Blogetary (Weblog + Commentary = Blogetary)

Or perhaps a Style Snob?  Are you so hung up on what’s marketable and “in” and what the acceptable “tags” are that you don’t pay attention to anything else in what’s being written and what’s being read? Do you poopoo past classical authors as being anachronistic simply because they don’t move fast enough for your post-modern 21st century gotta have the most recent technology and no attention span life? If so, you’ll probably be really irritated with this blog and should probably move on to something else.

When I was growing up and daydreaming about being a writer, the LAST thing I thought about was fashion or style. Well, maybe I thought a bit about what I would be wearing whilst signing books, or spent some consideration on what made up correct writer’s togs (sweater and jeans or tshirt and shorts were my two favorite choices) but that’s about it.  One of the reasons I was drawn to writing was because I wanted to create my own worlds in my own way without any inference from anyone else. And I also knew that it wouldn’t matter what I looked like or how old I was, because those things don’t matter in writing like they do in other professions.

I wanted that freedom to be me in my writing.  I still believe in that freedom, just as I still believe that I should be able to wear whatever I want to work. As long as I get the job done and I’m modestly covered and hygenically clean, it’s no one else’s business how I dress for work.

Recently, however, I’ve come to realize how much of a “high fashion” industry writing has become.  I’m not just talking how suddenly it’s very important whether or not a writer is attractive or young enough to spew out a best seller a year for their publishing house, I’m also talking about the style of writing now viewed as acceptable in the world.

In the introduction to George MacDonald’s Lilith, C.S. Lewis talks about the difference between how a story is written, and the story itself. What makes it a classic story? Lewis points out that MacDonald was a writer of his time. He was from the early 19th century and son of a Presbyterian minister and he had a particular florid style of writing that many people could not get through in Lewis’ time and most people can’t through in the 21st century.  However, the stories he wrote (The Light Princess, The Princess and Curdie, Lilith, At the Back of the North Wind) became classics.  What did people actually remember? Not the writing style, but the story itself.  As Mercedes Lackey once pointed out (and several other writers as well, I think) there is no such as “deathless prose.”

Louisa May Alcott is another writer who might get passed over when judged on style.  She wrote after the Civil War during the 19th century.  She could be viewed as too sentimental, too stuck in her transcendentalist 19th century view of the world, but people love her children’s stories (Little Women, Little Men, Jo’s Boys, The Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, The Old Fashioned Girl).  And she was considered a feminist in her time. Some of her finest tales were for adults (Work being her best).  But I’ve known people who turn up their noses at her because they just can’t get past her style.

Let’s see – who else could we put in that list: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, William Congreve, Ben Jonson, Jonathon Swift, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Aphra Behn, Ayn Rand, Mark Twain, Laura Ingalls Wilder, L.M. Montgomery…..HOMER, Dante Alighieri, Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco…..George Eliot, Thomas Hardy….

All shuffled under the rug because they “move too slow,” “just can’t stand that style of writing,” “too sentimental,” “too much description,” “too….”

You get the idea.

Each writer wrote according to the style and fashion of their times, some varying a bit ouside their norm.  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard (or read) people making disparaging remarks because of the above writer’s writing styles.  I’m not talking about the types of stories they wrote, but how they wrote it.  Yes, Thomas Hardy spends a lot of time on description. Too much for most people these days. But guess what, if it hadn’t been for that description his books couldn’t so easily have been made into movies.  They were cinematic in their description.  People didn’t have movies back then. They had books. Jane Austen may have spent a lot of time describing the manners of people in the drawing room, but in her world, that was where the real action happened. Every little thing in the drawing room meant something, or she wouldn’t have put it on the page.

It’s called an education, people.  You read what has been written before you. You learn how to decipher the style and find the story.  In so doing you learn history and how it works.  You learn to see the world through an alternate world view.  Why do you think Jules Verne wrote what he wrote? Or Philip K. Dick? And since humans have such a short attention span and memory, perhaps if time is taken to learn the different world views and history, maybe, just maybe, this once, history won’t repeat itself.

Let’s begin again – and I’ll try to be more straightforward.

These days the only way to begin the story is in the middle of the action. Draw the reader in as fast as you can.  Kill someone off in the first paragraph and have them gripped! Publishers want readers to be hooked by the first page and you’re competing for a spot in the sun, a slice of the pie and it’s all a zero sum equation and there’s no room for anyone else! Right?

Wrong. Writing (and getting published) is NOT a zero sum equation.  No, you will not be putting yourself behind if you bother to help other writers in their journey forward. And Yes, there are several ways to begin a story.  Sometimes it’s with dialogue between the characters (introducing the characters and how they interact with each other IS relevant to the story, don’t you agree?).  Sometimes the author can draw the reader into the story as they describe a trip down a long single lane road, describing the leaves in autumn as the car or carriage turns the bend and finds the house where the characters live (and before you know it, you know the setting and characters and are halfway through the first chapter).

Both of those two methods of beginning a story are perfectly acceptable, if not fashionable in the current writing climate.

In other words, if “It was a dark and stormy night” was relevant to the story and how it begins, then there’s nothing inherently wrong with using it. It may have gone out of “fashion” because it was used badly, but if used well, there’s nothing wrong with it.

Another fashion I’m tired of hearing about? The whole dialogue tag debate.   Some people will insist that the only tag needed, if needed at all, is “said.” And to use anything else is wrong, bad, horrible, awful, a disgrace and you obviously don’t know what you’re doing if you say use “grimaced” or “smirked” or “screeched” say as a dialogue tag. Others insist that the only tag needed is an action tag.

I beg to differ.

First page of Little Women, Alcott uses “sighed,” “grumbled,” “added,” and “said,” all to great effect as she introduces her characters.  Those tags helped describe the basic, fundamental characteristics of her characters (Jo grumbled, Meg sighed, Amy added, Beth (the sister with the least ego) said). In Old Fashioned Girl, on the first page, Alcott at first doesn’t use any tags at all, moves on to ”said” eventually, and “demanded” after that (and if you know Tom then you know that “demanded” would be the mode in which he spoke).

The first question you ask yourself when you write should NOT be what is fashionable, or what is marketable, or what is the current style! It should be what serves the scene? What serves the story? If you are writing a brother and sister bickering in rapid succession (the opening of Old Fashioned Girl) then you may not need any tags.  If you are introducing four very different young women in the first paragraph of a story (the opening of Little Women), then tags may exactly be what you need to help differentiate between them.  But of course, unless you bother to read something other than 21st century literature, you won’t know that.

A lot of that type of discussion is nothing more than discussing whether or not your nail polish should be brown or brownish red, really.  What if China Red is the best to go with what you have on? Or Velvet Black? Are you going to balk at using those colors because they aren’t in fashion? Or are going to go with your gut feeling, cut the restraints of the publishing/fashion industry, use what works best for you, and possibly create a new fashion trend?