I'm a baby
May. 21st, 2006 04:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tocryaboutWould you respect me less if I grovelled a bit for feedback on this chapter? Because since I posted it I've had this "did I turn off the stove" feeling that there's some glaring inconsistency that I missed during editing, and I've even been having dreams where people email me about it and explain what exactly the problem is and I wake up in great excitement thinking that I actually heard the Gmail Notifier beep.
(One of the Emails From My Subconscious said I use too many adverbs. My relationship with adverbs is a conflicted one, it would seem. (And man I had to struggle not to use "probably" or "apparently" in that last sentence because then the irony would have been too much.))
In that vein, something else that's been bugging me is the terrible spectre of what I'll call Anglican Sentence Structure, or ASS. My father first pointed this out to me when I was a wee girl of 15, and it's haunted me ever since: he pointed out that I have a tendency to "double" my sentences by using the ol' two-clause compound sentence ALL THE DAMN TIME, coupled with double subjects and/or verbs. He was talking about the Book of Common Prayer, actually, which (as an Anglican joke has it) was written by "Thomas Cranmer (and his wife)." Writers who absorb the language of the BCP, he said, tend to do the same thing.
I'll show you what I mean. Flipping to a random page in the BCP, we find:
Lord, we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works...
I could find dozens of similar examples. "Pardon and absolve us", "we have erred and strayed from thy ways", "manifold sins and wickedness", "ye that do truly and earnestly repent, and are in love and charity with your neighbours..." The repetition is not exactly necessary, and it's the sort of thing that books on writing would have us quash with extreme prejudice. (Gah, see? I did it again.)
And the books have a point. If you do ASS as much as the BCP does, it's not a problem--the Book of Common Prayer has never been accused of having a bad prose style. But if you do it without noticing, it can become ridiculous quickly. The only person who will probably notice my ASS is me or an editor, but page after page of ASS and it gets stale, even if the reader doesn't necessarily know what's making the prose so boring.
To make matters worse, I remember some writer (Andrew Greeley?) talking about a similar tendency to unnecessarily triple things. He referred to this as an Irish tendency; I'm not so sure. But this bites me in the butt particularly when I'm writing essays. I'll be writing a sentence, and I'll know full well that I have nothing more to say and may as well add the full stop, but arrgh it sounds wrong with only two objects and then the T.A. accuses me of padding.
I also notice something similar in LJ posts by people who are much, much more into Joss Whedon than I am. Because you know what? This? Is a little bit irritating. I see it so much that I'm sure the writers don't quite hear themselves doing it anymore. I like Joss, and there are some wonderful writers on the web who have clearly absorbed his style into their own. But when we're not paying attention, we realise just how unoriginal we are, and what kind of soil we've really grown in.
Me, I hear some Cranmer in my writing, and some Neil LaBute, a lot of Robertson Davies with the serial numbers filed off, and a lot of Margaret Atwood when I write couples. Those, at least, are respectable. It feels a lot worse when I realise I just ripped of Star Trek (not even good Star Trek), or Dawson's Creek, or Robin Hobb.
Who said "Good writers borrow, great writers steal"? It's a useful insight, anyway. We're at our best when we don't borrow a writer's style, keeping it clean and recognisable, but when we go joyriding off with it and hack the thing up for parts when we're done. And it's under those circumstances that it doesn't really matter what we steal.
(One of the Emails From My Subconscious said I use too many adverbs. My relationship with adverbs is a conflicted one, it would seem. (And man I had to struggle not to use "probably" or "apparently" in that last sentence because then the irony would have been too much.))
In that vein, something else that's been bugging me is the terrible spectre of what I'll call Anglican Sentence Structure, or ASS. My father first pointed this out to me when I was a wee girl of 15, and it's haunted me ever since: he pointed out that I have a tendency to "double" my sentences by using the ol' two-clause compound sentence ALL THE DAMN TIME, coupled with double subjects and/or verbs. He was talking about the Book of Common Prayer, actually, which (as an Anglican joke has it) was written by "Thomas Cranmer (and his wife)." Writers who absorb the language of the BCP, he said, tend to do the same thing.
I'll show you what I mean. Flipping to a random page in the BCP, we find:
Lord, we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually to be given to all good works...
I could find dozens of similar examples. "Pardon and absolve us", "we have erred and strayed from thy ways", "manifold sins and wickedness", "ye that do truly and earnestly repent, and are in love and charity with your neighbours..." The repetition is not exactly necessary, and it's the sort of thing that books on writing would have us quash with extreme prejudice. (Gah, see? I did it again.)
And the books have a point. If you do ASS as much as the BCP does, it's not a problem--the Book of Common Prayer has never been accused of having a bad prose style. But if you do it without noticing, it can become ridiculous quickly. The only person who will probably notice my ASS is me or an editor, but page after page of ASS and it gets stale, even if the reader doesn't necessarily know what's making the prose so boring.
To make matters worse, I remember some writer (Andrew Greeley?) talking about a similar tendency to unnecessarily triple things. He referred to this as an Irish tendency; I'm not so sure. But this bites me in the butt particularly when I'm writing essays. I'll be writing a sentence, and I'll know full well that I have nothing more to say and may as well add the full stop, but arrgh it sounds wrong with only two objects and then the T.A. accuses me of padding.
I also notice something similar in LJ posts by people who are much, much more into Joss Whedon than I am. Because you know what? This? Is a little bit irritating. I see it so much that I'm sure the writers don't quite hear themselves doing it anymore. I like Joss, and there are some wonderful writers on the web who have clearly absorbed his style into their own. But when we're not paying attention, we realise just how unoriginal we are, and what kind of soil we've really grown in.
Me, I hear some Cranmer in my writing, and some Neil LaBute, a lot of Robertson Davies with the serial numbers filed off, and a lot of Margaret Atwood when I write couples. Those, at least, are respectable. It feels a lot worse when I realise I just ripped of Star Trek (not even good Star Trek), or Dawson's Creek, or Robin Hobb.
Who said "Good writers borrow, great writers steal"? It's a useful insight, anyway. We're at our best when we don't borrow a writer's style, keeping it clean and recognisable, but when we go joyriding off with it and hack the thing up for parts when we're done. And it's under those circumstances that it doesn't really matter what we steal.
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Re: Telepaths sure seem inclined to have broken brains
Date: 2006-05-21 10:30 pm (UTC)These things are like zits, really. They are OMG HUGE to me but other people are just not that interested in the surface of my skin at the microscopic level. (And also, too many zits and people DO start to notice.)
"Clean" is probably the thing I admire most in other writers, so that is high praise. Putting that in my "buck up, little camper" file.
Hodya is in an uncomfortable position, as pretty much anyone would be who's dating Joel. It's probably a lot easier for both of them when they're in different cities, which is probably why the long-distance relationship lasted. She loves him but she's not a therapist and has her own needs, which he is either oblivious to or hopes will go away.
(For some reason I find it really hard to write young female characters--I constantly feel the feminists breathing down my neck and feel this crushing responsibility to make sure my ladies are strong powerful womyn who run with the wolves or something.)
I'm not sure it occurred to Joel that he could take Kathleen and leave the others, actually. It would have been unfair, but better than nothing, surely? I don't know. One does a lot of these sorts of problems in ethics classes, and individualism along the lines of "I like you/know you so I'll save you first" is naturally frowned upon.
I originally wrote it with them busting the patients out, but then I ran into the problem of thirty kids in a Volvo sedan and I hit my head on the table a few thousand times. Taking only Kathleen didn't smell right either.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 09:58 pm (UTC)Funnily enough, the person I know who does this most often? Is a professed Joss-hater. But he's watched the Joss shows. I think it's something one could pick up from too much lj, even without the source exposure.
I'm tragically behind on THL, but I'll get there.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 10:35 pm (UTC)It sort of makes me want to get very cranky and say "never read or watch anything again except Dickens and BBC Shakespeare, consarn it" but--but I like Star Trek. Even if it makes my characters sound like Ben Sisko when they get impassioned. (Ha, I should be so lucky. I once detected a note of Anne fucking Rice in a very dramatic scene and I had to lie down for awhile.)
no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 10:46 pm (UTC)It's funny how we grow accustomed to writing styles. On a much more basic level, I remember the first thing I ever read that was written in the third person present tense when I was eight or so -- Make Like a Tree and Leave by Patricia Danziger -- and how much I hated it. But I read so much fanfiction that's in the present, it takes conscious thought for me to write fiction in the past.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-31 12:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 08:34 pm (UTC)ahh, lovely...
Date: 2006-06-02 04:32 am (UTC)I guess what really stood out was Joel's...uncertainty about what to do, and then his characteristic firmness when he does decide to go to the clinic to see what's going on.
I like the characterization of Hodya too.
The wait for the next chapter is agonizing :) hope you post soon. Genevieve.
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