the writer may think they are being, it lowers the quality of the writing.
The claim that speech is not marked that way when spoken, and that therefore omitting punctuation is more immediate, does not make sense. When a person is speaking, you know they are speaking. You can see them and hear them. Reading the words off a page, you can't.
Well the immediacy is precisely the point. You don't see quote marks when you're speaking with someone, so if you're going for immediacy it makes sense to dispense with them.
Sorry but I don't agree with that at all.
The purpose of writing is to convey a message. It's the writer's job to persuade the reader, not the reader's job to try to work out what the writer is trying to say. That's a fundamental.
If what the writer is trying to get across is quite complex, that task is likely to be quite difficult, without including anything that adds to the obscurity. Whatever makes it harder for the reader to do that is poorer writing than whatever makes it easier for the reader.
There is a convention that direct speech is marked by what are called 'inverted commas' or 'speech marks'. Using some other method to mark direct speech, or not marking it at all makes life unnecessarily harder for the reader. However clever the writer may think they are being, it lowers the quality of the writing.
The claim that speech is not marked that way when spoken, and that therefore omitting punctuation is more immediate, does not make sense. When a person is speaking, you know they are speaking. You can see them and hear them. Reading the words off a page, you can't.
The job of writing is not to convey a message. Maybe for accounting and legal writing, okay, but not for literary writing. A negative judgment towards certain stylistic decisions is fine, but claiming across the board that such tendencies lowers the quality of the writing is patently absurd.
The claim doesn't need to make sense to you, it's what some writers have thought.
The purpose of writing is to convey a message. It's the writer's job to persuade the reader, not the reader's job to try to work out what the writer is trying to say. That's a fundamental.
Firstly, I don't think the only purpose of writing is to convey a message if by that you mean a set of ideas that exists in the writer's mind before they set the words down on paper. Most obviously, for example, poetry is not merely a set of words arranged into prettier patterns than is required to communicate the idea. If a set of words or punctuation communicates the emotional or experiential aims of the writer better than plain prose does then that's what the writer needs to do.
(*)
Secondly, the writer's job is to be as clear as what they are communicating allows without oversimplifying. The best way to avoid oversimplifying may not be to use plain language and standard punctuation.
(*) For that matter, a lot of communication is trying to do things. If the writer is trying to persuade the reader to give to charity that's not the same as informing the reader that they would like reader to give to charity.
There is a convention that direct speech is marked by what are called 'inverted commas' or 'speech marks'. Using some other method to mark direct speech, or not marking it at all makes life unnecessarily harder for the reader. However clever the writer may think they are being, it lowers the quality of the writing.
See, I would never go as far as "it lowers the quality of the writing." The worst thing I'll say about the no-quotation-marks style is that I think some writers adopt it specifically to make their writing look more "literary." Others probably have more thoughtful and considered reasons and, as this thread has shown, lots of people agree with that choice and do find it more immediate and direct. The most accurate statement I can make is that I personally, as a reader, don't like it, as it often makes the writing seem more flat and distant -- though if I get caught up in a story, I can ignore it.
@Thomas Rowans said "Man, for someone in the literary community this thread is kinda depressing" but I feel just the opposite. A thread like this is a great reminder of how subjective readers' taste is. Sally Rooney et al leaving out quotation marks, a technique that one reader finds distancing, makes the writing feel more immediate for another. One reader can't get into Wolf Hall, while another (me) is absolutely hooked from the first couple of sentences.
As a writer, I find it very freeing to remember that I can't possibly please everyone, because no writer does, and there is no "right" way to do things, only styles and techniques that work for some readers and not for others.
Just agreeing with above posts that purpose of writing isn't to convey a message. Well, lots of non-fiction writing, yes, true. But literary writing is quite different. I also don't think that being clear is always a virtue. Ah well, this could run and run.
JI also don't think that being clear is always a virtue. Ah well, this could run and run.
Agreed, but when it's done well - clear, precise - it's a wonderful thing that few people seem capable of doing these days. Greene and Waugh (perhaps more the latter) were the exemplars for me. Of those writing now I had high hopes for Jon McGregor, but he's never quite lived back up to his debut, the current heir to writing like the pre-war Mediterranean, so clear you can see the bottom, is probably Edward St Aubyn.
I like William Boyd's ability to write a different style with every book. Jonathan Coe can do that too, but I'm afraid for me he's outrun his own talents with the last few books - when he wrote sharper satire he was out in front, but things are a bit, well, bloated now. JM Coetzee was much more reliable, for longer, over more books, but I think even he's gone over the peak now.
I love Alan Paton.
I like some Dickens more than others - Dombey and Son is probably my favourite, but I agree that after the start the Pickwick Papers is really very good. I much prefer Trollope, and the real 19th century master for me was RS Surtees anyway.
Julian Maclaren-Ross still has no peer for me in short stories.
I really dislike modernism - persevering with Henry Green is always worth it, and the voice kicks in in the end, but persevering with Virginia Woolf has never rewarded me.
Patrick O'Brian is an interesting one (and not just for his writing IMO) - but in his Aubrey-Maturin novels (all 20 is it? of them), the first 2-3 have to be read just to set everything up, but he doesn't get into his stride until about halfway through book 3.
Anthony Powell had the same issue with A Dance to the Music of Time, which I re-read from time to time. Book 1 never feels like it's going anywhere, 2-6 are pretty uniformly excellent, 7-9 are a massive gear change, almost audible to the reader, but then settle back to excellence, 10 is one of my favourite books of all time, 11 is where he should have stopped, and 12 is semi-embarrassing because he's trying and failing to write about a world he no longer understands. I suppose that in itself is quite interesting - and he could certainly still *write* - but unless he deliberately set out to capture the melancholy of a man out of time (which would be very clever, but I genuinely don't believe he was trying to do that), rather than just trying and failing to be the observer he had always been to that point, then it would have been better left unwritten.
The purpose of writing is to convey a message. It's the writer's job to persuade the reader, not the reader's job to try to work out what the writer is trying to say. That's a fundamental.
I rather dislike long passages of dialog in which the speakers are not identified. If I want to know who said what, I sometimes have to go back a page or so and then count it off: he said, she said, he said, she said and so on.
I'm guessing the maker of that video edited Tolkien's reply to make it sound more whimsically simplistic than it was. I suspect the two-word insult was followed by an explanation as to why he thought the criticism invalid.
I rather dislike long passages of dialog in which the speakers are not identified. If I want to know who said what, I sometimes have to go back a page or so and then count it off: he said, she said, he said, she said and so on.
I once read a novel that had literally two lines of actual dialogue in it. The rest was expressed by descriptive constructions such as:
"She commented that he was late. He explained that his train had been delayed. She wondered whether to believe this, but asked him if he'd already had anything to eat or whether he still wanted dinner, and he said he did still want it."
I found it frustrating to read. It was like watching it through a glass window. Dialogue, properly done, gives you lots of little clues about the character in the way they phrase things and how they deliver speech, and brings them to life. There was nothing of that in this book.
The purpose of a fiction book is to create many things, but primary among them, to me at least, are a world and a relationship between reader and text. You don't get one without the other. Frustration can be a feature of both - and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Writers and books don't always exist to make readers feel better, exactly. The point of fiction is that it can be more real than fact. It can take readers to places and in ways which non-fiction can't manage. Usually because no-one ever reports on that experience and/or from that perspective.
This is one of the reasons we're all so different, I think.
The primary purpose of fiction for me is to tell a story. That's probably why I 'get' Tolkien - it's expressly what he set out to do with LoTR. Silmarillion is a series of stories - originally the Lost Tales told to an Anglo-Saxon sailor by the elves of Tol Eressëa, which is why some of them - the Narn i Chîn Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, the Fall of Gondolin, can stand completely alone as short stories. Short stories are a genre I generally prefer as well.
I have a friend who wrote a series of young adult novels which I got to read pre-publication. He would ask for feedback which I'd happily give, but when he asked me about what I thought about different characters I would be completely at sea. Characters become objects to whom events happen and I generally remember them and their names only inasmuch as they relate to those events.
Apparently this is unusual. And I'm not 100% consistent - I like many of Terry Pratchett's and Douglas Adams' characters - but they're so vividly drawn and larger than life, which might be why.
The job of writing is not to convey a message. Maybe for accounting and legal writing, okay, but not for literary writing. A negative judgment towards certain stylistic decisions is fine, but claiming across the board that such tendencies lowers the quality of the writing is patently absurd.
The claim doesn't need to make sense to you, it's what some writers have thought.
My apologies. Perhaps in my using the word 'message', I have tried to oversimplify.
There has to be something that the writer is trying to say, to get across, whether "accounting and legal writing" or the most expressive poetry where the 'message' may be something less self-evidently explicit. Otherwise, why are you writing?
The tools of style that a writer chooses to do that are the technique of writing. If well chosen and well handled, they make it easier for the reader to grasp the writer's 'message', whatever it is that the writer is trying to say. If not so well chosen and well-handled, they make it harder. That is especially so if they get in the reader's way.
Using 'persuade' fairly loosely, I stand by my statement "It's the writer's job to persuade the reader, not the reader's job to try to work out what the writer is trying to say."
"Most obviously, for example, poetry is not merely a set of words arranged into prettier patterns than is required to communicate the idea. If a set of words or punctuation communicates the emotional or experiential aims of the writer better than plain prose does then that's what the writer needs to do."
That is well within what I mean by 'message', but it still doesn't get one away from the simple point that a good poet does this more effectively than a mediocre or poor poet.
A person I once knew well but who has long since died, with a publishing background, used to cite as a maxim, I think widely known in that industry rather than coined by him,
I think it’s a maxim that is only useful at a certain level. It can’t really take account of whether your reader is interested in what you’re writing. A gripping thriller may leave unmoved a reader who is really only interested in learning about building ‘N’ gauge railway models from scratch.
Nobody can please everybody all the time, but at least some try not to bore. Alas, there are others who don't even seem to try.
Worse are those who seem to write from a premise that if their readers can't understand them or are bored by what they produce, that's their readers' fault.
Yes, I think "do not bore a reader who might otherwise be interested in your subject" is a better adage! Though I have sometimes been pleasantly surprised by a book about something I'm NOT normally interested in (this has happened with both fiction and non-fiction) that is written in such an engaging way that it makes me care about the subject after all!
I work in a public library and some of this conversation brought to mind an amusing incident from last week. An elderly man returned a book and expressed his great disappointment...it depicted a sailing ship on the cover so he had had expectations of a sea adventure tale like something by Patrick O' Brian perhaps...he reported that there were no ships in it at all just one mention of a rowing boat. I turned the book around to examine the spine to discover a big black heart sticker...the symbol used within the library for romance novels, (most often read by people of a similar age to him but of the opposite sex!) No wonder there wasn't much drama on the high seas. So a very definite case of a misleading cover.
I work in a public library and some of this conversation brought to mind an amusing incident from last week. An elderly man returned a book and expressed his great disappointment...it depicted a sailing ship on the cover so he had had expectations of a sea adventure tale like something by Patrick O' Brian perhaps...he reported that there were no ships in it at all just one mention of a rowing boat. I turned the book around to examine the spine to discover a big black heart sticker...the symbol used within the library for romance novels, (most often read by people of a similar age to him but of the opposite sex!) No wonder there wasn't much drama on the high seas. So a very definite case of a misleading cover.
H.L. Mencken mentioned in his diaries a dodgy publisher whose marketing tactic was to take old novels with mundane storylines that were in the public domain, and re-issue them with covers designed to look pornographic.
Mencken very explicitly held the man in contempt, but I think it's a pretty clever business model. A real-life example that I have seen was The Apprenticeship Of A Duddy Kravitz, a serious-minded but still PG satirical Canadian novel, sold by an American publisher with a cover looking like one the racier Mickey Spillaine covers.
This thread delights me, especially the shout-outs for more obscure and lesser known writers. I must admit that when I finally had to put down Fosse's Septology so well translated by Damion Searls, I wondered if should suggest it for the Ship's book group. Let's all commit to six weeks or longer of reading a 667-page masterpiece from the Nynorsk! One sentence endlessly circling! Profound Catholic mysticism and unheimlich (uncanny) existentialism! It's all about writing the unsayable and finding the silence behind words! Not everyone's cup of tea.
The version I heard, from A L Kennedy, was 'If it bores you to write it, it will bore somebody to read it' (this was in the context of a writing group).
It certainly frees you from a lot of 'oughts' about putting in descriptions or life histories - just cut to the chase. Those other things - the scenery, the weather, what characters look like - will come in when they're needed.
Tolkien's Silmarillion and LOTR are really sui generis (in a class of their own) in that they are not written as novels but as an attempt to create a new mythology - one reason why the battle scenes, for example, are unrealistic.
The other point I would like to make is that although I usually dislike attempts to reproduce pronunciation in print (particularly the use of 'of' to simulate ''ve', I make an exception exception for Mark Twain's rendering if the differing styles of speech in the regions through which the story passes in 'Huckleberry Finn'. He was writing of something he knew intimately, from the inside, not the outside. And the liberal sprinkling of the dreaded 'N'word does not trouble me at all; it's how it was, and can't be changed.
oh, and it's 'quoation marks' East of the pond too, I've never heard of 'speech marks, and I'm 86.
As a writer, I find it very freeing to remember that I can't possibly please everyone, because no writer does, and there is no "right" way to do things, only styles and techniques that work for some readers and not for others.
Yes I suppose that is the more optimistic take away.
Tolkien's Silmarillion and LOTR are really sui generis (in a class of their own) in that they are not written as novels but as an attempt to create a new mythology - one reason why the battle scenes, for example, are unrealistic.
I follow a blog by a military historian of the ancient world and he contends that the battle scenes in Lord of the Rings (the book, not the films) are well-researched, based in Tolkien's knowledge of medieval history and literature and his own experience of First World War battles, and as realistic as one can reasonably ask for given that some of the troop types were not available in the real world.
Still as dull as anything though. When it comes down to it, it's people, orcs and other creatures bashing each other with intent to terminate. That kind of thing is just depressing.
I quite liked the orcs actually - do we need a separate Tolkien thread? I could say what I thought about the elves and so on.
Still as dull as anything though. When it comes down to it, it's people, orcs and other creatures bashing each other with intent to terminate. That kind of thing is just depressing.
I quite liked the orcs actually - do we need a separate Tolkien thread? I could say what I thought about the elves and so on.
The Orcs get a bad press, which given their origins, is hardly their fault. I rather like the idea that Elves, despite their immortality, are capable of Sin and Rebellion...
IIRC, the only battle scene in which any of the hobbits are not present is Helm's Deep, which I admit I tend to skate over when re-reading the book yet again.
If you like to start a Tolkien thread, I'll happily contribute. Until then, namarie (Elvish for *be well*)!
Apart from the word "toke", the song actually makes a pretty good fit for LW. Probably because, musically, it does tribute older styles, specifically what Welk at the end calls "spirituals".
(Though I'm not sure if Welk's taxonomy is quite correct. @Nick Tamen schooled me on the proper parameters of a spiritual some time back, and I'd be curious to know how he thinks they apply to that tune.)
Apart from the word "toke", the song actually makes a pretty good fit for LW. Probably because, musically, it does tribute older styles, specifically what Welk at the end calls "spirituals".
(Though I'm not sure if Welk's taxonomy is quite correct. @Nick Tamen schooled me on the proper parameters of a spiritual some time back, and I'd be curious to know how he thinks they apply to that tune.)
Definitely not a spiritual, modern or otherwise. I mean, I’ll grant that the song maybe has a few nods to blues music, which has roots partially in spirituals. But Lawrence Welk was displaying all kinds of ignorance there.
For some less awkward hipness from Lawrence Welk, check out the show's 1956 rendition of Ghost Riders In The Sky. The row of female vocalists come off as particularly spectral.
Any book that is published by a reliable publisher but seems to have skipped the proofreading process. The author of the books that were the basis for the "True Blood" TV show, for instance. Someone was asleep at the switch for those books because page after page had horrible typos, run-on sentences, bad grammar, just the lot.
When I hurled one of the books across the room and scared my cat, I knew I had to stop reading this particular author or I might cause myself to go into cardiac arrest.
As a Proofreader, I simply can't understand book publishers who either don't employ competent editors/Proofreaders or don't have ANY!
Any book that is published by a reliable publisher but seems to have skipped the proofreading process. The author of the books that were the basis for the "True Blood" TV show, for instance. Someone was asleep at the switch for those books because page after page had horrible typos, run-on sentences, bad grammar, just the lot.
When I hurled one of the books across the room and scared my cat, I knew I had to stop reading this particular author or I might cause myself to go into cardiac arrest.
As a Proofreader, I simply can't understand book publishers who either don't employ competent editors/Proofreaders or don't have ANY!
My Penguin Classics edition of Sister Carrie had a page repeated, with the proper page missing(ie. there was, let's say, Page 142, followed by Page 142, and then Page 144).
Not sure if that's connected to Sister Carrie being a relatively obscure book. For what it's worth, it was a special "unexpurgated version", featuring stuff the original publisher had excised. The guy who wrote the intro opined that the restored material did not make it a better book.
I can't stand the poorly proofread material. I think I mentioned on the "Books we're reading" thread about a complete reprinting of the original Zorro stories where the publisher clearly did not proofread the scans of the original stories--for example, the name of a main character kept changing depending on what page you were on because the scanning software couldn't decide what the right name was.
I also dislike excessive descriptive passages, but I understand that they are necessary in some stories. If you are "world-creating" (whether in fantasy or sci fi) you really need to be descriptive to add verisimilitude to the story. Also, I recently read John Dickson Carr's first novel. I was shocked that he went so overboard in descriptive passages, because he didn't do that in later books. It was only at the end that I realized that the solution to the locked-room mystery depended on a specific architectural detail. If that was the only bit of architecture that he described in detail, the reader would have been suspicious that it was important, so he hid it in a flood of descriptive passages of every bit of architecture available. Boring, but it worked. My eyes glazed over long before the critical bit was described and I missed it entirely. So I understand why he did it. I don't like it, but I understand.
Another thing I hate is the alternate-chapters style: where the author bounces between two characters. Now, I don't mind a story where the actions of two or more character are described. That's good. What I object to in the purely mechanical alternating chapters. Character A's actions are in Chapter 1. Character B in Chapter 2. Character A in Chapter 3. Character B in Chapter 4. Character A in Chapter 5. Character B in Chapter 6....even describing it is boring. It makes for tedious reading.
I was quite confused recently by a novel that was part in first-person and part in third.
The author's narrative style was such that I did not recognise the switch immediately. It was only when I realised that the first-person character could not possibly be a witness to the events described that I cottoned on.
I've recently read one that uses a mix of first, second, and third-person narration, but it's quite intentionally and, I think, quite well done. Anything is possible if you're good at it! (But not every reader will enjoy it).
I apologize to all and sundry. I don't believe I read the title of this thread with any clarity. Instead, all of you were "treated" to my frothing fury that Charlaine Harris doesn't seem to have any proofreaders and/or editors to read her books before they get published.
Comments
Dickens is good for that! It's good to have experiences that force you to grapple with a different kind of aesthetic.
When I turned 21 all of my friends said they'd go with me to do whatever I wanted. I said I wanted to go to the De Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They dutifully attended, all of them not modern art lovers but willing participants. By the end, they were all enthralled. It's good to experience new and difficult things!
Ah, well there we go, closer to the point
I found both Sally Rooney's first fictions (Conversations with Friends and Normal People) easy enough to follow but her flattening effect or distanciation doesn't always come off: that is how I'd read the passage quoted by Trudy. She wants to show a failure of communication, not immediacy or animation. Characters have intense sexual encounters and then slip away from one another. I read some reviews early on and Rooney isn't writing in an Irish tradition, her conscious influences are Sheila Heti's semi-memoirs and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick. So the voice is altogether different from Anne Enright or someone like Eimear McBride who is channeling a Joycean disruptive stream of consciousness (Modernist not realist fiction) in A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, which begins like this:
For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day.
It took me a couple of weeks to figure out the relationship between the narrator and her brother and then I read the novel again a few months later. It is IMO heartbreaking and quite brilliant and while much of the writing is initially infuriating and inaccessible, there is a reason why the reader has to work so hard. We had a virtual book club gathering on Eimear McBride and the different responses were illuminating, it made the book feel inexhaustible. One reader said she had to succumb to the rhythms of the text without trying to make sense of them, the way she listens to Philip Glass or Bartok. Is it possible to enjoy a novel the way one might enjoy De Kooning's art or a piece of music?
The purpose of writing is to convey a message. It's the writer's job to persuade the reader, not the reader's job to try to work out what the writer is trying to say. That's a fundamental.
If what the writer is trying to get across is quite complex, that task is likely to be quite difficult, without including anything that adds to the obscurity. Whatever makes it harder for the reader to do that is poorer writing than whatever makes it easier for the reader.
There is a convention that direct speech is marked by what are called 'inverted commas' or 'speech marks'. Using some other method to mark direct speech, or not marking it at all makes life unnecessarily harder for the reader. However clever the writer may think they are being, it lowers the quality of the writing.
The claim that speech is not marked that way when spoken, and that therefore omitting punctuation is more immediate, does not make sense. When a person is speaking, you know they are speaking. You can see them and hear them. Reading the words off a page, you can't.
The job of writing is not to convey a message. Maybe for accounting and legal writing, okay, but not for literary writing. A negative judgment towards certain stylistic decisions is fine, but claiming across the board that such tendencies lowers the quality of the writing is patently absurd.
The claim doesn't need to make sense to you, it's what some writers have thought.
(*)
Secondly, the writer's job is to be as clear as what they are communicating allows without oversimplifying. The best way to avoid oversimplifying may not be to use plain language and standard punctuation.
(*) For that matter, a lot of communication is trying to do things. If the writer is trying to persuade the reader to give to charity that's not the same as informing the reader that they would like reader to give to charity.
See, I would never go as far as "it lowers the quality of the writing." The worst thing I'll say about the no-quotation-marks style is that I think some writers adopt it specifically to make their writing look more "literary." Others probably have more thoughtful and considered reasons and, as this thread has shown, lots of people agree with that choice and do find it more immediate and direct. The most accurate statement I can make is that I personally, as a reader, don't like it, as it often makes the writing seem more flat and distant -- though if I get caught up in a story, I can ignore it.
@Thomas Rowans said "Man, for someone in the literary community this thread is kinda depressing" but I feel just the opposite. A thread like this is a great reminder of how subjective readers' taste is. Sally Rooney et al leaving out quotation marks, a technique that one reader finds distancing, makes the writing feel more immediate for another. One reader can't get into Wolf Hall, while another (me) is absolutely hooked from the first couple of sentences.
As a writer, I find it very freeing to remember that I can't possibly please everyone, because no writer does, and there is no "right" way to do things, only styles and techniques that work for some readers and not for others.
Agreed, but when it's done well - clear, precise - it's a wonderful thing that few people seem capable of doing these days. Greene and Waugh (perhaps more the latter) were the exemplars for me. Of those writing now I had high hopes for Jon McGregor, but he's never quite lived back up to his debut, the current heir to writing like the pre-war Mediterranean, so clear you can see the bottom, is probably Edward St Aubyn.
I like William Boyd's ability to write a different style with every book. Jonathan Coe can do that too, but I'm afraid for me he's outrun his own talents with the last few books - when he wrote sharper satire he was out in front, but things are a bit, well, bloated now. JM Coetzee was much more reliable, for longer, over more books, but I think even he's gone over the peak now.
I love Alan Paton.
I like some Dickens more than others - Dombey and Son is probably my favourite, but I agree that after the start the Pickwick Papers is really very good. I much prefer Trollope, and the real 19th century master for me was RS Surtees anyway.
Julian Maclaren-Ross still has no peer for me in short stories.
I really dislike modernism - persevering with Henry Green is always worth it, and the voice kicks in in the end, but persevering with Virginia Woolf has never rewarded me.
Patrick O'Brian is an interesting one (and not just for his writing IMO) - but in his Aubrey-Maturin novels (all 20 is it? of them), the first 2-3 have to be read just to set everything up, but he doesn't get into his stride until about halfway through book 3.
Anthony Powell had the same issue with A Dance to the Music of Time, which I re-read from time to time. Book 1 never feels like it's going anywhere, 2-6 are pretty uniformly excellent, 7-9 are a massive gear change, almost audible to the reader, but then settle back to excellence, 10 is one of my favourite books of all time, 11 is where he should have stopped, and 12 is semi-embarrassing because he's trying and failing to write about a world he no longer understands. I suppose that in itself is quite interesting - and he could certainly still *write* - but unless he deliberately set out to capture the melancholy of a man out of time (which would be very clever, but I genuinely don't believe he was trying to do that), rather than just trying and failing to be the observer he had always been to that point, then it would have been better left unwritten.
Up to a point Lord Copper.
What is the 'message' of poetry?
I'm guessing the maker of that video edited Tolkien's reply to make it sound more whimsically simplistic than it was. I suspect the two-word insult was followed by an explanation as to why he thought the criticism invalid.
Me too!
"She commented that he was late. He explained that his train had been delayed. She wondered whether to believe this, but asked him if he'd already had anything to eat or whether he still wanted dinner, and he said he did still want it."
I found it frustrating to read. It was like watching it through a glass window. Dialogue, properly done, gives you lots of little clues about the character in the way they phrase things and how they deliver speech, and brings them to life. There was nothing of that in this book.
The primary purpose of fiction for me is to tell a story. That's probably why I 'get' Tolkien - it's expressly what he set out to do with LoTR. Silmarillion is a series of stories - originally the Lost Tales told to an Anglo-Saxon sailor by the elves of Tol Eressëa, which is why some of them - the Narn i Chîn Húrin, Beren and Lúthien, the Fall of Gondolin, can stand completely alone as short stories. Short stories are a genre I generally prefer as well.
I have a friend who wrote a series of young adult novels which I got to read pre-publication. He would ask for feedback which I'd happily give, but when he asked me about what I thought about different characters I would be completely at sea. Characters become objects to whom events happen and I generally remember them and their names only inasmuch as they relate to those events.
Apparently this is unusual. And I'm not 100% consistent - I like many of Terry Pratchett's and Douglas Adams' characters - but they're so vividly drawn and larger than life, which might be why.
There has to be something that the writer is trying to say, to get across, whether "accounting and legal writing" or the most expressive poetry where the 'message' may be something less self-evidently explicit. Otherwise, why are you writing?
The tools of style that a writer chooses to do that are the technique of writing. If well chosen and well handled, they make it easier for the reader to grasp the writer's 'message', whatever it is that the writer is trying to say. If not so well chosen and well-handled, they make it harder. That is especially so if they get in the reader's way.
Using 'persuade' fairly loosely, I stand by my statement "It's the writer's job to persuade the reader, not the reader's job to try to work out what the writer is trying to say."
As @Dafyd has said That is well within what I mean by 'message', but it still doesn't get one away from the simple point that a good poet does this more effectively than a mediocre or poor poet.
A person I once knew well but who has long since died, with a publishing background, used to cite as a maxim, I think widely known in that industry rather than coined by him,
Worse are those who seem to write from a premise that if their readers can't understand them or are bored by what they produce, that's their readers' fault.
H.L. Mencken mentioned in his diaries a dodgy publisher whose marketing tactic was to take old novels with mundane storylines that were in the public domain, and re-issue them with covers designed to look pornographic.
Mencken very explicitly held the man in contempt, but I think it's a pretty clever business model. A real-life example that I have seen was The Apprenticeship Of A Duddy Kravitz, a serious-minded but still PG satirical Canadian novel, sold by an American publisher with a cover looking like one the racier Mickey Spillaine covers.
It certainly frees you from a lot of 'oughts' about putting in descriptions or life histories - just cut to the chase. Those other things - the scenery, the weather, what characters look like - will come in when they're needed.
The other point I would like to make is that although I usually dislike attempts to reproduce pronunciation in print (particularly the use of 'of' to simulate ''ve', I make an exception exception for Mark Twain's rendering if the differing styles of speech in the regions through which the story passes in 'Huckleberry Finn'. He was writing of something he knew intimately, from the inside, not the outside. And the liberal sprinkling of the dreaded 'N'word does not trouble me at all; it's how it was, and can't be changed.
oh, and it's 'quoation marks' East of the pond too, I've never heard of 'speech marks, and I'm 86.
Yes I suppose that is the more optimistic take away.
I quite liked the orcs actually - do we need a separate Tolkien thread? I could say what I thought about the elves and so on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNKL9onYB_8
Have you seen the performance of that on The Lawrence Welk Show?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8tdmaEhMHE
The Orcs get a bad press, which given their origins, is hardly their fault. I rather like the idea that Elves, despite their immortality, are capable of Sin and Rebellion...
IIRC, the only battle scene in which any of the hobbits are not present is Helm's Deep, which I admit I tend to skate over when re-reading the book yet again.
If you like to start a Tolkien thread, I'll happily contribute. Until then, namarie (Elvish for *be well*)!
Apart from the word "toke", the song actually makes a pretty good fit for LW. Probably because, musically, it does tribute older styles, specifically what Welk at the end calls "spirituals".
(Though I'm not sure if Welk's taxonomy is quite correct. @Nick Tamen schooled me on the proper parameters of a spiritual some time back, and I'd be curious to know how he thinks they apply to that tune.)
When I hurled one of the books across the room and scared my cat, I knew I had to stop reading this particular author or I might cause myself to go into cardiac arrest.
As a Proofreader, I simply can't understand book publishers who either don't employ competent editors/Proofreaders or don't have ANY!
My Penguin Classics edition of Sister Carrie had a page repeated, with the proper page missing(ie. there was, let's say, Page 142, followed by Page 142, and then Page 144).
Not sure if that's connected to Sister Carrie being a relatively obscure book. For what it's worth, it was a special "unexpurgated version", featuring stuff the original publisher had excised. The guy who wrote the intro opined that the restored material did not make it a better book.
I also dislike excessive descriptive passages, but I understand that they are necessary in some stories. If you are "world-creating" (whether in fantasy or sci fi) you really need to be descriptive to add verisimilitude to the story. Also, I recently read John Dickson Carr's first novel. I was shocked that he went so overboard in descriptive passages, because he didn't do that in later books. It was only at the end that I realized that the solution to the locked-room mystery depended on a specific architectural detail. If that was the only bit of architecture that he described in detail, the reader would have been suspicious that it was important, so he hid it in a flood of descriptive passages of every bit of architecture available. Boring, but it worked. My eyes glazed over long before the critical bit was described and I missed it entirely. So I understand why he did it. I don't like it, but I understand.
Another thing I hate is the alternate-chapters style: where the author bounces between two characters. Now, I don't mind a story where the actions of two or more character are described. That's good. What I object to in the purely mechanical alternating chapters. Character A's actions are in Chapter 1. Character B in Chapter 2. Character A in Chapter 3. Character B in Chapter 4. Character A in Chapter 5. Character B in Chapter 6....even describing it is boring. It makes for tedious reading.
The author's narrative style was such that I did not recognise the switch immediately. It was only when I realised that the first-person character could not possibly be a witness to the events described that I cottoned on.