Orwell's writing advice isn't bad, as long as you remember it's advice for writing like Orwell. And his final rule was "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous", which puts the whole rulemaking enterprise in its proper perspective.
The problem with Freddie’s argument is that only 0.0001% of the population have his natural talent. So Strunk and White doesn’t apply to him like a typical tennis coach’s recommendations don’t apply to Serena Williams. But as a naturally lousy writer, I’ve found Strunk and White invaluable.
I never understood Whitehead's apparent "takedown" of Wood. Wood loved Bellow, he examines him at length in How Fiction Works, and didn't have much to say about Carver or minimalism, and certainly didn't promote it as the "right" way to write or anything. But then it's not clear what Whitehead is actually saying in that short Harper's piece. I suppose it was just "Shut up with your literary criticism, you pallid English nobleman"? Anyway I think all of them are great. I was never big into Carver, but Brandon Taylor wrote about Carver recently in a really enlightening sumptuous way, it made me go back and read him and appreciate him more. It's sort of obtuse and annoying to knock down Carver in the way Whitehead does. But then, things just go in and out of fashion, not much we can do I suppose.
Stephen King never said “get rid of adverbs.” The point he was making in On Writing is that too many fiction writers overuse them to the point where every time a character speaks, it's paired with a distracting adverb that adds nothing. Not "get rid of adverbs" but "use adverbs sparingly."
I love writing, but I've moved past the idea of it becoming "my life." Which is ok. Sometimes it's best to let your passion not consume your entire life. But this article was great, and I truly hope it helps the people who need it.
Great post. As a reader, I find that writers with a strong voice can break any so-called rules and hold my attention. If I'm reading some tepid regurgitation of a well-known argument, of course I'd prefer it to be succinct because then it will be over sooner. But a writer with a point of view, who uses language in clever and unexpected ways, can go on for pages without boring me.
Also, I love that you honor female teachers and writers in your work (as well as male writers). It's rare for male writers to cite women as influences, so it always makes me happy.
So, I have a question. You mention here, again, the importance of editing. Are you getting editing these days? Do you grow beyond the need for it with experience? Or is it just that, this being the gig you can get, you're doing without, even though you'd like an editor? How does the degree to which you value editing interact with being on a famously unedited platform?
I like you very much, and I like your writing very much. I'm also a fan of how you continually blindside me with a paragraph where you pull the curtain back on your self-analysis (in this case, the paragraph about "the lee of the stone"). I'm amazed you're able to assess the divisive quality of that post and make a decision about what you're willing to accept in order to be exceptional when you're still this close to having written and published it. This is good stuff, man.
I'm a Strunk & White partisan; I acknowledge their reputation has dimmed but I believe they're due for a revival ("the Strunk will rise again!"). Obviously some of the advice in that book—basically all the grammar stuff—is outdated and wrongly prescriptive, and when you have a 90-page book it feels weird to say "it's great but you have to disregard 30 pages of it" (values approximate; I don't have it in front of me). But I think its critics (including Freddie in this post) have reduced the advice on conciseness to a distortion or parody, and in attacking that straw man they overlook the value of the book's actual advice, and the bad writing that inspires it. The advice is not "use as few words as possible," but "omit *needless* words"; I tell my students that writing will often have to use a lot of words, but that makes it all the more important not to get wordy, which saps the reader's interest and disperses their attention. In other words, it's not about cutting down words for its own sake (and in fairness plenty of teachers have probably reduced it to that themselves), but for the sake of improving directness and impact. And the idea that there's no correlation between prose being baggy and being boring defies experience. I went to grad school in the humanities, where academics scoff at the idea that our scholarly articles could be written more clearly, but read Kenner's The Pound Era and then compare it to contemporary literary scholarship and tell me that the first isn't clearly better.
I also doubt that you've never known anyone moved by these writers. Raymond Carver still blows people away. E.B. White is a great and moving writer—"Once More to the Lake" still hits, I wept when reading my daughter Charlotte's Web. I don't think that Strunk & White translates to "everyone write like Hemingway" in the first place, but also pretending like minimalist prose doesn't hold up seems reflexive rather than critical.
I have recently discovered your newsletter, and I admire your passion and your original thinking ... now here comes the BUT part .... Honestly, who in the H-E-L-L do you think you are casually dismissing the works of George Orwell?! :-) I say this playfully, but DAMN, dude. Would that we could all write a novel as "shitty" as ANIMAL FARM or 1984. I don't care how simplistic or heavy-handed some alienated hipster in 2021 might think these works are, they've had a HUGE impact on thinking in the Western World in the last 70 years. By all means, be a provocateur — but you go too far with that sh** and people are just going to laugh at your sorry ass. Though I have a strong feeling you're okay with that. :-). Also, thanks for the shout-out to THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY. I will give it a read.
Great post. But the author of Burmese Days, Down and Out in Paris and London, and Coming Up For Air is by no means a shitty novelist!
So that's why she had to use the "K"...
Orwell's writing advice isn't bad, as long as you remember it's advice for writing like Orwell. And his final rule was "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous", which puts the whole rulemaking enterprise in its proper perspective.
The problem with Freddie’s argument is that only 0.0001% of the population have his natural talent. So Strunk and White doesn’t apply to him like a typical tennis coach’s recommendations don’t apply to Serena Williams. But as a naturally lousy writer, I’ve found Strunk and White invaluable.
I never understood Whitehead's apparent "takedown" of Wood. Wood loved Bellow, he examines him at length in How Fiction Works, and didn't have much to say about Carver or minimalism, and certainly didn't promote it as the "right" way to write or anything. But then it's not clear what Whitehead is actually saying in that short Harper's piece. I suppose it was just "Shut up with your literary criticism, you pallid English nobleman"? Anyway I think all of them are great. I was never big into Carver, but Brandon Taylor wrote about Carver recently in a really enlightening sumptuous way, it made me go back and read him and appreciate him more. It's sort of obtuse and annoying to knock down Carver in the way Whitehead does. But then, things just go in and out of fashion, not much we can do I suppose.
Hitting the heart icon didn't feel like enough. This was fantastic.
Stephen King never said “get rid of adverbs.” The point he was making in On Writing is that too many fiction writers overuse them to the point where every time a character speaks, it's paired with a distracting adverb that adds nothing. Not "get rid of adverbs" but "use adverbs sparingly."
I love writing, but I've moved past the idea of it becoming "my life." Which is ok. Sometimes it's best to let your passion not consume your entire life. But this article was great, and I truly hope it helps the people who need it.
Irrationally delighted to learn Freddie is an admirer of Norman Maclean. I guess it shouldn't surprise me, but it did.
Great post. As a reader, I find that writers with a strong voice can break any so-called rules and hold my attention. If I'm reading some tepid regurgitation of a well-known argument, of course I'd prefer it to be succinct because then it will be over sooner. But a writer with a point of view, who uses language in clever and unexpected ways, can go on for pages without boring me.
Also, I love that you honor female teachers and writers in your work (as well as male writers). It's rare for male writers to cite women as influences, so it always makes me happy.
So, I have a question. You mention here, again, the importance of editing. Are you getting editing these days? Do you grow beyond the need for it with experience? Or is it just that, this being the gig you can get, you're doing without, even though you'd like an editor? How does the degree to which you value editing interact with being on a famously unedited platform?
I like you very much, and I like your writing very much. I'm also a fan of how you continually blindside me with a paragraph where you pull the curtain back on your self-analysis (in this case, the paragraph about "the lee of the stone"). I'm amazed you're able to assess the divisive quality of that post and make a decision about what you're willing to accept in order to be exceptional when you're still this close to having written and published it. This is good stuff, man.
I'm a Strunk & White partisan; I acknowledge their reputation has dimmed but I believe they're due for a revival ("the Strunk will rise again!"). Obviously some of the advice in that book—basically all the grammar stuff—is outdated and wrongly prescriptive, and when you have a 90-page book it feels weird to say "it's great but you have to disregard 30 pages of it" (values approximate; I don't have it in front of me). But I think its critics (including Freddie in this post) have reduced the advice on conciseness to a distortion or parody, and in attacking that straw man they overlook the value of the book's actual advice, and the bad writing that inspires it. The advice is not "use as few words as possible," but "omit *needless* words"; I tell my students that writing will often have to use a lot of words, but that makes it all the more important not to get wordy, which saps the reader's interest and disperses their attention. In other words, it's not about cutting down words for its own sake (and in fairness plenty of teachers have probably reduced it to that themselves), but for the sake of improving directness and impact. And the idea that there's no correlation between prose being baggy and being boring defies experience. I went to grad school in the humanities, where academics scoff at the idea that our scholarly articles could be written more clearly, but read Kenner's The Pound Era and then compare it to contemporary literary scholarship and tell me that the first isn't clearly better.
I also doubt that you've never known anyone moved by these writers. Raymond Carver still blows people away. E.B. White is a great and moving writer—"Once More to the Lake" still hits, I wept when reading my daughter Charlotte's Web. I don't think that Strunk & White translates to "everyone write like Hemingway" in the first place, but also pretending like minimalist prose doesn't hold up seems reflexive rather than critical.
I have recently discovered your newsletter, and I admire your passion and your original thinking ... now here comes the BUT part .... Honestly, who in the H-E-L-L do you think you are casually dismissing the works of George Orwell?! :-) I say this playfully, but DAMN, dude. Would that we could all write a novel as "shitty" as ANIMAL FARM or 1984. I don't care how simplistic or heavy-handed some alienated hipster in 2021 might think these works are, they've had a HUGE impact on thinking in the Western World in the last 70 years. By all means, be a provocateur — but you go too far with that sh** and people are just going to laugh at your sorry ass. Though I have a strong feeling you're okay with that. :-). Also, thanks for the shout-out to THE ETHICS OF AMBIGUITY. I will give it a read.