11-08-2018, 05:27 PM
(11-07-2018, 12:41 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: When I took some writing classes in the early 2000's I had a teacher who was a strong proponent of aggressive editing. He was adamant that you need to remove absolutely everyhting extraneous, every word and phrase and line of dialog that doesn't directly serve to progress the story or develop the characters. At first I took this as an absolute truth -- after all he was a published writer with several books under his belt, and much more knowledgable than me -- but soon discovered that by following his advice, me and my classmates were ending up with very generic prose. And I really don't see how that's a good thing. Editing is always necessary of course, but for streamlining the text and making it flow better, not for removing all personality from the writing. I suppose it makes sense for the genre he was working in but I think it was misleading to insist that it was something that could be applied across all genres. So there's that as well: what is "crap" and how much of it can you edit out before your prose starts reading like it could have been written by anyone?
Unpopular writing opinion: unique, characteristic prose, dare I say purple prose, is much more interesting to read than spartan prose. Certainly, every word should have some sort of purpose, but that purpose can be just as much stylistic as substantial. God knows I enjoyed Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1 quite a bit and there's absolutely no way it could ever be considered "spartan" in its prose. Sprawling, a little messy, occasionally repetitive, long-winded, a little bit verbose - and I loved very word of it. But I also adore Daniel Abraham's prose, which is a touch more minimalist. Sparse, often beautiful, lyrical, poetic, and with a stunning ability to conjure a living character in just a few sentences. (Abraham is to characterization as Sanderson is to worldbuilding.) China Mieville's prose is purple-as-all-get-out (pardon my language) but, in his words, it is a stylistic choice. H.P. Lovecraft is not considered a particularly brilliant prose-writer, but if his prose was more spartan, more minimalist, how much of the unique atmosphere and tone and horror of his stories would be lost? So much of that atmosphere is reliant on the poetry, the archaisms, of his words and the way he puts them together.
In the end, it's up to the writer to find their voice (or voices), however they may sound, however sparse or verbose they may be. I just finished the first draft of a novelette and it's almost 15k words long and probably shows a bit too much Auster and Caro (Robert Caro, whose lengthiness in his writing lead to Princeton's English department establishing a maximum length for senior theses) influence in the way it's written. For the story that I'm telling, it works very well, but were to try that voice out on, say, "Ants Discover Fire," it'd just fall apart completely. Writing a lot and reading a lot and being exposed to a wide variety of different voices and trying out a wide variety of voices and you'll develop your own, syncretizing everything you liked and everything you'd want to get out of prose, and even if you take different approaches to different stories, your prose will still be uniquely yours.
I mean, no one will ever agree on what's crap. But one thing is for sure - I don't want my prose sounding like any generic author.