| Author | Message | ||
     Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.151.109.99 |
Which side of the prose style fashions are you on? | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.16.81 |
Depends on the theme and the material, Des! Oddly enough, I'm working on a lengthy analysis of some Lovecraft tales for a literary publisher, and I was amazed by just how little florid prose there is in "The Rats in the Walls" - barely a couple of paragraphs, very carefully built up to with measured and sober language. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.29.180.201 |
Yeah, it's about time that cliche about Lovecraft died a death. It's QI material now. The same as that comment about The Beatles that suggests McCartney wrote all the sloppy stuff and Lennon was the hardman. Nonsense. Just look at the stuff, innit. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.29.180.201 |
As for Des's question, yes, it depends on what you're trying to achieve. No point in being dogmatic about it. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.29.180.201 |
Just a thought. The more I write, the more I think prose style is determined not by literary choice, but by the life-world of the character you're writing about. So children tend to see things in vivid, colourful ways; (some) adults in logical, rational ways. Prose style flows naturally from the feeling you get from engaging with the person you're writing about. It's far from a conscious/mechanical process; I guess it's what writers describe as nous, instinct, the-right-way-to-do-it. Another thing I've learnt recently (slightly tangential to Des's question) is that some characters I write about simply result in utterly dull and lifeless prose. They're commonly folk with whom I have little personal empathy, whom the tale I've invented has demanded and yet to whom I can do no justice. These tales either implode or get no further than the initial white-heat spell of writing. They're soulless and clunky. Which makes me think that lively, engaging prose comes from a fundamental connection with the character. You, the author, are elucidating a lived-world you truly understand, with all its perceptual and cognitive intricacies. Dunno if that's a common experience among fellow scribes. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.40.253.74 |
Both have their strengths. I think lean requires more confidence from the writer. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.29.180.201 |
I don't know. Martin Amis was shitting himself before publication of Money. He'd put all focus on the excessively florid voice. The whole book hanged on it. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.40.254.75 |
William Gibson talks about the fear of writing a none stylistic sentence and yet his prose is lean. I think Gibson is now the best prose stylist thriller writer around, since his near abandonment of SF. Has a lot in common with le Carre while being completely different from him. Amis surprised me in Pregnent Window by dropping in the odd stock phrase and cliche, while producing, for me anyway, his most moving book. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.40.254.191 |
Oh mother. Must be the George Formby tribute act at the 1940s weekend rubbing off on me. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.29.180.201 |
Can you recall the cliches in the Amis? I think he'd be horrified in some snuck through. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.40.254.70 |
Not offhand. They surprised me when I read the book. Thought he must've let them go for ease of reading. Sometimes not using the stock phrase or cliche is worse than using it. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
"Tentacular and rich" is Henry James, and as much as I admire him, he's far from easy reading. And I mean the actual act of reading his work: it's difficult to do, a strenuous mental exercise. I guess I'm indeed getting older  because I find my patience runs thin nowadays, in my reading. A clean well-lighted place, that's what I want.... | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.21.211 |
Henry James! Good Lord, I didn't realise. Did he also say "Fast and bulbous"? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.151.109.99 |
Depends on the theme and the material, Des! ---------- I'm not sure. Can one write a spare and lean account of a tentacular and rich plot, and vice versa? BTW Indeed, Henry James. Anyone read 'The Golden Bowl'? | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.151.109.99 |
Sorry, by 'account of', I think I really meant 'prose about'. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.28.124 |
"Can one write a spare and lean account of a tentacular and rich plot, and vice versa?" I should think so. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.151.109.99 |
I suppose a corollary question to that is: does any one author usually write in the same prose style whether writing about a spare and lean plot or a tentacular and rich plot? | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.28.124 |
I don't think I do, certainly. I had an early go at writing a Lovecraftian tale very largely in dialogue - "The Will of Stanley Brooke". It isn't very good, but it was a conscious stylistic experiment. My thing is occasionally to try doing without some element I depend on and see what happens then. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.29.180.201 |
Des, as I've said, I don't think many authors would make a conscious decision to get all tentacular and rich (or spare and lean) before writing. It just happens by instinct, according to the lived world one is trying to evoke. Has any writer here ever sat down and thought, "Right, this story is all halucinogenic, so let's set the prose loose"? I doubt it; it just comes out how it comes out, according to experience and nous. It's when we deliberately cut against the grain of our instincts, as Ramsey suggests above, that we notice these elements. A useful, defamiliarising experience. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.29.180.201 |
Jack Sullivan makes some good points about this in his essay on Ramsey in Horror: 100 Best Books. He reveals how the prose adapts to the material, sometimes clean and solid, other times sinuous and adventurous - 'spectral realism', he calls the latter. Compare the writing of acid-y tales in Scared Stiff to, say, the leanness of The Count of Eleven. Compare The Grin of the Dark to Ghosts Knows, two books written within years. Same author, vastly different stylistic approach. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.151.109.99 |
I agree with all that Gary. Intersting stuff. But do you feel that the fashion these days is spare and lean prose, whatever the subject matter? The prevailing trend? With exceptions, of course. | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.8.28.124 |
I think for me the prose style of anything I write is one way of engaging imaginatively with the material, and it isn't usually a very conscious choice. Sometimes I get it wrong and the material stays lifeless. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.29.180.201 |
Probably. I suspect some authors are making a commercial virtue out of spare and lean (easier to read) without sacrificing artistic integrity. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.29.180.201 |
Ramsey, I've always felt that the tendency in your later work to remove all said-isms and associated commentary from your dialogue lost a little of your strengths as a stylist. For instance, I love literary games you play in Grin/Dark, where a character speaks before you tell the reader that s/he hadn't said that at all, but might have done. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.29.180.201 |
Also, I find the tendency in your later work to pare everything to the minimum exhilharating to read, but sometimes - just sometimes - yearn for the 'muddier' earlier stuff, where densely composed prose often yielded heady effects. Then again, Grin/Dark demonstrated that this stuff isn't far from being unleashed at any given moment. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 178.116.61.103 |
I like the way the prose evolves in "The Pattern". Very calm and elaborate at first, almost pastoral, which is entirely in keeping with the setting. Then, literally, a note of discordance - the first scream, which hits one like a wet snowball. The prose picks up after that, as more unease creeps in with every successive scream. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
The only thing stranger than imagining Henry James listening to Trout Mask Replica, would be imagining the review he'd write upon it....  (I've not read The Golden Bowl, Des.) The Count of Eleven was indeed quite lean in comparison to, say, Midnight Sun—though it could be the terrors of that latter were so abstract, and so the language necessarily matched it. I found MS more strenuous reading than Ramsey's other novels, personally. But there's a difference between abstract, and complex. Let alone "tentacular," which could refer to story elements: plot, characters, themes, etc. Ulysses is every bit as tentacular as, say, Slaughterhouse-Five—a gulf of styles separates those two. As a writer, oddly, I find it's much like Pascal's famous quip; it's easier to be lengthy, verbose and complex, and so much harder to be lean and mean. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
Hee-hee.... http://blogs.babble.com/strollerderby/2012/07/12/judging-a-book-by-its-cover-a-6 -year-old-guesses-what-classic-novels-are-all-about | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.151.109.99 |
The *extreme* of tentacular is a page-length sentence by Proust with sub-clause upon sub-clause, and if 'rich, full of succulence, words to die for. For rich I'd cite Brendan Connel'l's work as an example. I am not an exponent of lean and mean and spare - so I'lll leave others to define that. I imagine Cormac McCarthy being an example. My original question was about prose style not necessarily plots, although there is a similar spectrum for plots as well as prose style, I guess. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 99.126.164.88 |
For me then, Des, it depends on my mood. Sometimes, there is nothing but what, say, a Henry James tale might satisfy... though it's strenuous reading, like going to a gym. Like a gym, you tend to feel more invigorated after engaging, however. I'm torturing this metaphor. Hemingway is actually sort of right on the line: on the one hand, there's no one easier to read—even a 6 year-old could tear through a Hemingway tale. But the "code" for meaning, in Heminway, is so dense and abstract in its own way... that the style, counterintuitively, becomes incredibly "succulent," and immensely difficult.... | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 09-2010 Posted From: 86.151.109.99 |
Yes, Craig. 'Spectrum': Face value: simple to complex. prose style 'spectrum' can be used in conjunction with the plot 'spectrum ' at various points on each spectrum to produce something beyond face value. | ||
| Joel (Joel) Username: Joel Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.37.199.45 |
"two books written within years" That tends to be how time works.  I think Hammett is a fine example of complex, multivalent stories told in pared-down prose. The effect is astonishing, like eating raw chilli in organic capsules that break open minutes after swallowing. You're on the bus, the book left at home, and you think HANG ON A MINUTE... Rich, tentacular prose around spare, lean storylines can be interesting but the horror small press has worked that seam so far into the ground it's run out of oxygen. It's dead canary fiction. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.158.156.168 |
I like the title The Pregnant Window. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.29.180.201 |
It's taken from an essay, Tony, about revolutions. The full quotation is something like, "Revolutions result in dead fathers and leave pregnant widows." It refers to the women's movement in this instance. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.158.156.168 |
Ah, I meant 'Window' not Widow! Thanks for filling me in, though. | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.29.180.201 |
Er, hold on - the pregnant window? | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.29.180.201 |
It was Mark's fault, I now notice. I wondered what he was on about with that Formby joke. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.158.156.168 |
Yes - The Pregnant Window has a certain mystique... I heard Window Cleaner the other day - such a shocking song! 'Pyjamas lying side by side'. Lordy! | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.158.156.168 |
I'm inclined towards the lean in prose nowadays. It can *be* a kind of richness. But I don't mind tentacles, or am averse to using them. | ||
| Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch) Username: Mark_lynch Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 92.40.254.90 |
Turned out nice again. Oh, Formby was banned by the BBC, Tony. He was the equivalent of punk in his day. His little stick of Blackpool rock caused real outrage. |