Albert Anker: Der Grossvater erzählt eine Geschichte, 1884
A commenter was kind enough to leave his opinion on one of my reviews from a couple weeks back. (No, I won’t link to it. But I won’t delete it either.) He wasn’t happy with my comments on a certain novel. He said the novel talked about things he knew from first hand experience, and he’d found it a great story. My criticisms of the author’s writing style and use of words (if I understood his comment correctly) were out of line, in his opinion. Nobody cared about that stuff.
In a way I sympathize with him. There’s a difference between good writing and good storytelling. There are a number of well-regarded wordsmiths out there who can’t tell an interesting story to save their lives. And plenty of guys who’d keep you fascinated telling tales at a campfire, who couldn’t write a coherent sentence. There’s some injustice in the fact that the first group is considered superior to the second.
I’ve known a couple fellows myself, in my time, who could keep an audience mesmerized, even though they butchered the English language. They made good use of the verbal storyteller’s tools—intonation, facial expression, changes in volume, dramatic pauses, gestures.
But the problem is that when a storyteller sits down to write a story on paper, he loses most of those tools. If he wants to have the same kind of effect on his audience, he now needs to use the written storyteller’s tools—word choice, rhythm, sentence length, simile, metaphor, etc…. It goes on and on. I suspect a writer has a far greater variety of tools than the verbal storyteller. Which, sadly, makes the job rather harder. It takes a lot of work to learn to use them all. But with those tools the writer can do something the campfire storyteller never can. He can tell us things on multiple levels.
Here’s an example. I think I’ve used it before. The opening paragraph of Raymond Chandler’s mystery, The Big Sleep. I won’t even set it up. Let Philip Marlowe tell you himself:
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie, and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
The character Marlowe is doing more than describing the weather and his own clothing here.
He’s telling us he’s not rich (the suggestion is that he has one good suit). He’s telling us he likes a drink from time to time. He’s telling us he’s impressed enough by money to make an extra effort to accommodate the people who possess it. But he’s also telling us he finds that effort a little ridiculous. He can laugh at himself about it.
Author Chandler, in his famous essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” tells us that the ideal hardboiled hero is a man who wouldn’t take a bribe.
Philip Marlowe has just told us, by indirection, that he’s that very man.
The words are the servant of the story.
Every once in a great while, I encounter a story that captures me to a degree that I will force my way through the tortured writing in order to savor the story. (David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus comes to mind. However, as much as I’ve pondered the story, I could never bring myself to reread it because of Lindsay’s prose.)
If your words are not serving the story well, then you need to get better servants. You owe it to your story.
Our head pastor fits is a walking illustration of what you’re talking about–he makes so much sense when he’s talking, but to put it down in writing is torture.
I remember reading some light romance novels my grandmother gave me once, a box set, and one out of the set was decently written, but it didn’t keep me interested, even though the story was pretty good. Another of the books was just terrible, used every cliche you can think of, and I couldn’t put it down! Makes me think of some Dave Barry jokes I’ve heard about Dan Brown’s writing–end every chapter with a semi-catastrophic event (suddenly, shots were fired!), but then in the next chapter, or two chapters down, reveal it wasn’t really relevant.
Would prize-winning authors whose works I don’t know a single person who reads, (on the one hand) and best-selling authors such as Dan Brown be the 2 ends of the spectrum?
One writes artistic books with stories no-one is interested in, the other terribly written pulp with compelling stories.
Pretty much, yes.
“If your words are not serving the story well, then you need to get better servants. You owe it to your story.”
I like that, but I also think there are two types of skillful wordsmithing.
There is the type I will call literary, for lack of a better term, exemplified here by Chandler. That is, language meant to have elevated greatest density of meaning, with every word perfectly balanced. Chandler may actually be moderately literary, in that sense. There are both genre and “Literary” authors whose language is much more attention-seeking, and some of them can be quite good.
Then there is language that seeks transparency above all else, that just wants to get out of the way of the story. This, too, requires craft. It has to have enough rhythm to not jar the reader, but not so much rhythm that it feels distractingly poetic. It’s hard to think of good examples, but I think that a lot of the most popular fiction does this quite well–it isn’t all the grammatical and literary crap epitomized in Stephanie Meyers or Dan Brown.
It just, by definition, won’t draw attention to itself.
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