Now that we have analyzed how some writers use concrete nouns and verbs, lets move to the next four suggestions from S&W.
(1) Revise and Rewrite all your work. We have already performed this task, but now look at the piece you posted a few weeks ago and reread it with an eye for flaws in arrangement that call for transpositions. Experiment with what you have written and see if your sentences can be moved around for greater effect.
(2) Do not overwrite. Eliminate all ornate and hard to digest prose. With a rest and a break from writing, you will find it easy to pick out and expurgate all those "sickly-sweet words and the overblown phrases".
(3) Do note overstate. "A single carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for your readers, the object of your enthusiasm." Superlatives are excessive adverbs and adjectives. For example, the words bravest, healthiest, weakest or most fiercely, most recently, most interesting wear on reader tolerance. Superlatives are sometimes used in comedy; The Lego Movie's dialogue uses many superlatives to comic effect; however, if you are writing a serious piece, it's likely a superlative will only diminish your work.
For a laugh here is an example of superlative use from the Lego Movie.
"One day, a talented lass or fellow, a special one with face of yellow, will make the Piece of Resistance found from it's hiding refuge underground, and with a noble army at the helm, this Master Builder will thwart the Kragle and save the realm, and be the greatest, most interesting, most important person of all times."
Now pick another page from the book you are reading and post in the comment section if the writer is guilty of overwriting or overstating.
3 comments:
Tobias Wolff, Old School,page 152:
The platform began to fill. The old woman in the white bonnet came over to show us her ticket and ask if her train had already come and gone without her. I told her it was my train too, and that it hadn't yet arrived. A little while later I saw her showing her ticket to another man.
Mr. Ramsey bent forward and rubbed his eyes. "What will you do?" he said. "I don't know." "Of course, Quite right, too. But you might..." Then he stopped and never finished the thought.
When the train came he lugged my suitcase on board and put it in the luggage rack at the end of the car. I followed him out to the vestibule and we shook hands.
"Here one says something", he said. "It's not the end of the world, be game, you'll work things out...But for all I know you won't work things out. How should I know?" He patted his pockets for the Gitanes, put one in his mouth, and offered another to me. When I hesitated he stuck the pack in my shirt pocket and stepped down the platform and walked away, two long sweat stains darkening the back of his jacket. I was glad to see him go; several minutes still remained before departure time and I'd worried he might stand vigil outside, watching me through the window and giving sad little nods whenever our eyes met.
A steady line of wilted-looking passengers jostled past me into the carriage. Time to make a move. I pushed through to a forward-facing window seat, claimed it with my overnighter-my gladstone-took out In Our Time, and made way to the smoking car.
Tim's comments:
On this page I do not think Wolff is guilty over overwriting. His sentences are filled with just enough information to set the mood and convey the bare essentials. His language definitely becomes more descriptive in the last two paragraphs, but this is effective as he brings the chapter and essential section of the book to a close. I much prefer this writing style as the word selection becomes much more important and the writer is able to expand the style and particular words used to match the emotion of the story segment. Thoughts?
Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel.
“In the years that had followed Eliza’s removal to Dixieland, by slow inexorable chemistry of union and repellence, profound changes had occurred in the alignment of the Gants. Eugene had passed away from Helen’s earlier guardianship into the keeping of Ben. This separation was inevitable. The great affection she had shown him when he was a young child was based not on any deep kinship of mind or body or spirit, but on her vast maternal feeling, something that poured from her in a cataract of tenderness and cruelty upon young, weak, plastic life.
The time had passed when she could tousle him on the bed in a smother of slaps and kisses, crushing him, stroking him, biting and kissing his young flesh. He was not so attractive physically – he had lost the round contours of infancy, he had grown up like a weed, his limbs were long and gangling, his feet large, his shoulders bony, and his head too big and heavy for the scrawny neck on which it sagged forward. Moreover, he sank deeper, year by year, into the secret life, a strange wild thing bloomed darkly in his face, when people spoke to him his eyes were filled with the shadows of great ships and cities.
And this secret life, which she could never touch, and which she could never understand, choked her with fury. It was necessary for her to seize life in her big red-knuckled hands, to cuff and caress it, to fondle, love and enslave it. Her boiling energy rushed outward on all things that lived in the touch of the sun. It was necessary for her to dominate and enslave, all her virtues – her strong lust to serve, to give, to nurse, to amuse – came from the imperative need for dominance over almost all she touched.
She was herself ungovernable; she disliked whatever did not yield to her governance. In his loneliness he would have yielded his spirit into bondage willingly if in exchange he might have had her love which so strangely he had forfeited, but he was unable to reveal to her the flowering ecstasies, the dark and incommunicable fantasies in which his life was bound. She hated secrecy; an air of mystery, a crafty but knowing reticence, or the unfathomable depths of otherworldliness goaded her to fury.
Convulsed by a momentary rush of hatred, she would caricature the pout of his lips, the droop of his head, his bounding kangaroo walk.
“You little freak. You nasty little freak. You don’t even know who you are – you little bastard. You’re not a Gant. Any one can see that. You haven’t a drop of papa’s blood in you. Queer one! Queer one! You’re Greeley Pentland all over again.”
Does he overwrite: No, I could not find one "Sickly-sweet" word.
Does he overstate: No, his numerous expansions within his complex and compound sentence improve the images.
I find no overwriting or overstating.
I agree with what you've said on the development of details.
I noticed his uses, to good effect, an aposiopesis (rhetorical device: the sudden stop in midcourse of a statement. leaving it unfinished to emphasize emotion, character mindset, etc).
"Of course, Quite right, too. But you might..."
Highly recommend this technique in your writing!
Post a Comment