I made a blog

[Mike Dunn]

As a general rule, stylists understand well when they can use their poetry, and when they just need to tell the story. When you read Mieville next, take time to really look at his prose. Watch where he is letting his characters do their thing, and when he's writing clean prose. I think these kinds of writers are so brilliant because they can turn it on and off in the right places. And realize that Mieville's "voice" here is not really Mieville's voice. Mieville does not, for example, use the word "complexitude." His character uses that word, and it is the exact word his character would use. He gets away with his pretension here because of the characters he chooses to write about.

I just found a quote of Mieville's that speaks to your very point:

I think for a lot of people who don’t read pulp growing up, there’s a real surprise that the particular kind of Pulp Modernism of a certain kind of lush purple prose isn’t necessarily a failure or a mistake, but is part of the fabric of the story and what makes it weird. There’s a big default notion that “spare,” or “precise” prose is somehow better. I keep insisting to them that while such prose is completely legitimate, it’s in no way intrinsically more accurate, more relevant, or better than lush prose. That adjective “precise,” for example, needs unpicking. If a “minimalist” writer describes a table, and a metaphor-ridden adjective-heavy weird fictioneer describes a table, they are very different, but the former is in absolutely no way closer to the material reality than the latter. Both of them are radically different from that reality. They’re just words. A table is a big wooden thing with my tea on it.

[John]

Mike, that's a great quote to share. It's one I should print out, as I often find myself pressured to write sparsely. It's comforting to know that someone as accomplished as Mr. Mieville feels that isn't strictly necessary.

[roncollins]

The real point is to write in a clear and interesting way. Among the problems with deep prose is that it is very hard to write in a clear and interesting way--and in conjunction with this, most new writers are afflicted with both a great passion for the poetry of writers like Mieville and a lack of skill in both storytelling and the use of vocabulary in ways that are interesting. The later is (my opinion here) due to being weak with their basic sentencing and the information flow within it. In this way, Mieville's prose--when well done--flows to a beat and is in its own strange way quite spare. The poetry of his construction is rock-solid, and his use of vocabulary is dead-on for the tone of the piece ("complexitude" in the earlier example is a perfect usage; I posit that 99.5% of writers, especially new writers, would not have used that word properly...or as well as he did).

One way you can tell the difference between a newbie and a Mieville (beyond some obvious ways) is to pay attention to them when they are _not_ writing big, complex sentences. Mieville _can_ be very tight with his language. And he uses moments like that to move things along. Newbie writers are hit-and-miss. They don't actually know how to be spare, and honestly, they often don't know how to diagnose this problem in themselves (perhaps because they know what they love). It's very hard to write good, spare prose. But spare prose, when written well, is _always_ clear, and if supporting an interesting story is _always_ interesting. Hence, new writers are often told to tighten their prose. But the real message a new writer should be hearing (IMHO) is "I'm bored. Make your prose easier to read (and, therefore, more interesting)."

To me, so much of the learning curve for writers is about being able to translate the rules of thumb into useful ideas. I figured out early in my process, that the message "write more sparely" was really code for "use the language better." At one point I wrote deeply lavish prose that I thought was glowing and beautiful, but the average person could not read in a way that would be satisfying to them. This annoyed me to no end. Couldn't they see how glorious my work was? But it wasn't glorious. I was throwing beautiful words down in ways that readers had to work extremely hard to follow (I was asking them to hold concepts in their head for long periods of time before they all fell together, for example...so, yes, everything was there, but I wore the reader out with the way I was asking them to absorb it). Stripping my prose spare helped me understand how to write prose that people could read, how to lead a reader through the idea field I wanted them to get in the most efficient fashion for them. In other words, that process was actually more important to _me_ as a writer than it was to anyone who was reading me.

Anyway, once I got better at understanding how I was presenting information, I then found whatever natural voice I have (or whatever artistic flare I have for using language, for a more pretentious phrasing) came almost unbidden to the forefront.

[Mike Dunn]

Thanks Ron (as always) for the sound advice).