lol I knew I shouldn't have written that. Like everybody else I've only read 1984 and Animal Farm and I find both comically bad as novels, though important obviously.
I would love to read a review of 1984 by you, or even just a takedown pointing out all of the ways it's comically bad.
But I don't think it's bad and I wonder if it's not in part because I hold it to the lower standards of the past. (And it's also one of the most 'adapted' works, particularly recently – basically every YA novel or series is an adaptation!)
I don't think the standards for novels in the past were lower, and I assume Freddie doesn't either since his review of Fake Accounts seemed to suggest that novels today are in a bad way (or did I project that?). I think 1984 is a fantastic novel—I go back to it again and again—so I also would be curious to read Freddie's review.
I don't think the novel is in a bad way. I think novels that are self-consciously attempting to mimick the internet face two inherent and serious problems: one, it's not at all clear why I would need to read a novel to experience the internet when I can just access... the internet, and two they will always be terribly out of date by the time they appear in print. You could potentially avoid that by writing them in a very stylized way that avoids specific tropes and language, but these writers aren't doing that.
As for 1984 and Animal Farm... all of the allegorical and symbolic elements of these books is laughably heavy-handed and obvious. I think some writers can pull that off, but I don't think Orwell does in those books. A lot of 1984 is a trudge, to me, and I find the concluding confrontation by the party (and specifically the stuff with the rats) to be absurd in a way that takes me out of the book. But the real sin to me is the endless section on doctrine and theory. It is beyond a slog. I get that he's going for something artistically too there but it just really feels like a "I'm just going to come out and say this" from a novelist, which is not ideal, to me.
Thanks! I definitely don't think that long treatise is something that every book should include, but it works for me. For me the main novelistic (as opposed to polemical) value of 1984 is in its insights into the effects of repression on individuals, and the exploration of the value of the individual mind in a homogenous society. Obviously people invoke 1984 in annoying and self-righteous ways—everyone wants to be the brave truth-teller, etc.—and yet I really am reminded of these issues when I see people misusing their intellect and education to defend some absurd orthodoxy just because it's popular in their peer group. And obviously that's one of the topics that interests you most as a writer, so it's curious to me you're so cool on ol' Eric Blair.
So true. 1984 is overrated, Animal Farm is better. But Homage to Catalonia is fabulous and Down & Out is spectacular. His least important work is of course the most talked about, you gotta go deeper to find the good Orwell.
Looking into it more, I see that my memory was faulty—Burmese Days is definitely a novel, and while Down & Out is made up of (AFAICT) real events rather than fiction, it is definitely fictionalized when I said it wasn’t. Thanks foe the correction!
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.
The problem with Strunk and White is that they present rules that are simply not true of English grammar. For a linguist's perspective I recommend Geoff Pullum here: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.pdf
The thing about Pullum, and I've been saying this for almost fifteen years (and also in my comment above), is that his attacks on Strunk & White's grammar are on point, but they don't apply to the books writing advice, which is different in kind. "Don't use this comma because you just shouldn't" is different from "don't use 'the fact that' when you can express the same thing more efficiently," but they get conflated together. (Which I mean they're in the same book so that's fair, but we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.)
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.
It is perhaps the case that Whitehead (and I) are guilty of seeing in Wood - who I do think can accurately be accused of sometimes embracing a constrictive minimalism - a broader problem that annoys us and find Wood to be an attractive target.
I'm not sure Wood does that, though. He praises writers as maximalist as Bellow and Guy Gunaratne and many more. I think y'all might be mistaken here. Plenty of reasons to disagree with Wood, but shading him as a disciple of minimalism seems misplaced. Maybe I'm wrong though! I just remember so well Wood's study of Bellow and found it enlightening and wonderful.
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."
Yeah, it's similar with the passive voice. Of course some teachers wrongly say to never use the passive voice, but the true advice is to watch out for cases where it makes the sentence indirect and vague without adding anything, which is a common side effect of the passive.
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.
Well, the article also says you generally need a day job—which is true in my experience, especially if you’ve got things like student loans and/or kids.
I know I’ll never make a living writing. The market is saturated, and there are too many people doing it for free. But I genuinely appreciate the creative freedom I have thanks to my day job.
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!
lol I knew I shouldn't have written that. Like everybody else I've only read 1984 and Animal Farm and I find both comically bad as novels, though important obviously.
I would love to read a review of 1984 by you, or even just a takedown pointing out all of the ways it's comically bad.
But I don't think it's bad and I wonder if it's not in part because I hold it to the lower standards of the past. (And it's also one of the most 'adapted' works, particularly recently – basically every YA novel or series is an adaptation!)
I don't think the standards for novels in the past were lower, and I assume Freddie doesn't either since his review of Fake Accounts seemed to suggest that novels today are in a bad way (or did I project that?). I think 1984 is a fantastic novel—I go back to it again and again—so I also would be curious to read Freddie's review.
I don't think the novel is in a bad way. I think novels that are self-consciously attempting to mimick the internet face two inherent and serious problems: one, it's not at all clear why I would need to read a novel to experience the internet when I can just access... the internet, and two they will always be terribly out of date by the time they appear in print. You could potentially avoid that by writing them in a very stylized way that avoids specific tropes and language, but these writers aren't doing that.
As for 1984 and Animal Farm... all of the allegorical and symbolic elements of these books is laughably heavy-handed and obvious. I think some writers can pull that off, but I don't think Orwell does in those books. A lot of 1984 is a trudge, to me, and I find the concluding confrontation by the party (and specifically the stuff with the rats) to be absurd in a way that takes me out of the book. But the real sin to me is the endless section on doctrine and theory. It is beyond a slog. I get that he's going for something artistically too there but it just really feels like a "I'm just going to come out and say this" from a novelist, which is not ideal, to me.
Thanks! I definitely don't think that long treatise is something that every book should include, but it works for me. For me the main novelistic (as opposed to polemical) value of 1984 is in its insights into the effects of repression on individuals, and the exploration of the value of the individual mind in a homogenous society. Obviously people invoke 1984 in annoying and self-righteous ways—everyone wants to be the brave truth-teller, etc.—and yet I really am reminded of these issues when I see people misusing their intellect and education to defend some absurd orthodoxy just because it's popular in their peer group. And obviously that's one of the topics that interests you most as a writer, so it's curious to me you're so cool on ol' Eric Blair.
Ahhh – that makes sense!
But then I like Ayn Rand, and other books by authors that also pull a "I'm just going to come out and say this" in the same way.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Young people don't know his work.
So true. 1984 is overrated, Animal Farm is better. But Homage to Catalonia is fabulous and Down & Out is spectacular. His least important work is of course the most talked about, you gotta go deeper to find the good Orwell.
Wigan Pier is the best of all.
Quibble: Burmese Days and Down and Out aren't novels, right? They aren't fictional (or fictionalized like In Cold Blood).
No, both are novels in the traditional sense. They’re heavily influenced by his life, but they’re both pure fiction.
Looking into it more, I see that my memory was faulty—Burmese Days is definitely a novel, and while Down & Out is made up of (AFAICT) real events rather than fiction, it is definitely fictionalized when I said it wasn’t. Thanks foe the correction!
I mean, honestly!
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.
The problem with Strunk and White is that they present rules that are simply not true of English grammar. For a linguist's perspective I recommend Geoff Pullum here: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/LandOfTheFree.pdf
The thing about Pullum, and I've been saying this for almost fifteen years (and also in my comment above), is that his attacks on Strunk & White's grammar are on point, but they don't apply to the books writing advice, which is different in kind. "Don't use this comma because you just shouldn't" is different from "don't use 'the fact that' when you can express the same thing more efficiently," but they get conflated together. (Which I mean they're in the same book so that's fair, but we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.)
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.
Meant to add: I enjoyed your piece! As I do everything you write.
It is perhaps the case that Whitehead (and I) are guilty of seeing in Wood - who I do think can accurately be accused of sometimes embracing a constrictive minimalism - a broader problem that annoys us and find Wood to be an attractive target.
I'm not sure Wood does that, though. He praises writers as maximalist as Bellow and Guy Gunaratne and many more. I think y'all might be mistaken here. Plenty of reasons to disagree with Wood, but shading him as a disciple of minimalism seems misplaced. Maybe I'm wrong though! I just remember so well Wood's study of Bellow and found it enlightening and wonderful.
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."
Yeah, it's similar with the passive voice. Of course some teachers wrongly say to never use the passive voice, but the true advice is to watch out for cases where it makes the sentence indirect and vague without adding anything, which is a common side effect of the passive.
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.
Well, the article also says you generally need a day job—which is true in my experience, especially if you’ve got things like student loans and/or kids.
I know I’ll never make a living writing. The market is saturated, and there are too many people doing it for free. But I genuinely appreciate the creative freedom I have thanks to my day job.
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.
The late Christopher Hitchens would put you on a spit and roast you over this. I mean, once he got drunk enough (i.e., most any time).
You have to hang it out there, sometimes, or else it's no fun. And I do think his nonfiction work is head and shoulders above his fiction.