Books Dec 28, 2010 at 1:22 pm

Comments

1
Wish people took this to heart more often, or even further. To quote Sam Becket: “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."
2
I had an English prof who used that very sentence as an example of writing perfection. And although I wouldn't generally cite Stephen King as a great writer, I have one of his quotes taped up over my desk: "Any word you have to search for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. "
3
The Bible, in its entirety, could have been written by a lively 14 year old.
4
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
5
I hate this rule when it isn't tempered by variation. So, so many male fiction writers use the same stoic, terse voice and sentence structure because of advice like this. It is commonly thought of as good writing. Half of the men in a creative writing class are trying to emulate Hemingway or Carver.

Fuck simplicity. I'm writing Ulysses 2.
6
@2, I hate to disagree with you, but Stephen King is a terrible writer, and he's wrong here. Simplicity has its uses, but so does complexity. Every word in the English language, including those found by use of a thesaurus, have a function somewhere. Maybe not in a King book, but his books are written for ten-year-olds. And actually ten-year-olds could really benefit from copious thesaurus-digging. And dictionary-reading. Especially Webster's Second.
7
Truly, only academics of English (I am one of these people) could possibly believe that simplicity of language is to be desired above all other things (regarding language). Such people have only infrequently encountered the sort of compounds (not even to speak of idioms) commonplace in Sanskrit.

Add to that, Shakespeare was a bleeding clown. Romeo and Juliet seems to me almost written disdainfully, and with very intent to make the tragedy seem utterly ridiculous. Ovid's Metamorphoses' Pyramus and Thisbe (the source material for Romeo and Juliet), despite it's relative shortness, is infinitely more heart-rending. Tragedy has not been tragedy ever since Euripides became a playwright.
8
Okay, Fnarf, point taken. And perhaps what I wrote didn't come out quite the way I meant...I meant that although I don't consider Stephen King to be a great writer (I actually threw one of his books into a campfire this summer, as I was tired of hearing the reader grouse about how horrible it was--yes, I burned a book), I like that quote. Sure, kids should look for new words instead of always using the same ones, but writers? Tortured prose drives me insane. My favourite line from a book, ever, is from Dubliners, where the main character is describing the sound of cricketbats carrying across a green field in summer: "Like drops of water slowly falling in the brimming bowl: Pick, pack, pock, puck." Aaahh, lovely.

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