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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:
A random thought on thick description
One thing that struck me about your observations is a general shift in stylistic conventions, one which I'm not certain is really related to film. And that's the shift away from the omniscient narrator. I haven't read much Dickens, but I've read a lot of Dostoyevsky and Wilkie Collins who I think will work as well for these purposes, since they both feature the same Victorian style of description you're talking about. The kind of descriptive tangents they make are enabled by the fact that the narrative voice is not limited in time, space, knowledge or to the point of view of a single character. When American lit (both popular and literary) moved to favoring third-person (and to a much lesser degree first-person)-limited, the scope of descriptions changed. They became limited to the knowledge, experience and voice of the pov character. In third-person pov, the author can only describe what the character knows, what the character perceives, and what the character would attend to. Take three different 3rd-p-limited pov characters into the same Mcdonald's at the same moment and they will in all likelihood describe entirely different scenes-- one might fixate entirely on the shrill noise created by a birthday party of small children, another might dwell on the generic vacuity of the corporate decor, another might cheerfully attend to the brightness of the lighting and the cleanness of the floor, while a fourth may focus entirely on the breasts of the cashier.
Which is not to say that limited pov equals spare description. I'm thinking of a couple popular novels I've read recently-- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and well, a whole bunch of mysteries by Jonathan Kellerman. while keeping to 3rd p limited, both authors paint detailed and vibrant sensory pictures. (Stephenson's image of a leather executive chair swallowing the buttocks of the pov character like a soft, buttery calfskin catcher's mitt may stay with me for the rest of my natural.) Kellerman, on the other hand, takes some flack from readers sometimes for the thickness of his descriptions. In particular, people often complain the detail to which his pov character observes peoples appearances (down to the shade of eyeliner). I think these complaints are pretty minor-- but they also illustrate the descriptive dilemma of 3rd person limited, because to the degree to which Kellerman's decriptions jar, they jar in part because a straight male psychologist is noting minute details of women's jewelry, make-up, and clothing that seem inconsistent with (stereotyped, at least) expectations of what a straight male professional would know about and pay attention to.
On the other hand, it's interesting to note that critics have praised Kellerman's richly described style as "cinematic." ;-)
From:
Re: A random thought on thick description
From:
Re: A random thought on thick description
But yes, the omniscient narrator--perhaps part of a greater trend towards invisible style? That's probably too reductive again. Maybe people just started moving away from it. Where I work I almost always have to write in first person limited so I'm hyper aware of being limited to pov but also trying to get in description while still sounding conversational.
I feel like I can't add anything to your comment--I loved reading it. I'll probably be thinking about it tomorrow too. And also that catcher's mitt. Awesome!