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Much truth here. Years ago I took a summer school course in technical and scientific writing involving intense exercises in ruthlessly eliminating passive voice
by firebones 16y ago
Much truth here. Years ago I took a summer school course in technical and scientific writing involving intense exercises in ruthlessly eliminating passive voice (regardless of the gymnastics involved in doing so) and many other common tropes of academic writing. The course was like a cell-obliterating chemotherapy against whatever creative writing voice I had managed to put together at that age, and it took years to overcome the effects.
Toss in a good measure of courses involving study of Hemingway and Vonnegut and I was a wreck for years. A passive construction, a ten-dollar word, the odd adverb--all had me in doubt and writing the most vanilla prose.
So it goes.
It was only when I started participating in NaNoWriMo that the forced march of cranking out 1666 words a night for a month combined with the permission to produce a shitty first draft allowed me to being my recovery.
- nprincigalli 16y agoReminds me of the classic Hemingway vs Faulkner discussion: http://www.guilford.edu/about_guilford/services_and_administration/writing/style/faulkner.html http://www.guilford.edu/about_guilford/services_and_administ... Hemingway: Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited. Faulkner: He did not feel weak, he was merely luxuriating in that supremely gutful lassitude of convalescence in which time, hurry, doing, did not exist, the accumulating seconds and minutes and hours to which it its well state the body is slave both waking and sleeping, now reversed and time now the lip-server and mendicant to the body's pleasure instead of the body thrall to time's headlong course.