CSotD: Yeah? Well, evoke THIS!
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Pearls Before Swine, with a message from God that He really wants me to rant about self-consciously writery writing.
Which is to say, He's a little miffed that the strip Anne Gibbons did for Six Chix yesterday made my short list but then I wrote about something else. So now He's re-introduced the concept in starker terms.
I didn't want to start off yesterday with "Great strip. Extraordinary coloring! So, anyway, I hate writers' conference writing." Because, while Gibbons was offering a gag based on a silly sign, she wasn't necessarily dumping on writers' conferences or them as goes there.
But Stephan Pastis has teed the ball up not in a golfing sense but in the "three-year-old with a plastic bat" t-ball sense, and you can't just walk away from something like that. You have to take a whack at it.
I actually changed public radio stations once because the somewhat-more-local one encouraged its listeners to send in what I refer to as "squirrel essays," which they then added to the insufferable listener commentaries already on the network feed.
"Squirrel essays" are those precious little reflections by people who just moved from the city to the country last month and have discovered the beauty of nature. Which, depending on your religion, has either been out here for 5,000 years or 5 million but which, in any case, does not qualify as breaking news.
Not even when you describe it in the evocative, self-conscious style that won such praise at the writers' conference last summer.
I have mentioned before that, in my senior year of college, we made up a rule for seminar banning the word "evocative." It was only a joking rule, but it did mean that anyone who called anything "evocative" was going to get the ol' horse laugh.
Which is better than having Rat punch you in the head, but served much the same purpose.
I'm not against style, even purposeful style.
I'm told, for instance, by those who read Classical Greek, that Homer is better in the original in large part because of the set phrases that were part of the epic poetry which was intended to be spoken rather than read: The wine-dark sea, rosy-fingered dawn, cleaving the water with their oars and so forth.
And even a straightforward, plain piece of journalism like "Two Years Before the Mast" contains references to classical literature and the Bible in the form of off-hand turns of phrase or even snatches of quotes in the original language, which was typical of the 1840s but would be considered pretentious today.
Still, Hemingway did not invent plain writing. When I began trying to be a novelist, someone turned me on to Turgenev and it was an instant love match, especially since, the year before, I had been forced to work my way through Henry James in seminar, and this was junior year, when people were still allowed to declare things to be evocative. Henry James was pretty freakin' evocative, all right.
James and Turgenev were friends, but James quit sending him chapters of his work in progress because, after a polite response, Turgenev became silent, and it was clear that, as James wrote, "I do not think my stories struck him as quite meat for men. The manner was more apparent than the matter; they were too tarabiscoté, as I once heard him say of the style of a book — had on the surface too many little flowers and knots of ribbon."
And, if you're going to admit that your writing might be over-ornate and fussy, it's much more evocative to describe it as "tarabiscoté."
Now, as Flaubert once remarked to Madame de Staël, "Chacun folque à ses stroques uniques." My ex enjoyed Balzac, while I felt that five pages of evocative scenery was going to have to pay off with a lot more than a coach arriving.
Which is not why we are no longer married, but we did amass a huge collection of books in large part because there were "her" books and "his" books. (This was my wife who was so massively overqualified for one editing job that she managed to read — I'm not making this up — both "War and Peace" and "Remembrance of Things Past" at her desk in the space of 10 months. And who was perceptive enough to recommend the first to me, but not the second.)
Anyway, there are a lot of really well-written books out there that do not sound like the work of snooty elitists, starting with Turgenev and Hemingway, and a lot that certainly do, like Balzac, Proust and James.
You're allowed to like either, or even both.
But, for god's sake, if you're going to imitate one school or the other, go for plain. It hurts when you swing-and-miss at the evocative stuff.
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