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The title reminds one of Orwell’s essay on the English language. Other than his essay about having to shoot an elephant, it’s my favorite. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
I was going to conclude with an exhausted sigh of TL;DR (ironically enough), but then I scrolled down to the bottom and found the gist:
" I think the following rules will cover most cases:
i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. "
Oftentimes, intentionally using superfluous words, particularly obscure words, is important in building mood.
Lovecraft for instance. And Robert Howard (author of Conan).
And, the granddaddy of all: Thomas Carlyle whose “French Revolution” is packed with metaphor, simile, superfluous words, and convoluted sentences... indeed, he made fun of the way he writes in “Sartur Resartus” in a hilarious fashion.
Title corrected: eliminate superfluous words
“Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick” -Kevin Malone
The article seems like a caricature of itself, but to the sentiment of the title: the devil’s in the details.
I think people tend to imagine Hemingway as spare prose and pithy sentences, and when they try to mimic their stereotype of him, they end up with dry prose and dead sentences. Real Hemingway had range, often wrote long, descriptive sentences. And here we find the devil:
The trick isn’t wringing your prose down to a clear, factual account. The trick is knowing in the first place what is “necessary” to convey the truth of whatever writing.
“What literally occurred” is only one possible angle on this, and focus on that is neither necessary nor sufficient to create artful prose. Depending on the piece you may focus on what occurred, the feeling and mood of it, the reader’s relationship to any of it, or the questions any of the above evokes—-if the question is “what might this prose be _for_, at its heart?” then the list of answers is endless. And so the answer to the question “which words are necessary?” is “any of them might be, depending on what you intend to convey and to whom.”
So yes, eliminate every superfluous word, fine. Also, apply only the necessary paint strokes to the canvas. This advice is not helpful for a beginner, it’s only useful to someone who has artistry to convey and enough craft to bear critique.
It's not terrible advice because beginners tend to overwrite. This is why you'll find fantasy novels where the first page is scene setting, usually with a twist of the picturesque which is supposed to awe the reader.
But nothing much happens until paragraph 5, by which time no one cares, because they want a novel, not a tour guide. ("And on our left we have the Unicorn Park of Alkkl'Blah. Built by the Morgon Autarchy to commemorate their triumph in the Zoonac Wars of the third century, its thousand foot crystal spires are legendary for...")
You can do a lot with a single telling detail. Instead of describing everything, describe one thing that sums up everything else. Leave the rest to the reader's imagination.
(Just to be clear, I don't think it's "terrible advice," just not the most relevant for beginners.)
I definitely recognize what you're talking about, but my sense is that there are two core problems of poor writing, neither of which is helped at all by this advice:
1. Having something to say at all. This is the art of it, not the craft. If you have something resonant to communicate and you do it with living words, audiences suddenly become quite forgiving of sloppy craftsmanship. I won't dunk on any books in particular, but we can all think of books that are both wildly popular and objectively terrible.
I think the right advice to overcome this issue is "live a life. Keep your eyes open. Like really go for it, man." Maybe after the first, breathless draft is complete then say to this author: good, now try cutting half the words but keeping everything you intended.
2. Bad craftsmanship. Poorly constructed scenes, paragraphs, sentences.
I think the right advice here is "write. write. write. read. write more." The aphorism goes something like "everyone has a million terrible words inside them, and they must write them all out before any of the good ones emerge."
Claim: in the normal course of events, if an intelligent and earnest person is an avid writer and reader and student of the world, their million words will become progressively better until they are finally good. I believe my quantity over quality focus for students is borne out by the research across domains.
"Nobody likes exposition dumps or purple prose, brutally cut everything" not only isn't central to the goal of generating a bunch of words, but it may actually discourage people from producing the volume of work I think they'll need to become good. I say write purple, write a 200,000 word infodump. No one likes infodumps until some genius comes along with the first pure infodump novel that sells 5mm copies while everyone else complains, and then that's the publishing game for the next 10 years.
Just whatever you do, write.
- Having something to say at all.
Yes. Most bloggers. A full screen of infodump about themselves and what they were doing, then, perhaps, just perhaps, some content. Too often, just enough content to maximize clicks.
- Bad craftsmanship.
That's a teachable skill. Merely writing many words is not enough. Someone must criticize them. Back when journalism had copy editors, many writers learned their trade as newspaper reporters.
- Just whatever you do, write.
And if no one is reading it, please stop.
Somehow there is a world of difference in when one moves from Henry James to Hemingway.
It is as if James violates every maxim of how to write simply and clearly and succinctly, but ultimately his writing has aura of ambiguity which enriches it rather than diminishes it. He will go paragraphs and pages even, one has to mentally unwind a lot of it, like an intricate puzzle, to grasp the tiniest specks, bits of knowledge about the story, about the plot. And the thing is he doesn't do much description, all the details are abstracted but the seeming convoluted manner, and subtle hints deducted from indirection, it does create a captivating experience.
With fantasy novels specifically, yes people do want a tour guide. The Way Of Kings being 5x as long with 0.5x the plot movement of Mistborn didn't happen because brandon sanderson forgot how to write. It happens because Epic Fantasy as a genre is, in part, about being lead through a world.
Yes. You sign up knowing you will have a paragraph upon paragraph about a characters clothing. Epic fantasy is meant to be fully realized and asks much more of its reader. The four best modern epic fantasy: Wheel of Time, Malazan Book of the Fallen, Song of Fire and Ice, and Way of Kings. I think GRRM has the best balance of pacing, but you don’t just sit down and casually read these stories in a weekend. Well, you can, and some people like to do a fast read and then a slow read to full absorb it. Ultimately, I quite enjoy it. The slow pace is nice. It can be an exercise in patience, but they are quite rewarding to me. There are plenty of books out there that go faster and have tighter, cleaner writing.
> It happens because Epic Fantasy as a genre is, in part, about being lead through a world.
I don't see there a disagreement, it is "just" a question on how one is lead through the world:
- Are you lead by the experiences by the characters of the book, and you simply feel the depth of the world behind it, and you learn to understand it over time.
- Or do you have the narrator simply explain everything to you.
- Or does some protagonist takes over that role.
That seems a bit lazy to me, and not so appealing. Still, it can made for a good read, mind you. I definitely swallowed some of those books.
...no one cares, because they want a novel, not a tour guide
That criticism is pretty applicable to The Sun Also Rises. Two great sentences and a lot of setting description.
I politely disagree. There is very little useless detail in that book. Every place detail opens up the characters who live there, in how they bother to notice or not notice it. It also creates the contrasts between Paris, Pamplona and the intermediate settings.
I think that "no one cares" is simply not truth. These books do have their readers who do love them. And that style of writing is not even niche, it is not rare to like such books.
Streaming on PBS, Monday April 5. I have no idea how to watch PBS on a TV anymore.
You can still pick it up with an antenna but they also have an app.
You need one of them special big display panels with an ATSC tuner built in.
More seriously, in my experience (which includes some pretty boony boonies) the PBS stations are fairly easy to pick up with rabbit ears and a single scan.
It's all the repeaters does the trick, I'm sure.
Waste no word
There, removed an extra word
The article reads like an exercise in the opposite
This was my impression as well. Well, being a non-native speaker I tend to blame myself. Still, this style of writing does sound self-indulgent to me:
"Hemingway’s voice distilled itself with miraculous speed, a fusion of telegrammatic urgency and high modernist impersonality, with counterpoint learned from Bach and rhythms located profoundly in his own neurology"
etc.
Good God. I write Lovecraft pastiche for fun and even I think that's way too purple.
The next sentence is "In the most beautiful way, it was anti-writing". That's somewhat revealing.
Yeah, I have no idea what the writer is saying. The only part of that I “get” is telegrammatic speed. What the hell is “high modernist impersonality”?
I’m a native speaker and have read 3 Hemingway books.
I assume they mean modernism, the prevailing artistic style of the first half of the 20th century.
Eliminate superfluous words
That was my thought, too, but the "every" makes it a stronger mandate than what both of us came up with. Without the "every", you could let some questionably superfluous words stay.
"Every" is superfluous. If there's even one superfluous word, you haven't eliminated superfluous words.
Then you’ve not eliminated
Well if we want a strong mandate we can go with
Eliminate!
Seconding this. The “every” is necessary.
As Shakespeare once said "keeping things short is what makes things wise".
"poetry is compression" - William Goldman
easily the most profound three words I had ever encountered as an aspirational teenage writer, though it would be several decades before my understanding of "compression" developed sufficiently to fully recognize and appreciate the depth of that insight.
One wonders what Goldman would have thought of Claude Shannon.
Cut spare words
Be laconic.
Stephen King railed dogmatically against the use of adverbs. I liked his work but wasn't aware of this ... obsession of his until I read On Writing. It made me more self-conscious about using adverbs in my own writing until I noticed that many great writers I love and respect had no such issue with incorporating adverbs.
As my grandfather used to say, chacun à son goût - to each his own.
Sale: Baby shoes, unworn.
In George Orwell's 1984, Newspeak was a language formed by eliminating all of the words deemed unnecessary. The idea was, limit words and you may limit thoughts. While brevity can make a sentence more powerful, getting in the habit of eliminating words might be dangerous.
I think the meaning is different enough that it's not the same thing. Editors and writers talk about excising unnecessary words from specific sentences where they aren't helping the reader understand your meaning. But, they're not saying that you should remove those words from your vocabulary and never use them, which is what Newspeak was about.
Using fewer words in a sentence is accomplished by having more words in your vocabulary.
> Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterwards the road bare and white except for the leaves.
"“I read that paragraph and I want to cry,” confesses a literary scholar in Hemingway."
What? That paragraph was horrible. First of all, after reading it two times, I still have no idea what the point was, other than: leaves, dust, troops. Second, he says the same thing three times.
"Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the trees." Ok.
"The trunks of the trees too were dusty" No shit. There's dust raised in the air high enough to get to the leaves. It's probably gonna be on the trunk.
"and the leaves fell early that year" Wait. Did they already fall? Or are they falling now? Or is this an omniscient narrator saying they will in the future?
"and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising" Yes, you told us in the last sentence.
"and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling" Oh, ok, so the leaves are falling now.
"and the soldiers marching" Yes, you told us in the last sentence, and previously in the current sentence.
They watched soldiers marching by for months.
Few people understand why they should eliminate those words. In fiction, the writer should be invisible unless they are a narrator. If you are a narrator, do it well, but if you are writing in the third person or omniscient view, don't "break the fourth wall" with editorial words that beg the question of whose judgment the word expresses. Hence the advice to strip out adverbs and re-write sentences that use words with the "-ly" suffix. Each one is a passive, begged question. If there is no person and character with intent associated with the adverb, strip it.
The advice to eliminate superfluous words is not a recipe, it's a joke that is a variation on, if you want to be a good writer, only write the good stuff, or don't publish the bad stuff. Worshipping great writers won't make you a better writer any more than doing a cargo dance will get supplies dropped from the sky. If you want to write, have a story to tell, the rest is editing.
“ In fiction, the writer should be invisible unless they are a narrator.”
I don’t actually think this is reasonable or possible. Readers are fully aware that writers are distinct from other writers in their prose structure. This is colloquially known as “style”. Additionally, other writers can most certainly identify individual writers by their narrative choices based on the same notion of “style”. Hemingway had a style and that’s why so many people compare their prose to him!
Crappy writing isn't a style unless it's on purpose, and often not even then. A great example of this is Philip K. Dick, who was a terrible writer by any standard, and not on purpose either, but he still became a great author because the overall effects of his ideas were so good that readers tolerated his crappy writing. The total effect of his ideas were his unique style, not his clunky dialogue or characters with less animation than action figures. He was like the Sex Pistols of science fiction in that he could barely play his instrument, but made the equivalent to some pop hits and he inspired a lot of other much better people to get over their own fears and write.
Authors certainly have a voice, but it's because the whole story is told in it, and not because they interject to comment and give the reader direction using extra descriptions from a perspective that is outside the story. It would be like a director addressing the audience or an "applause" sign. When I read fiction, I read it to appreciate the effect of the author's craft, and not to listen to someone sounding things out and practising. Adverbs aren't forbidden, but I see them as cribs for re-editing because they are usually placeholders for unformed ideas.
The writer being invisible is an academic perspective that never holds water in the real world. Every single reader and reviewer talks about how good or bad a writer's voice is. The concept of invisibility makes beginning writers go from one extreme to another. From too much poetic prose to being sterile and monotone. This also applies in nonfiction writing.
And no, adverbs do not make sentences passive. This idea popped up in amateur writing forums recently and its driving me nuts. Passive tense involves using is, has, was as verbs in a sentence. No where in any official definition of passive tense does anyone claim adverbs create passive tense.
And the joke is, writing is about life, minus the boring parts.