I didn't find any problems with the issues you've raised, Terry, TBH. I don't especially like the voice but I don't have a problem with it.

Converted mudflat: I assumed he meant that a mudflat had been converted into a harbour. Exactly what changes were made to implement that wasn't clear, but it gave me a image.

Tightly elbowed: very closed in and cramped. Not spacious.

Unlovely: not lovely.

It is slighly odd that he says it was unlovely at any tide but high, but I agree with Alex that you can see signs of where the high tide is, and I assumed when reading the passage that he meant the high tide covered the ugly mud flat. Like Alex I can picture it.

Or it was a slightly odd joke - it was unlovely at any tide but high but I've never seen it high, hence never seen it lovely.

You can often see some fish in the water depending on the water and the light and angle. I guess he was saying the fish he could see in the harbour were small.

I find the style of writing a bit self-conscious and staccato, but I often find so-called literary writing a bit odd, if I'm honest. Not literary crossover, but literary.

Deb



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Re. the fish: small fish only give the impression to me of a not-very-nice environment. Large fish would imply to me a more healthy environment. However, I could be wrong about this.

Thinking about 'unlovely' further, I like it.
To have used a word like horrible, or dreadful, or even ugly would have, to me anyways, indicated a degree of thought. The writer would be indicating that it at least made her feel something.
'Unlovely' is almost dismissive.
HB x

I've only scanned the thread, so sorry if I repeat/ignore anyone's comments, but here's my two penn'orth (as mediated by one and a half glasses of caterer's fizz on an empty stomach.)

I read this yesterday without noticing where you said it came from, Terry, and my first thought was 'Golly, she can write! Saying so much with such plain words.'

The harbour at Mana was a converted mudflat, tightly elbowed and unlovely at any tide but high. I had never been there when the tide was high. The birds were shags mostly. The fish were small.

'Converted mudflat'
I like the sense of functional, un-satisfactory, unglamorousness. They needed a harbour. They only had a mudflat.

I wasn't sure how you'd see 'elbowed', but a sense of crampedness came over, and smallness because it's a human-body metaphor. Not a big harbour, then - but how the metaphor fits isn't clear, so it was one to wait and see if it's resolved.

Unlovely is a great word - I've used it. So compact and plain and yet full of meaning by being a negative of 'lovely' - not even as definite as ugly. Great rhythm. Yum.

"at any tide but high. I had never been there when the tide was high. "

Nice, subtle bit of voice and character: two negative ways of saying something, says a lot. And when you look almost everything is qualified in that way - expressed in a negative form, 'mostly', 'unlovely except' 'I had never been there at'

"The birds were shags mostly."

Yes, there's all the puns (and a very silly rhyme* which I immediately thought of) but I do see why she's used it. It's a bleak, scruffy sort of word, whereas 'cormorant' is rather exotic and poetic.

Only 'small' is an absolute... I love the blank bleakness of that.

Her ear isn't mine - I have a reflex dislike of rows and rows of sentences which all go subject-verb-object, but she actually uses rhythm and sentence length so well. The rhythm of the only complex clause "tightly elbowed and unlovely at any tide but high." is great - think how much less well it would work if it was "tightly elbowed and unlovely at anything except high tide.' (as well as losing the extra flavour of hesitancy of 'any tide but' )

The the whole thing is four sentences which get shorter and simpler, all the way down to 'the fish were small'...

Good stuff. The whole story's good, too. The paragraph goes on for slightly more than as much again, and then the second paragraph begins:

"The marina was tucked into the crook of the elbow, facing back towards the shore"

so the only really uncertainty in that opening does, actually, get sorted out, as it were: the little bit of my mind which was hanging onto 'elbowed' as an unresolved query, could let go...

Emma

---------------------------------------

*
The common cormorant (or shag)
Lays eggs inside a paper bag,
You follow the idea, no doubt?
It's to keep the lightning out.

But what these unobservant birds
Have never thought of, is that herds
Of wandering bears might come with buns
And steal the bags to hold the crumbs.


Blimey, I've just googled this to check I was remember it right, and it's by Christopher Isherwood!

I didn't mean I thought it was nit-picky if we had the whole story in front of us, but only this short extract as we don't know where's she's going with it so early on.

Well, this has been a really interesting exercise. Clearly, this writer is using language in a way that speaks strongly to some of us.

I'm very tempted to be persuaded by Emma's very eloquent analysis, and I may well be in the end. However, I'm not entirely convinced about the high tide/never seen it bit being a joke. And on the mudflat issue, I still think you can't 'convert' a mudflat into a harbour; convert in a building sense means extending the materials present. You wouldn't, for example, say that 'the field was converted into a house'; you'd talk about a house being built on the field. And, yes, I may be too literal about this, but I think there is a fine line between intimation and simple lack of clarity.

As for the rest of the story, it's probably a matter of taste. I found it difficult to care about the characters and the 'realistic' repeated phrases in the dialogue was irritating.

But it's been very good to have such intelligent, different views to consider. So, I'm now going to retire into my tower of Grumpyoldgitedness to ruminate on this further. Thanks again to everyone for offering such interesting views.

Terry



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Jem: fair point!

there is a fine line between intimation and simple lack of clarity.

Such as when people 'browse a library' (cows and sheep browse, not people).

Or when a group of people are 'thick as thieves' (I don't know how thick thieves are, or what definition of 'thick' a group of people have to conform to, to be like them).

Or how a ship can 'plough through the waves', when no ship that I've seen has ever been fitted with a plough.

All this writer is trying to do, it seems to me, is invent a few metaphors and similes which are not cliches. They worked for me, and apparently for quite a few others here.

Alex

Terry, re. the converting, I think you are being far too literal. Converting does not only have the sense of building.

Consider the differences between a "tightly elbowed" mudflat, and a working harbour. Possibly not a lot. A jetty maybe, rings for securing boats. So they built those.

As Alex says, the writer appears to be trying to use language in a fresh way rather than resort to cliches. Surely that's a good thing?

Deb

Alex, that's not quite what I meant. By 'intimation' I mean when an author leaves some cognitive space between what they're describing and the words they use to do it with. Which is part of what good writing is all about, of course, rather than the heavy-handed tell. I think what I've been trying to question here is the nature of that space and how universal it should or shouldn't be. Yes, people here have liked the similes and metaphors in this piece but it seems to me that they've had to make some assumptions in order to do so. I still can't see Emma's joke, for example; which isn't to say it's not there but only that - assuming I'm not completely thick - it's at least one that has to be looked for or which suits some minds and not others.

So, thinking about this some more, perhaps what this discussion is partly about is whether the 'invisibility' of prose - prose which produces imagery without the reader being conscious of it - is a) a universal effect, b) always desirable and c) if not, then what are the conscious qualities a writer would aim for in his/her prose.

And, maybe at another level, while I can now understand better what this author is doing with her similes, metaphors, allusions, etc, I don't actually find them enervating or stimulating. So, for me - and this is clearly a personal preference - what this talk has helped me see is that as a default position, I prefer prose to be invisible; but if the author wants it to be seen, then I prefer it to be uplifting, genuinely funny, though-provoking, etc, because then it's a justifiable intervention into the flow of the story. Here, they just seem mundane and distracting. As said, why not just describe the angle of the harbour instead of evoking tight elbows (see? I still don't get it!) But, I stress, this is just my preference.

Terry

Deb: sorry, I still don't agree about the mudflat thing. 'Convert' usually means changing one thing into another or using more of the same to change the original into something bigger, better, etc. But let's just leave it that at least this shows her imagery is not universally obvious.

Consider the differences between a "tightly elbowed" mudflat, and a working harbour. Possibly not a lot. A jetty maybe, rings for securing boats. So they built those.

I think why 'convert' works for me is just this sense of the minimum necessary, e.g. 'Shall we move house, or build a new one, or just convert the attic?'...

That 'just convert' is right for this downbeat, functional world. Having read the rest of the story I'd say it's a world where feeling isn't expressed - and 'depressed' as well - but that's only hinted at in this opening paragraph. The sense builds very strongly through the story, although it's never expressed - 'told' - only practical stuff shown.

Thinking of what instead she might have written (which is always an interesting way of trying to crystalise what's going on) 'build' usually has positive connotations of making more of the place/situatuation, 'put' has a sense of someone doing something, and 'construct' or 'make' also have more positive, something-out-of-nothing connotations. What else might she have used, and why didn't she, I wonder?

The issue, I think, is that if you stub your toe on what a word denotes (just as you might on 'elbowed' if you were being too literally physiological about it) you're unlikely to get very far with picking up on what it connotes. And the play of denotation (is that a word?) and connotation is what writers are working (wrestling?) with all the time.

What goes wrong with dead-ish figurative language is that the connotation has lost its oomph, because it's second-hand language, and in the end it loses it altogether (as 'browse' almost has, not in a bad way, but who actually uses the word now with an alive sense of how one's like a cow in a big bookshop?)

Hmm, the dance of denoting and connoting. I can feel a blogpost coming on. Thanks, Terry!

Emma

What goes wrong with dead-ish figurative language is that the connotation has lost its oomph, because it's second-hand language, and in the end it loses it altogether

Soooo true, Emma! That's what's really nice about those opening sentences, although I find them a little self-conscious.

'Convert' usually means changing one thing into another

Yes. And how does that not apply here?

Deb: because it's not changing the mud into a harbour. The harbour will have been built upon the mud, using mainly materials brought in from elsewhere. If you bought some land and built a house there, you wouldn't say you'd 'converted' the land; you'd say you'd built a house on it. However, as I said before, I accept that some people don't 'snag' on this. All I'm saying, is that some people do.

I'm wondering - because I can see where the snag might be, but don't feel snagged at all - if what's key is the fact that it isn't 'mud', it's 'mudflat': A mudflat is a place, not just a substance, and a place which already has a relationship with boats: somewhere where you used to just run your boat aground, and then step out and splodge ashore. Only they decided to make it a bit more functional, so they added whatever it is you'd add (I'm soooo not a boatie) to make it qualify as a harbour. A harbour has some kind of physical shape, but it's just as much a matter of classification.

If you bought some land and built a house there, you wouldn't say you'd 'converted' the land; you'd say you'd built a house on it.

No, but perhaps this isn't quite the right analogy, because a house and some land aren't the same class of thing. The closer analogy might be more something like this:

"The car boot sales in the farmyard have been such a success that we're converting the field next door into a car park."

Clearly, you can use a field as a car park as it is, (just as you can use mudflats as a harbour), but people get stuck in the mud and it's bumpy so you do stuff to the field (as you add Lights? A slipway? Some moorings? Charge some fees? to the harbour) to help with that.

Emma

If you bought some land and built a house there, you wouldn't say you'd 'converted' the land; you'd say you'd built a house on it.

But you might say that a field had been 'converted into allotments'. You might also say that some land had been 'turned into a car park', and there's only a hair's breadth between 'converted' and 'turned into'. Your objection to the term 'converted' is, it seems to me, based on a very narrow analogy.

Alex

<Added>

Crossed with Emma

Well, I suppose if you saw a mudflat as a place, you could say it was converted. But I think for that to be true the place converted should initially have been a human-occupied place (which is converted into another kind of human occupied place), not a natural environment - which is what 'mudflat' conveys to me. For example, a small dock might get converted into a harbour, or a seaside village. Which is why I'd agree with your example of the field next to the car boot sale being converted into a car park: it's an already existing human usage converted into a connected but different human usage. Okay, I guess you could split hairs and say the field next to the boot sale was originally a natural site, but it's new function is clearly connected to an existing one. I just can't see the same if an open mudflat has had a harbour built on it.

But, again, I think this shows there's a fine line between what snags some people and not others. Perhaps a question to come out of this is whether or not it's possible to write prose that doesn't snag anyone; or aim for not snagging the majority; or aim for a preferred minority; or just go for it anyway. I think we may be dancing around the issue of difference between literary and more plot-based fiction (to risk too general a distinction). In plot-driven stories, fine line prose can be a distraction; whereas perhaps in literary fiction it can be the point, or at least a strong part of the reason for the piece existing.

Terry


<Added>

"But you might say that a field had been 'converted into allotments'."

That's true. But I think an allotment is much closer to a field than a harbour is to a mudflat. You don't 'build' an allotment, for example. Having said that, while I don't think you'd say a field had been converted into a house, you might say it had been converted into a housing estate. So, like I said, I think it's fine line stuff.

I agree with Emma, Terry, that mud and a mudflat are not the same thing at all.

You can convert a barn into a house. You can convert a mudflat into a harbour. You just make some changes and additions to what is there already.

Deb

<Added>

Why does something which is converted have to be human-occupied place to start with? Seems to me you're making up what 'converted' means...

<Added>

con·vert (kn-vûrt)
v. con·vert·ed, con·vert·ing, con·verts
v.tr.
1. To change (something) into another form, substance, state, or product; transform: convert water into ice.
2. To change (something) from one use, function, or purpose to another; adapt to a new or different purpose: convert a forest into farmland.

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Part of the entry for 'converted' from the free online dictionary (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/converted).

Looks like you're wrong, Terry, TBH.