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Again with the posting--ovulating, I swear. But I find myself again with something to babble about.
I was reading a conversation today and something in it struck me. It wasn't the point of the conversation at all, but it just seemed to come up and be there under the surface. "It" was a casual reference to those "old fashioned" kind of books, the kind that people perhaps call literature (literature here being a suspect word that means boring and forced on you by snobs), are really inferior to the kind of writing JK Rowling does. It wasn't so much saying that outright, but more a pre-emptive defense of Rowling against people who didn't class her with the greats, particularly as a stylist. Her writing was simply clear, and that was a good thing—and it all made her better for children (even all those adverbs, which aren't lazy but helpful to children who couldn't understand things just from dialogue).
And that made me think two things--one that I thought that certain things in Rowling's style were being described as conscious choices about style when I wasn't sure they were, and two, that she was being described as being better when what the person really meant was just "contemporary."
And that made me think about writing styles a lot more...
The kind of books that were being criticized in favor of Rowling's sparser style were described as having too much description, where as Rowling let you imagine your own world. Now, I like having some room to breathe in a book too, but I think JKR goes beyond that, and this reminded me of something that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sydpad said recently that I really agreed with about Rowling's style. It's too long to quote in full, but the whole thing can be read here. But here are some excerpts:
The point I'm taking right now from that is the connection to screenwriting. (And I should note here thatsydpad is not saying screenwriting is inferior at all.) When I was in grad school studying writing I swear one was more likely to hear that writing a screenplay like a play or a book was a bad thing than vice versa. In fact, one might actually hear that making your fiction writing like a screenplay was not so bad. In fact, I remember a teacher explaining ways he felt people tried to do that and did it badly. It wasn’t that he really wanted everyone to write fiction like screenplays (but he saw nothing wrong in aspiring to a movie-like experience), but because he recognized movies as a huge influence. For instance, he talked about writing stories in the present tense--the way screenplays are written--because one mistakenly thought this made the writing more immediate. (In fact it puts a barrier up between the words and the action. Instead of "He walked in," which the reader experiences in the moment s/he reads it, you get "He walks in," which is a direction to you, the reader, to make the character walk in. In a screenplay, of course, this is exactly what you are doing--telling the actors and directors what to do when they actually create the story in its final form. In the screenplay he’s not walking in, but he will in the movie.)
It's not that JKR is bad for writing in a way that's reminiscent of screenplays--I think that's very much part of our time. So much so that I don't think she's consciously saying, "I'm putting in adverbs to help children who can't understand through just dialogue" since that's frankly insulting to children and also suggests that the only way one can help a reader is to use crutches like adverbs that tell instead of show. To me it really does read more like she's just, like many of us naturally do now a days, seeing a movie in her head and quickly describing how the actors are saying their lines while keeping her eye on the story.
And what sort of strikes me about the way the "old-fashioned" kind of prose was spoken about is that I think often people assume that since the sparser style is modern, every other previous style has been consciously evolving to where we are now. Like, Dickens was talented, but unfortunately he hadn't yet learned that all that description etc. is unnecessary and boring and that we'd all rather just picture things for ourselves, so he's hampered by that. Good for him for having things that make up for that.
But really it's more interesting to think about the different situation older writers found themselves in. Movies create a sort of in-between space for stories that never existed before. They make a "real" version of the events described that you can just watch-- what they obviously don't do is create a story through only *words* like authors used to have to do. I think that today we're almost so used to movies we don't even realize the difference--just listen to Tolkien Purists talk about PJ's movies and you'll see how people can use "they could have just done it like it was in the book" as if they're stating the obvious in situations where they're actually asking the impossible. I think what they often really mean is that they want the movie to be like the movie that plays in their head when they read the book...only that's not really a movie. It's deceptively like a movie, but it's not a movie.
It's almost impossible to really imagine pre-movie storytelling, but obviously it existed. Using more words, or descriptive words, or big words, is not really so much more difficult than not. It's just different--and more word-based, which is probably why it's, you know, got more words. If you’re aspiring to a movie, otoh, you’re going to try to disguise everything not movie-like, and that includes language that draws attention to itself or passages that aren’t giving you the information a movie does. I have no idea what the reaction would be if we could reverse the process and, say, go back in time to read Rowling to Dickens fans. Would they feel the loss of the language? Like the artist lacked a certain level of competency at the craft—the way we today notice bad special effects in movies? Would the author's allowing us to make up our own images just feel like the author creating sketchy characters? After all, in that time period they might not have the same pool of stereotypes to draw on, and might not have as many different types of people to draw on as modern people do thanks to movies and TV, to use to fill in the blanks.
I'm not, in case it seems I am, making a case for older styles of writing necessarily being better. I do appreciate that I was exposed to this style from a pretty young age so it never seemed foreign to me--but I also like sparse styles of writing. I'm glad I can enjoy something like Les Misérables and not just be completely put off by interludes about Waterloo or the life story of monsignor Myriel who will have nothing to do with the story after dominating it for the first 90 pages. I definitely appreciate the different style of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose word-painting I think Sydney shows really does blow Rowling's adverbs out of the water. But some writers of sparse prose are better than writers of more florid prose.
I also think that far from a sparse style being the pinnacle of a natural evolution, that it's still just as common for people who like reading for the sake of reading to be drawn to other types of writers as well. I remember when I worked at the children's bookstore there was one little girl who started out only wanting to read Babysitter's Club, because she was into that. It was one of the closest things we had in the store to TV series--mass market, familiar, simply written etc. Then one day she came in wanting a "real book," a phrase she seemed to have come up with herself for books that weren't based on a formula with the characters never changing etc. So we started her on books with similar themes--school problems, etc., like Judy Blume. She read a lot of those, but one day came in and hesitatingly asked for someone who was "a better writer" than Judy Blume. Blume's plain, kid-like language was one of her selling points, and she was now specifically asking for something else. Which she got in Natalie Babbitt:
I was reading a conversation today and something in it struck me. It wasn't the point of the conversation at all, but it just seemed to come up and be there under the surface. "It" was a casual reference to those "old fashioned" kind of books, the kind that people perhaps call literature (literature here being a suspect word that means boring and forced on you by snobs), are really inferior to the kind of writing JK Rowling does. It wasn't so much saying that outright, but more a pre-emptive defense of Rowling against people who didn't class her with the greats, particularly as a stylist. Her writing was simply clear, and that was a good thing—and it all made her better for children (even all those adverbs, which aren't lazy but helpful to children who couldn't understand things just from dialogue).
And that made me think two things--one that I thought that certain things in Rowling's style were being described as conscious choices about style when I wasn't sure they were, and two, that she was being described as being better when what the person really meant was just "contemporary."
And that made me think about writing styles a lot more...
The kind of books that were being criticized in favor of Rowling's sparser style were described as having too much description, where as Rowling let you imagine your own world. Now, I like having some room to breathe in a book too, but I think JKR goes beyond that, and this reminded me of something that
sydpad said recently that I really agreed with about Rowling's style. It's too long to quote in full, but the whole thing can be read here. But here are some excerpts:Any writer will use a descriptor like 'stubbornly' once in a while, but Rowling does lean on it more than usual I think. I only had to open HBP to a random page to find the example above, but I really had to pore over Dickens and Austen to find any descriptors used for dialogue at all. That's why I think she's so suited to screenwriting-- it's like she just wishes she had actors there to sell the idea rather than having to find a way to write it down.
[snip]
Now, I defy you to actually say one word in a 'pleading' tone in way that's THAT clear, without being comical. You can't do it. She's created this brilliant situation which is her chief genius, but it would play out much better on screen, where you could use the cuts and some first-class actors in close-up to get the pleading across. The word pleading here is the whole scenario; it's not actually a description of Dumbledore's tone.
[snip]
It's like the robes-- OMG, the robes! that are there, and then they're not, and then they're this style or that style... the thing is, she's basically handing it over to the 'costume department'. She's barely bothering, generally, to really see the whole shot in her head and paint a picture. Story is be-all and end-all--
The point I'm taking right now from that is the connection to screenwriting. (And I should note here that
sydpad is not saying screenwriting is inferior at all.) When I was in grad school studying writing I swear one was more likely to hear that writing a screenplay like a play or a book was a bad thing than vice versa. In fact, one might actually hear that making your fiction writing like a screenplay was not so bad. In fact, I remember a teacher explaining ways he felt people tried to do that and did it badly. It wasn’t that he really wanted everyone to write fiction like screenplays (but he saw nothing wrong in aspiring to a movie-like experience), but because he recognized movies as a huge influence. For instance, he talked about writing stories in the present tense--the way screenplays are written--because one mistakenly thought this made the writing more immediate. (In fact it puts a barrier up between the words and the action. Instead of "He walked in," which the reader experiences in the moment s/he reads it, you get "He walks in," which is a direction to you, the reader, to make the character walk in. In a screenplay, of course, this is exactly what you are doing--telling the actors and directors what to do when they actually create the story in its final form. In the screenplay he’s not walking in, but he will in the movie.)It's not that JKR is bad for writing in a way that's reminiscent of screenplays--I think that's very much part of our time. So much so that I don't think she's consciously saying, "I'm putting in adverbs to help children who can't understand through just dialogue" since that's frankly insulting to children and also suggests that the only way one can help a reader is to use crutches like adverbs that tell instead of show. To me it really does read more like she's just, like many of us naturally do now a days, seeing a movie in her head and quickly describing how the actors are saying their lines while keeping her eye on the story.
And what sort of strikes me about the way the "old-fashioned" kind of prose was spoken about is that I think often people assume that since the sparser style is modern, every other previous style has been consciously evolving to where we are now. Like, Dickens was talented, but unfortunately he hadn't yet learned that all that description etc. is unnecessary and boring and that we'd all rather just picture things for ourselves, so he's hampered by that. Good for him for having things that make up for that.
But really it's more interesting to think about the different situation older writers found themselves in. Movies create a sort of in-between space for stories that never existed before. They make a "real" version of the events described that you can just watch-- what they obviously don't do is create a story through only *words* like authors used to have to do. I think that today we're almost so used to movies we don't even realize the difference--just listen to Tolkien Purists talk about PJ's movies and you'll see how people can use "they could have just done it like it was in the book" as if they're stating the obvious in situations where they're actually asking the impossible. I think what they often really mean is that they want the movie to be like the movie that plays in their head when they read the book...only that's not really a movie. It's deceptively like a movie, but it's not a movie.
It's almost impossible to really imagine pre-movie storytelling, but obviously it existed. Using more words, or descriptive words, or big words, is not really so much more difficult than not. It's just different--and more word-based, which is probably why it's, you know, got more words. If you’re aspiring to a movie, otoh, you’re going to try to disguise everything not movie-like, and that includes language that draws attention to itself or passages that aren’t giving you the information a movie does. I have no idea what the reaction would be if we could reverse the process and, say, go back in time to read Rowling to Dickens fans. Would they feel the loss of the language? Like the artist lacked a certain level of competency at the craft—the way we today notice bad special effects in movies? Would the author's allowing us to make up our own images just feel like the author creating sketchy characters? After all, in that time period they might not have the same pool of stereotypes to draw on, and might not have as many different types of people to draw on as modern people do thanks to movies and TV, to use to fill in the blanks.
I'm not, in case it seems I am, making a case for older styles of writing necessarily being better. I do appreciate that I was exposed to this style from a pretty young age so it never seemed foreign to me--but I also like sparse styles of writing. I'm glad I can enjoy something like Les Misérables and not just be completely put off by interludes about Waterloo or the life story of monsignor Myriel who will have nothing to do with the story after dominating it for the first 90 pages. I definitely appreciate the different style of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose word-painting I think Sydney shows really does blow Rowling's adverbs out of the water. But some writers of sparse prose are better than writers of more florid prose.
I also think that far from a sparse style being the pinnacle of a natural evolution, that it's still just as common for people who like reading for the sake of reading to be drawn to other types of writers as well. I remember when I worked at the children's bookstore there was one little girl who started out only wanting to read Babysitter's Club, because she was into that. It was one of the closest things we had in the store to TV series--mass market, familiar, simply written etc. Then one day she came in wanting a "real book," a phrase she seemed to have come up with herself for books that weren't based on a formula with the characters never changing etc. So we started her on books with similar themes--school problems, etc., like Judy Blume. She read a lot of those, but one day came in and hesitatingly asked for someone who was "a better writer" than Judy Blume. Blume's plain, kid-like language was one of her selling points, and she was now specifically asking for something else. Which she got in Natalie Babbitt:
"Listen, all you people lying lazy on the beach, is this what you imagine is the meaning of the sea?"
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From:
Greetings and...yes.
And so, suddenly, I find myself commenting. Strange how that works out.
I've read your posts on Draco/Snape/Sytherins and their glory/humiliation/imminent downfall/impending redemption and I've always been inspired, but for some reason, this was the post I felt driven to talk about. Because I'm weird like that.
And, because, like I said, you're a genius. For so long I've read Rowling and pondered over the idea that there seems to be some intangible aim, some unreachable goal, behind the work, and I think it might be an issue that is commonplace for fictional/fantasy writers. She is in an author's version of the classic Catch 22 scenario: writing about fictional wizards in a fictional world full of fictional beasts and fictional situations, but at the same time making them everymen and women. Keep it too real and you lose the fantastical element, making all the wand-waving and incantation-saying silly; keep it beyond the reach of normalcy, and kids wont get as attached to the characters. Harry himself is inside everyone and no one at all, simultaneously the speccy kid at school with two friends to his name and the awesome force of nature who can destroy oppressive regimes and defy invasive governments (and, now, make the ladies swoon in the hallways). It's the bridge that almost every author has to cross to reach their readers: either I am making you care about these people and their lives because you relate and connect (Harry feels awkward with Cho, Harry feels stupid in Potions), or the story is so wildly different from your experience that you are fascinated regardless of the unquestionable distance between the character's lives and your own (I know I've never faced a Basilisk wtf this is so weird I cannot put it down).
Movies make that gap a lot easier. I don't have to suspend reality quite as much when the image of Harry waving a wand and something exploding is right in front of me- we have cut out the middle man that is my personal interpretation of events. Conversely, I can identify directly with the wee eleven year old Harry on screen because I can see for myself that he is an underfed orphan that elicits my pity/ needs a hug. Maybe I needed a hug once too, and so I care about him.
From:
Re: Greetings and...yes....continued
With movies, you can do both. We (will) see the expansive awesome that is the joke shop, and we (will) hear that Ginny is beside herself when Ron calls her out as a harlot. For authors, the challenge of showing rather than telling is difficult- having Harry magically intuit that someone is upset, or that danger is approaching, isnt as dramatic or as interesting to readers as it would be to make them do the work. We know that the Department of Mysteries scenes in OoTP/ Dumbledore Tower Scenario in HBP are going to go badly long before they really do- JKR writes a suspenseful, if somewhat drawn out, moment that captures readers. Movies can do this with lighting and some voilin music. A picture is worth a thousand words, I am sure that the dramatic climax of OoTP, which lasted dozens of pages, could be cut into five minutes of film. Would it do the pages justice? Maybe not.
Perhaps because imagination is harder to come by, and more difficult to enrich and inspire these days (such a depressing thought), but giving people a solid, physical presence to connect with is an effective means of communicating your story. Kids with creative tendencies can picture Harry vividly enough from the books alone to satisfy them- I have a nine year old cousin who flat out refuses to see the films because he likes the images he has in his head and knows that the movies would only conflict with his imaginary world he has based off the books (I think the removal of Draco-as-tabloid-informant in the GoF movie would make his head explode). Fair enough. And JKR allows for that- by sparing us the lengthy details, she leaves more room for kids like him to elaborate by themselves (he also suspects that Ginny will get Harry another Quidditch book for his birthday, because there has to be more than one and he has read 'Quidditch Through the Ages' too many times. That probably won't be included in Book 7, but probably won't be ruled out, either.)
On the other hand, some people don't read the books until they've seen the movies, and then forever have Rupert/Dan/Emma as their mind's Trio. And because JKR never directly contradicts that (aside from that green eyes/blue eyes trick of Harry's...dont even get me started), it works for them. JKR may have them doing more elaborate things and involved in more complicated plots, but the basic template stays the same.
I like to think that JKR isnt thinking of the movies when she writes the books- clearly she wasnt at first, but even she is human, and even she must have an inkling of the theatrical "wow" that could be the final Tower scenes of HBP. (I say could be because...well, handled poorly they could also be a complete farce). Maybe she just wants to leave imagination wiggle room- which seems almost redundant when talking about a school full of wizards, but you know what I mean- so that kids like my cousin can extrapolate things like 'Ron makes a mean egg sandwich' from the text.
Um, I feel like this is very long and probably not very full of sense-making. I think you're very smart and wise, and full of insightful ideas and comments. And, yes.
From:
Re: Greetings and...yes....continued
Speaking of genius...I hadn't thought of it that way but that is a great point about the balance of everyman and hero. It is great the way JKR does it--and it may be instinctive almost at times. Part of it is maybe the use of the tight pov where we feel how Harry feels, and Harry rarely feels special--but at the same time it's not totally fake because I think we see Harry sometimes taking things for granted. So it's not like he's really walking around being overly humble like a saint. He gets impatient, he snape.
if you say 'Ginny shouted, beside herself', that conveys just as much as if you say 'Ginny had gone red in the face, was swaying agitatedly and so on and so forth.') JKR does not shy away from exploring more detailed descriptions, in fact, she gives almost painstakingly exact accounts of what are arguably less important elements of the story (the Twins' joke shop etc); however, when she thinks such attentions might distract from a central conflict or pivotal scene, she abandons them in favor of brevity- using fewer words to show the same thing, then moving along.
Right--the story and the pace is all-important at all times. There are times where she will really focus on details in the setting, for instance. The first time we see the MoM is like that, I think. It sweeps you along--and obviously that's working!
And there is something fun about being able to extrapolate things like "Ron makes a mean egg sandwich" from a text. I think fandoms really rely on that kind of wiggle room.