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pjthompson) wrote2010-08-05 03:05 pm
Lush and overwritten
So, what is the difference for you between lush prose and overwritten prose?
I’m not asking to be a smart aleck or because I have an ax to grind (I don’t), I’m genuinely curious what the breaking point is for any of you who would care to comment.
I know that one person’s lush is another’s overwritten and vice versa, so some of it is a matter of taste, but I’d still like to hear your thoughts on this if you’re willing.
For myself, yeah, I do sometimes hit a wall with some lush prose where I want very badly for the author to tone it down several notches. Usually for me it involves the use of a lot of two dollar words when simpler ones would flow better, but it can also involve a great deal of artery-clogging images piled one on top of another. Still, other people lap that kind of thing up like cream—arteries be damned.
There probably isn’t a consensus. But, please, discuss…
Mirrored from Better Than Dead.
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No seriously, I've really worked at trimming this from my own writing over the years. The stuff that I use to think was the height of expressive prose, I now see much of it as pretentious crap. What I like is expressive language that is there for service of the story, to bring forth the characters and plot. Often with so-called literary fiction, the emphasis seems to be only on the language, to mask that the writer doesn't have anything important to say. Here's a snippet I used from my review of the antho Paper Cities at The Fix. It's from Hal Duncan’s “The Tower of Morning’s Bones.”
Fire. He had dreamt of fire: a fierce firmament in the deep structure of the afterworld, a flux of flash in an ocean system of eddies and currents, waves and tides, splashes and ripples, the simple quarternity of colour complexified into chiaroscuro.
Need I say more? Some consider this fine writing. I find it very pretentious. So bad it would be funny if the writer wasn't serious.
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I've really worked at trimming this from my own writing over the years. The stuff that I use to think was the height of expressive prose, I now see much of it as pretentious crap.
I'm constantly working on that! As I said above, it's sometimes hard to tell from inside the story when you're (I'm) doing that. Often I only see it with time and distance.
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(And actually, you could argue that the others aren't, either. What is a flux of flash, exactly? And the meaning of "firmament" that he's used is very obscure--usually "firmament" means "the heavens," but here he's using it to mean "activity"--but what does it mean to talk about fierce activity in the deep structure of the afterworld. What is meant by "the deep structure of the afterworld," for that matter?)
Complex, ornate language can be okay, but you have to make it mean something.
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