No, I got that, Naomi. That's what i was disagreeing with!!

That's what i was disagreeing with!!

Me too!

"being too subtle" is an excuse you are using to justify pandering to your own needs.

I utterly disagree. I _might_ have agreed if the subtlety was intentional but to quote myself from earlier in the thread:

Some of what I consider to be slapping the reader's cheeks with a wet fish while pointing desperately at the second door on the right turns out to be a bit more like a deaf-mute in a darkened room gesturing with a slight motion of his left hand (which is behind his back).

In other words, I was trying my damnedest to be blatant but failing to get the message across. After thinking about this a bit more, I think I now have both the explanation and the solution.

What my reader picked up on was not an absence of voice per se, but the gulf between the voice I was using and the way the story was coming across.

EG: I had written what seemed like a character piece in a thriller-esque voice.

The reason for this, in my case, was that I was writing using the tone of the story in my head, but not putting enough of the story down on the page to justify it.

I have now had some serious words with one of my more reticent bad-guys and, although I can no longer sleep at nights, the story gets going sooner, faster, and better.

I _LOVE_ good feedback!

G

Have you come across John Gardner's The Art of Fiction?

Bought a copy, read half way through, put it down again. Hated it.

I'm sure he knows a lot about writing and (given the huge numbers of unsubstantiated opinions that he expresses, the law of statistics would imply...) that some of his opinions are worth listening to. However...

For his own writing, he seems to have missed the subtle difference between the spoken English of a lecture and the written English of a book that is in any way pleasurable to read. For me, reading with a glass of wine whilst reflecting on the implications for my own writing, he came across as an opinionated, pompous ass; the type I would be polite to, then move across the room to get away from, at the type of dinner-party he might be encountered at. The result being that I lost the will to search for the nuggets of writing gold that I am sure must be in there somewhere.

The really irritating thing, is (much like "the God Delusion" that demonstrates almost every vice it criticises religion for) I think I probably agree with much of the sentiment about what makes writing good, but find the arguments so tediously put, in a writing style that grates, that I almost want to switch sides.

Ho hum, looks like different people are impressed by different things! Emma, if you ever get the chance to do an "executive summary" so that I can be exposed to the content rather than the man, I would be interested to see it...
G

I'm peeling with laughter here.

You do realise (of course you do!) that eventually you're just gonna have to do that soul work for yourself...

He's very trenchant, certainly, and there's an unashamed and rather old fashioned sense of absolute judgement. I don't think you could write a book like that nowadays and start sentences with things like, 'In first class fiction, of course...'. I read it when I'd just read Ann Lamott's Bird by Bird, which is also very good, but so far towards the Californian Twelve Step end of the spectrum, that it was rather a relief to come back to some tough technical talk. And I'll love him forever for coining the term 'psychic distance' for something we all have to grapple with, but have never had a word for

He can also construct a decent sentence - doesn't bother me if they're quite formal in tone - why shouldn't they be? When I got to his exercise about writing three 250 word sentences in different moods, I really, really cheered. How many writing books actually tell people they have to do their five-finger exercises? And yet it seems to me that technical stuff like that is like teaching art students to draw (though I gather they don't do that nowadays either): a fundamental part of the toolkit.

Emma

Damn it all.

When I got to his exercise about writing three 250 word sentences in different moods, I really, really cheered.

You keep on writing things that make me want to love the guy.

He can also construct a decent sentence - doesn't bother me if they're quite formal in tone - why shouldn't they be?

And, if I attended his lectures, I'm sure I would. There are so many clauses, modifiers and asides that read out loud is the only way it makes any sense.

eventually you're just gonna have to do that soul work for yourself

I'll wait for the audio version!

Gaius, I'm really interested that you feel a book should be more informal in tone than a lecture. I find complex sentences easier to read than to listen to, I think. With spoken you do have tone of voice - if the speaker's good - to help you keep track of it, but at least written down you can go back and re-read if you really don't get it.

But I love a complex sentence - it's one of the joys of writing hist fic. - and the flexibility of English is just such a joy, because it's short on inflected endings and rules about where the verbs go, for example and long on auxiliaries which don't always need to be with their main verb/noun, but which can be moved around. Period voice is as much to do with word order as with vocabulary, to my mind. (And I'm not alone in that - according to A S Byatt, Golding, Ackroyd, Fowles and Swift all say they write hist fic because, among other things, they love writing long sentences). When my blue pencil is busy on my work it's usually because the subordinate clauses have got away with me...

Emma

I'm really interested that you feel a book should be more informal in tone than a lecture.

It's not the formality, it's the construction...

For the spoken word, it is easier to get away with long, multi-clause sentences as there are more clues about the structure and emphasis from body language, inflection, volume, speed, pitch and so on. You don't need chapter headings when gossiping to friends.

For readability, all of those clues are gone.

So you look for visual clues; paragraphing, headlines, sentence order, chapter headings, lists, diagrams, figures, dialogue...

Some of these clues are needed just to keep the eye in the right place on the page. Typically, when interrupted, I look for a particular pattern of paragraphs / sentence endings / words to find my place again. But there was none of this "macro-punctuation" and at one point, I had to re-read an entire, godawful page just to find the sentence I had been reading when my wife passed me a glass of wine...

Long sentences are fine, but not if there are _only_ long sentences. Convoluted multi-clause sentences are fine, but should be used deliberately for a deliberate effect. When you have page after page of endless multi-sentence paragraphs filled with convoluted, multi-clause sentences, there is no way to focus the eye (or the mind) and more than once, I found I had forgotten where the sentence started by the time he came to the point.

Reading him reminds me of the sensation I got while talking to a salesman I used to know; I would make a mental note of the question I asked, and wait, patiently, sometimes for several minutes, until he finally got to the end. If I remembered the question and then listened to the last sentence, I got my answer. If I tried to follow the rest of the garbage, it was hit and miss whether I would even remember what the discussion was about.

For a trained communicator to be unable to separate his thoughts clearly smacks of pure laziness and self-indulgence.

G

PS: I don't know if you've ever tried re-writing TMOL as a screen-play? If you do, I think you'll realise what I'm getting at. Every medium has different constraints and different possibilities.

I don't know if you've ever tried re-writing TMOL as a screen-play?

No, but I sort of know what you mean.

I agree that it helps to have the things available to speakers of tone and pause, to explain things - so much so, that when a copy-editor and I are disagreeing over punctuation, it's usually because I've punctuated for myself reading it aloud, if you see what I mean, rather than the correct shape of clauses and constructions.

I think it's partly a matter of what you're used to or have been reading lately, isn't it? For example, although I read Middlemarch a while long ago, having not read a big mid-19th century novel for some time, and I became very aware how different the sentence constructions are from someone like Jane Austen, whom I'd been soaking in to write TMOL and whom I know better anyway, it was a different experience again from reading Henry James, who I adore, but who is in a strange way, though grammatically correct, much more open-ended in the ways in which he constructs his sentences, even thought they're not, of course, as loose and lollopy as, say, Virginia Woolf, who recalls Byatt's definintion of a 'good modern sentence' as one which 'proceeds evenly, loosely joined by commas, [so that] its feel is hypothetical, approximate, unstructured and always aiming at an impossible exactness which it knows it will not achieve.'.

142 words, I make that!

Emma

142 words, I make that!

MS Word says 140, but an impressive effort none the less. I shudder even to think about the three different 250 word monsters that are recommended as an excercise. :0 BTW, is that lollopy as in to move with a bobbing motion, or as in to lounge about?

FYI, in a previous life, I worked as a tech writer for computer-based training where more than 20 words in a sentence could earn you a slap on the wrist. (In hindsight, this was probably due as much to the crappy 640x480 screens people had back then rather than any deap-seated pedagogy.)

I think it's partly a matter of what you're used to

Am I right in thinking you are something of an academic? I may have been more tolerant of his writing if my university days weren't so distant in memory.

Am I right in thinking you are something of an academic?

Only in the sense that I'm now doing a PhD, and most of that's a novel. But my first degree, twenty plus years ago was Drama, so I spent it pretending to be a tree. In fact, I'm rather missing the Great Literary Novels like Eliot (hence an attempt to catch up with Middlemarch), because I was too busy reading Stanislavski and Brecht.

But my mother used to read Austen and Shakespeare aloud to us, and my favourite kid's programme was Jackanory, so I guess I've always connected reading and hearing quite closely.

Emma

I spent it pretending to be a tree

You seem to have all the fun.

doing a PhD, and most of that's a novel

You can get a doctorate for having this much fun?! How did it take me so long to start writing fiction?

I guess I've always connected reading and hearing quite closely

I'm rapidly coming around to the idea that people maintain multiple vocabularies. Put simply; I believe I have more control of and flexibility in my written vocabulary than in either my spoken one or my listening one. I have also known some extremely eloquent sales-people who can barely string a written sentence together.

To me, for each vocabulary: the rules are different, the language is different and the emphasis is different.

It's like comparing dressage riders to show-jumpers. It's all about horses and both disciplines have complementary skills that require concentration and cooperation from the horse, but being good at one doesn't mean being good at the other.

Then again, it could be more fundamental than that. In writing this, I have rejigged most of the sentences about fifteen times. If I could edit my spoken English as much, perhaps I would find I'm quite a wit!

---
"Morning Gaius"
'Morning, Emma.' No... scrub that. 'Good morning, Emma' No... still not right. 'Dr Darwin, what an unexpected pleasure.' Hmm. Something about doctors though. 'Nearly, Dr Darwin.' Oh yes... that's got some merit, after all, it is still bloody dark outside and it provides a reference to her endeavours to give her the warm-fuzzy of being more than just a name. Very subtle.
"Almost, almost Dr Darwin."
"Not busy then?"
'What?' No, too obvious. 'Moi?' Too pretentious. 'You are quite wrong.' Too much of a lie. AHAH!
"Like yourself, waiting to see how the day evolves!"
"Damn you, I've had that since school days. I hated my Biology teacher that day. He was the first, you see, the first to make that appalling reference to my namesake. But I had my revenge, oh yes, the first character to be gratuitously mauled and savaged to death by Corgis in TMOL is based on him."
'Oh crap.' Too rough. 'Oh crap, I'm sorry.' No, still not right. 'Can't be original all the time.' No, leaves me open to the obvious question of if or when at all. More on the evolution front? Yes!
"I bet he would have Lamarcked you down for that!" (Ho ho, I am so funny.)
---

No, on second thoughts, there is merit to being sullen in conversation.
G