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Filed under: writing

Matthew Walther hath no love of Strunk & White: The Art of Writing Well

How does Style compare with other guides to English prose composition? Most American readers would, I imagine, have me measure Lucas’s book against The Elements of Style. I must confess that my admiration for Strunk and White’s slim bestseller is slight. Its brusque prose seems to me a dubious model, even for young writers, and one doubts that anyone, save perhaps a few anxious chinoed and seersuckered undergraduates in the 1960s, has ever attempted to work strictly according to principles espoused by its authors. If six million buyers of The Elements of Style had taken the book's instructions literatim, American literature in the second half of the twentieth century would (hard to imagine!) have been even more impoverished. Only by becoming suspicious of much great English prose can one hope to lionize a sentence like “Dead leaves covered the ground.”

 

Matthew Walther is an American writer.

 

via goo.gl

 

Why, sometimes, you just gotta use the pen

If I’m really stuck, I go back to longhand. There’s something about the privacy and the immediacy of it that seems to help. When you’re writing longhand, your attention is on the sentence—you’re not looking at the full page. The remove between the keyboard and the screen can hamper me and mess me up. The trick is to will yourself into the hypnotic state where you believe your own language and your own story. You have to pare out distractions, especially the vast banality of the Internet, which I find lethal to fiction writing. Fiction is so much harder and scarier to write than nonfiction. It requires an enormous amount of concentration and faith to carve out that little bit of space into which you can insert a world that feels real. 

via newyorker.com

From a wonderful snippet of interview with Wells Tower, who goes both ways -- fiction and non. I very much like this too: I have a nonfiction desk and a fiction desk, and I’ve deliberately not gotten wireless Internet. In order to go online, I have to go over to the nonfiction desk. Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/04/the-tool-box-we.html#ixzz...

 

The allure of Ted Hughes' letters, especially in typescript

In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm's meta-biography of Sylvia Plath, Malcolm at one point describes reading some letters that Ted Hughes, who was married to Plath when she killed herself in 1962, wrote in the 1980s to Anne Stevenson, who was then writing a biography of Sylvia Plath. Stevenson Malcolm read the letters during a visit Malcolm paid to Stevenson in England. Earlier, Stevenson had mentioned to Malcolm, as a way of explaining what it was like to be around Hughes, that "One thing you must understand about Ted is that he was and still is an electrically attractive man." 


Here's Malcolm reading the letters. It's obviously mostly about Hughes, but it's interesting as well for its sensitivity (in this highly sensitive writer) to the experience of reading letters written in different media — a letter printed from a word processor being in a different media, though the paper be the same, than one  typed on an Olivetti.  

The letters from Hughes immediately drew me, as if they were the electrically attractive man himself. As I looked at the pages of dense, single-paced typing, punctuated by x-ings-out and penned-in corrections, I had a nostalgic feeling. The clotted, irregular, unrepentantly messy pages brought back the letters we used to write one another in the 1950s and '60s on our manual Olivettis and Smith Coronas, so different from the marmoreally cool and smooth letters young people write one another today on their Macintoshes and IBMs. Reading the letter giving Hughes's response to the chapters Anne had sent him of her short biography, I felt my identification with its typing swell into a feeling of intense sympathy and affection for the writer. Other letters of Hughes's that have come my way have had the same effect, and I gather that I am not alone in this reaction; other people have spoken to me with awe of Hughes's letters. Someday, when they are published, critics will wrestle with the question of what gives them their peculiar power, why they are so deeply, mysteriously moving. 

Chaos, Clutter, & the Writer’s Challenge | Wired Science | Wired.com

My post at Neuron Culture:

In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm’s meta-biography of Sylvia Plath, Malcolm structures the book around visits, mostly in and about London, with other writers who have written about Plath and encountered the hazards, both obvious and submerged, that await anyone writing about people live or recently alive. For the end of the book she saves a visit to one of the oddest Plath memoirists: Trevor Thomas, a man of many hats who happened to live in the flat below Plath’s in the last couple of months before she killed herself, and who in 1986 had been coaxed by the Independent to retail his memories of her. He was 79 then and a few years older when Malcolm visited him.

Thomas and a friend, Robbie, pick her up at the tube stop in London, pick up a pizza and some olives for dinner, and drive back to Thomas’s flat. The entire visit is searing, as Malcolm, a writer of incomparable intelligence, fierceness, and compassion, tries to give order to Thomas’s dense, cluttered existence in a house that is much the same way. Toward the end of this passage, which is just short of the end of the book — this is both a biography of biography as well as of Plath, so she’s trying to tie up one just before the other — Malcolm offers this extraordinary passage about the challenge facing any writer. It’s vintage Malcolm and an extraordinary view of the writer’s challenge:

 

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Is publishing really doomed by oversupply of writing?

Until the digital age, content was scarce. It wasn’t scarce because people didn’t create it; it was scarce because it required an investment to distribute it. That’s no longer true. Anybody with an Internet connection can make anything they write (or snap or video or sing) available to anybody else with an Internet connection. For just about free. That’s just one reason — among many — why the amount of content choices available to everybody has mushroomed in the past 15 years.

When the supply of something goes up faster than demand, the price of the something drops. Or, put another way, money flows to scarcity. And content is anything but scarce. That, in a nutshell, is the inexorable problem publishers face. And every day it gets worse. More backlist and out of print and public domain and orphan books get digitized and made available. More bloggers blog. More commercial operations put content online to satisfy their own stakeholders. More videos are uploaded to YouTube and more documents are uploaded to Scribd. All of it is processed and made discoverable by Google and other search engines. And the cumulative effect of all this content being created as something other than new publications for sale is cutting into the market for content that is being created with the expectation of sale.

via idealog.com

I understand the basic argument that Mike Shatzkin makes here (and others often elsewhere), but I have one fundamental doubt (hope?) about it:

Yes, there's plenty of supply out there. But is the supply of really good stuff actually much much larger? Certainly not in the proportion that supply in general is.

Let's assume for a minute that No, the supply of really good writing has not expanded immensely. (An arguable point, I know, but go with it for a moment.) If that's the case, is there still a way that the best writing can be charged for profitably, whatever the medium -- or will the robust supply of not-quite-as-good writing (or far-from-as-good writing) provide enough value for its low cost that no one will chip in extra for high value? And if there are readers willing to pay for good stuff (I certainly am), is there a business/publishing model that can, as it were, indulge them?

That's the discussion that gets left out when people look at supply as monolithic. Think food. There's LOTS of food available in the U.S., much of it very cheap compared to historical norms, because supply is great. But people still pay for especially good meals and even pretty good meals. Can we expect no equivalent regarding books and articles?

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