Day 330: Sentences
I had some non-writing related stress this past week, and while they were a little more stress than could be fixed with a glass of wine, they weren't, you know, life threatening. But apparently my IBS didn't get the memo and flared up like a beast. In combo with sinus headaches, I've had a rather miserable week.
So now I'm really behind on finishing my novella, but the things that caused me stress are now past and my body's starting to feel a bit better.
When I had my sinus headache and couldn't read, I listened to the audiobook of Several Short Sentences About Writing. The language is more literary with lots of pretty metaphors, which isn't really my preferred style, but so far, the content itself is not bad.
He starts off the introduction with the premise to question everything you've been taught about writing and decide for yourself what works for you, which is the same as the Dear Writer, You Need to Quit book.
In the first chapter (which seems a bit long) he's going back to the basics of the sentence, and suggests writing short sentences because it's easier to discern their meaning and edit them for more exactness in what you want them to say. He reminds the reader that there will be the meaning you want a sentence to have, and the meaning it actually has, and you need to edit/write it to make sure the two align, which is a very good reminder. It's easier to do that with shorter sentences, and he touches on sentence rhythm by saying that it's also easier to adjust the rhythm of short sentences over longer ones so that you don't just have a choppy reading rhythm.
He goes on about other things a sentence should accomplish--inference and nuances, grammatical varieties, and how if each sentence is clear, your reader won't need herding. (Which I thought was a bit ironic since it seemed he took a really long time to get his points across.)
But I appreciated the contents of the book because it reminds me of how I'm doing more detailed polishing of my sentences with this slower writing style. He's right in that even small word choices can change the meaning and rhythm of a sentence, and what I've been doing is tweaking to make sure both of those are exactly what I want them to be.
Honestly, I've long held the opinion that for genre and pulp fiction, writers don't tend to need so much attention to detail for each sentence. This is just my opinion, but because readers of genre and pulp fiction tend to read more books per month, if they're anything like me, they might also be reading faster and not necessarily reading every sentence slowly. I read for the story and the characters. I think that the meanings of sentences have to be clear, but I also think sentences (for genre fiction) are kind of like the asphalt the reader's car is speeding along. You only want to make sure there are no bumps and potholes, not that every line is perfectly drawn on the road or that the surface is perfectly smooth and straight.
But then I was reading some light novels this past week (to take my mind off my IBS discomfort) and while some were really great, some were rather lacking. I would read a paragraph a few times to try to understand what the writer was trying to say, and I think a little more attention to detail for the sentences by the author (and/or the translator/editor) would have made things clearer so the story or characters weren't quite so confusing.
So now I'm starting to think that maybe more attention to detail might be what separates an okay book from a very good book. Anything that is confusing will stop the reader's reading flow. Any information that's buried in a sentence or that's not conveyed clearly will also create confusion and stop the reader's reading flow.
I originally started doing this slower writing style to accommodate my weakness of sloppy self-editing (simply because I hate it so much), but I've started editing with more detail. And now I'm starting to see that this editing with detail is probably more important than I had thought. I am taking the time to make my sentences say what I want them to say, but at the same time, I've never been the type to edit obsessively (which is probably obvious since I dislike self-editing so much).
Anyway, as the author mentioned in the book's introduction, as writers, we just need to figure out what works for us rather than adhering only to rules and tips we've learned. I think that's why this writing blog is so important for me. I am trying out different things, and trying to figure out what works for my personality and tendencies, and recording the data and results of experiments.
Sometimes I do feel like a complete anomaly, because I don't know of any writer who outlines quite as much as I do, nor do I know any authors who hate self-editing so much that they will change their writing style to accommodate that. But I do know authors who do outline, and I know authors who write slowly and deliberately, so I suppose I'm not such an oddity if I think of it that way.
I suppose it just emphasizes that every writer is a completely different animal, and each writer has to figure out what works for them alone. I think it's good to get lots of information about how other people do things, but only so that you can pick and choose what works best for you.
Because I was sick over the weekend, I had a bunch of writing-related business to do today, and honestly I'm not sure if I'll get any writing done today because my brain is a little fried. I'm also not entirely over my IBS issues, so it might be better for me to take it a bit easy today and get to bed early.
***
(I actually forgot to post this yesterday, so I'm posting this the morning of the next day.)
So now I'm really behind on finishing my novella, but the things that caused me stress are now past and my body's starting to feel a bit better.
When I had my sinus headache and couldn't read, I listened to the audiobook of Several Short Sentences About Writing. The language is more literary with lots of pretty metaphors, which isn't really my preferred style, but so far, the content itself is not bad.
He starts off the introduction with the premise to question everything you've been taught about writing and decide for yourself what works for you, which is the same as the Dear Writer, You Need to Quit book.
In the first chapter (which seems a bit long) he's going back to the basics of the sentence, and suggests writing short sentences because it's easier to discern their meaning and edit them for more exactness in what you want them to say. He reminds the reader that there will be the meaning you want a sentence to have, and the meaning it actually has, and you need to edit/write it to make sure the two align, which is a very good reminder. It's easier to do that with shorter sentences, and he touches on sentence rhythm by saying that it's also easier to adjust the rhythm of short sentences over longer ones so that you don't just have a choppy reading rhythm.
He goes on about other things a sentence should accomplish--inference and nuances, grammatical varieties, and how if each sentence is clear, your reader won't need herding. (Which I thought was a bit ironic since it seemed he took a really long time to get his points across.)
But I appreciated the contents of the book because it reminds me of how I'm doing more detailed polishing of my sentences with this slower writing style. He's right in that even small word choices can change the meaning and rhythm of a sentence, and what I've been doing is tweaking to make sure both of those are exactly what I want them to be.
Honestly, I've long held the opinion that for genre and pulp fiction, writers don't tend to need so much attention to detail for each sentence. This is just my opinion, but because readers of genre and pulp fiction tend to read more books per month, if they're anything like me, they might also be reading faster and not necessarily reading every sentence slowly. I read for the story and the characters. I think that the meanings of sentences have to be clear, but I also think sentences (for genre fiction) are kind of like the asphalt the reader's car is speeding along. You only want to make sure there are no bumps and potholes, not that every line is perfectly drawn on the road or that the surface is perfectly smooth and straight.
But then I was reading some light novels this past week (to take my mind off my IBS discomfort) and while some were really great, some were rather lacking. I would read a paragraph a few times to try to understand what the writer was trying to say, and I think a little more attention to detail for the sentences by the author (and/or the translator/editor) would have made things clearer so the story or characters weren't quite so confusing.
So now I'm starting to think that maybe more attention to detail might be what separates an okay book from a very good book. Anything that is confusing will stop the reader's reading flow. Any information that's buried in a sentence or that's not conveyed clearly will also create confusion and stop the reader's reading flow.
I originally started doing this slower writing style to accommodate my weakness of sloppy self-editing (simply because I hate it so much), but I've started editing with more detail. And now I'm starting to see that this editing with detail is probably more important than I had thought. I am taking the time to make my sentences say what I want them to say, but at the same time, I've never been the type to edit obsessively (which is probably obvious since I dislike self-editing so much).
Anyway, as the author mentioned in the book's introduction, as writers, we just need to figure out what works for us rather than adhering only to rules and tips we've learned. I think that's why this writing blog is so important for me. I am trying out different things, and trying to figure out what works for my personality and tendencies, and recording the data and results of experiments.
Sometimes I do feel like a complete anomaly, because I don't know of any writer who outlines quite as much as I do, nor do I know any authors who hate self-editing so much that they will change their writing style to accommodate that. But I do know authors who do outline, and I know authors who write slowly and deliberately, so I suppose I'm not such an oddity if I think of it that way.
I suppose it just emphasizes that every writer is a completely different animal, and each writer has to figure out what works for them alone. I think it's good to get lots of information about how other people do things, but only so that you can pick and choose what works best for you.
Because I was sick over the weekend, I had a bunch of writing-related business to do today, and honestly I'm not sure if I'll get any writing done today because my brain is a little fried. I'm also not entirely over my IBS issues, so it might be better for me to take it a bit easy today and get to bed early.
***
(I actually forgot to post this yesterday, so I'm posting this the morning of the next day.)
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