Less is not more, more is more -- is the common wisdom about better writing wrong?

[psood0nym]

I’m interested in Bluelighters’ thoughts on this thread’s titular claim about writing. In “The Elements of Style,” a work of near Biblical renown among many writers, Strunk and White remind us to avoid needless words but don’t begin to consider all of the ways in which more words might be needed. As much as I agree with much of their proclamations, in my opinion “The Elements of Style” set off decades of misunderstandings about what constitutes elegant and effective prose (I probably shouldn’t have written this while drinking, as doing so will not help convince you of my point, but then where would I have gotten the inspiration to create this thread?).

Short, simple and direct sentences are of course entirely appropriate for hard journalism, communicating the thoughts of macho characters in fiction, and other writerly contexts where their utility is obvious, but I’m often struck by the impression that the “less is more” creed is the province of grammar Nazi’s who are convinced language is far more rigid than its history implies, or of English teachers, whose frustrated attempts to get students to communicate acceptably encourages them to insist on simplicity in instruction that, while practical in basic communications, is not nearly so applicable to creating great prose or rhetoric. (I should confess I find committing to short sentences in writing oppressively boring.) Of course, I’m not alone in my attitude. I’ve held it for a long time, it’s just that I’ve only recently gone rummaging for scholarly ammunition to defend it (probably best encapsulated in the work of Brooks Landon). I like the metaphor of the pencil in the following John Erskine quote, which communicates this dissenting school of thought’s central doctrine. From “The Craft of Writing” (1946):

Let me suggest here one principle of the writer's craft, which though known to practitioners I have never seen discussed in print. The principle is this: When you write, you make a point not subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding. When you put one word after another, your statement should be more precise the more you add. If the result is otherwise, you have added the wrong thing, or you have added more than was needed.

The formal term for what Erskine is alluding to here is “cumulative syntax.” From lecture notes by Brooks Landon:

The cumulative syntax, first codified and best explained by Francis Christensen, adds information to an initial base clause in unbound or free modifying phrases, all of which point back to, expand, and add to information presented in the base clause. The cumulative sentence is a form of a loose sentence, as opposed to periodic sentences that delay completion of their meaning until the end of the sentence. Cumulative sentences are easy to write, a process of adding modifying phrases to the base clause of the sentence, each phrase adding to our understanding or sharpening our visualization of the preceding phrase or of the base clause, taking us through increasingly specific sentence levels, each level another step for the sentence. Cumulative sentences lend themselves to numerous writing moves that almost guarantee our writing will become more effective … This is not to say that cumulative sentences are better than other sentences, nor is it to claim that what they accomplish can only be accomplished by this syntax, but it is to claim that the cumulative syntax gives us a kind of Swiss Army knife for our writing, a multipurpose tool that can be useful in a wide range of situations.

Landon uses Hemingway’s status as poster boy for the short sentence to make a persuasive and ironic point:

Ask anyone who has read much Hemingway whether his sentences were characteristically long or characteristically short, and the odds are they’ll choose short. But consider this sentence from Death in the Afternoon: “ Once I remember Gertrude Stein talking of bullfights spoke of her admiration for Joselito and showed me some pictures of him in the ring and of herself and Alice Toklas sitting in the first row of the wooden barreras at the bull ring at Valencia with Joselito and his brother Gallo below, and I had just come from the Near East, where the Greeks broke the legs of their baggage and transport animals and drove and shoved them off the quay into the shallow water when they abandoned the city of Smyrna, and I remember saying that I did not like the bullfights because of the poor horses.” My point is that Hemingway wrote tons of long sentences. It may be precisely those long sentences he wrote that make us remember the short ones.

Of course, efforts to domesticate cumulative syntax in constructing long and intricate sentences are an invitation to screw ups. Our attempts to sew meaning often grow worn as we extend them, and so our ambition to ensnare subtleties by letting out the sentential leash risks fraying its threads. Nevertheless, I think we need to jettison the popular dogmatic faith in the virtues of the short and direct sentence that characterizes much of formal writing instruction if we hope to avoid being weighed down and mired in mediocrity. Thoughts?

 

[infectedmushroom]

I haven't read that book but I've always liked the idea that an artist doesn't add clay, he strips it away. That being said I don't think it's a good idea to be to anal about how one writes. Just write, and see the style develop on it's own. Maybe it will be long, maybe not. If everyone wrote the same way, it would be boring.

 

[psood0nym]

^I see what you're saying, but I'm asking which advice, generally speaking, do Bluelighters think helps most of us become better writers and why: the "less is more" advice or the "more is more" advice? I'm also frustrated with the way modern writing instruction dissuades writers from revealing themselves through heavy use of similes and metaphors, instead favoring more clear, direct, objective, author-as-security-camera-style prose. I'm referring to the attitude reflected by White in this quote:

The simile is a common device and a useful one, but similes coming in rapid fire, one right on top of another, are more distracting than illuminating. The reader needs time to catch his breath; he can’t be expected to compare everything with something else, and no relief in sight.

Metaphor is how writers put their souls into prose, it's how they add life to their writing. Highly analogical writing reveals the unique dynamics of an author's mind to readers through a largely intuitive process of empathetic synthesis. That's probably the very most illuminating part of reading for me: learning novel ways of thinking from an author and sensing a deep connection between our minds in the recognition of what was previously ineffable. How is too much of that a "distraction" when it represents the achievement of one of the highest and most noble ambitions a writer can have? So what if metaphorically dense prose is "showy" or "self-indulgent" or difficult to hold together in understanding sometimes? I want to be held to higher standards and power up, not worry about how an author's work makes me feel stupid sometimes. If I want sixth grade reading material and hand holding I'll stick to the New York Post.

As a reader I want to be shown the respect to be challenged to understand novel concepts, shown ways of thinking I haven't considered before, analogies between things I've not perceived. I value these mostly sentence-level achievements in writing even more than I do the the satisfaction clean structure provides or the entertainment value of a tight snappy plot. Of course, attention to structure is indispensable and I don't mean to dismiss that concern. It's just that my impression is that popular insistence on the importance of simplicity and adherence to direct common language in the teaching and appraisal of rhetorical or fictional writing is taken too seriously and mistakenly assumes prose and poetry are more different from each other than they are.

 

[infectedmushroom]

I totally agree with you. Those who have the balls to write in a highly subjective way can become cult heroes (I'm thinking hunter s Thompson for one.)

 

[CoffeeDrinker]

I have no use for Strunk and White to be honest. I always was confident in my ability to construct long sentences that don't constitute a run-on, then I read Jack Kerouac and learned that no one cares if you write run ons anyway.

Check out the book titled "Spunk and Bite."

 

[psood0nym]

I have no use for Strunk and White to be honest. I always was confident in my ability to construct long sentences that don't constitute a run-on, then I read Jack Kerouac and learned that no one cares if you write run ons anyway.

Check out the book titled "Spunk and Bite."

Read it, liked it, and had it assigned to me by a high-profile writer and professor who nevertheless espoused the "less is more" doctrine. She's a great writer, too, and did a lot to support me (efforts I've risen to meet with existential paralysis, but that's beside the point). She played her part in the well-intentioned but unrehearsed party line that bows in deference to what's imagined as new classical thought. Despite this, I want to let my mind go critical, half in terms of restrained meta-cognition, and the other in terms of nuclear fusion.

 

[PainSucks]

Preamble: I'm a poet who bows to the prose poem as my favored form, so take what I say with more than a couple grains of salt, and please ignore the flagrant sics.

I think a balance of the two (long and short) nabs benefits from both camps, and would recommend exploring and formulating a wide variety of approaches to sentence structure. A series of long sentences could indeed wind a reader (so can short, jargon heavy science-speak), but it could also build a pitch that knocks them over and takes them into conceptual territory they would have never experienced otherwise, and which turns out to be one of the most remarkable experiences they carry with them as a reader. Alternation can have great effect, meaning long then short, or long and medium and short all mixed together, with the occasional deliberate use of length to punctuate a point. I think DeLillo does this very well; he'll move through a series of medium-to-long length sentences then hit you with a short one, or a one word sentence, that carries a lot more force behind it because the mind hadn't encountered anything that terse in a while. He also said a couple of things in an interview that I liked and think may be tangentially related: that he gets the sound of a sentence in his head before he writes it, like the length and timbre in terms of a syllabic music, and then finds the words for it, and if the words he finds don't fit the length-music, he keeps looking until they do; and also that his composition practice had a major breakthrough when he started working in paragraphs, meaning he starts a new page for each paragraph and doing so brings his attention much closer to what's going on there and how we can affect it.

Also: "then I read Jack Kerouac and learned that no one cares if you write run ons anyway." YES.

But, like you say, if you're going to write a run-on, or a sentence that takes up more of the page than it excludes, it better be fucking good. Can it be done to great effect and lauded by the masses and the ivory twats? Sure. Queue Proust, queue Marilynne Robinson, queue David Foster Wallace. And if your page-length DFW-like footnotes rock the essay but fail in the novel? At least they can fail so beautifully their failure leaves most accomplished career-padding attempts by the fire, edging toward where they belong.

I think it also depends on how you as a person or being or, well, let's not go there and just say how you think. Marilynne Robinson wrote in one of the essays in her last book something about how she was taught Latin relatively early in school, and so her sentences tend to run long and clause-ish and Latiny, and fall through the mind like multi-level waterfalls splashing here and there until they enter the calm pool where the period is in order. If you want more specifics on that, let me know and I'll look back and try to find a pertinent excerpt. In any case, she comes to mind as someone who can certainly go the ways of both clear, easy lucid prose and mind-elevating transformations of language, and might be worth investigating for your purposes.

As for leaving metaphoric writing out of your prose. Please. This isn't an office or business environment. Imagine what Cormac McCarthy would think about that nonsense. In a world where there are ever more things to do (like bureaucratic b.s. to take care of), and ever more informational/entertaining inputs vying for my attention and time, and ever more writing that could make the slogging worthwhile, I want soul-exposing, humanity-shredding, mind-expanding returns on my investment, and while these rules of composition might help a newbie learn to walk, I damn sure hope they aren't tolerated shackling the talents of my advanced literary bushwackers. As long as the diction isn't so overblown it turns the stomach, the rhetoric isn't chomping at a level of intelligence or cleverness it can't achieve, and the extended use of metaphors doesn't conclude with a relation the language hasn't illustrated, I say lay it all down. But, then, don't be afraid to cut. The line may be beautiful, but if it ain't good for whole goose, get it out of there. But if it does fit, and does lift the descriptive prose out of its toe-the-line doldrums, then the syncretic and synaesthetic effects can sit in the work like ticking bombs waiting for a pair of eager eyes to light the fuses.

 

[PainSucks]

Forgot my last point, which isn't a point but a semi-colon. If you're going for the long sentence, she's your friend, let her in, court her, show her off, don't use her too much, but figure out what she can do in your sentence that adds another layer of complexity in your hints to the reader.

 

[psood0nym]

I think a balance of the two (long and short) nabs benefits from both camps, and would recommend exploring and formulating a wide variety of approaches to sentence structure. A series of long sentences could indeed wind a reader (so can short, jargon heavy science-speak), but it could also build a pitch that knocks them over and takes them into conceptual territory they would have never experienced otherwise, and which turns out to be one of the most remarkable experiences they carry with them as a reader. Alternation can have great effect, meaning long then short, or long and medium and short all mixed together, with the occasional deliberate use of length to punctuate a point. I think DeLillo does this very well; he'll move through a series of medium-to-long length sentences then hit you with a short one, or a one word sentence, that carries a lot more force behind it because the mind hadn't encountered anything that terse in a while. He also said a couple of things in an interview that I liked and think may be tangentially related: that he gets the sound of a sentence in his head before he writes it, like the length and timbre in terms of a syllabic music, and then finds the words for it, and if the words he finds don't fit the length-music, he keeps looking until they do; and also that his composition practice had a major breakthrough when he started working in paragraphs, meaning he starts a new page for each paragraph and doing so brings his attention much closer to what's going on there and how we can affect it.

I don’t suppose you have a link to this interview online?

The idea of hearing the musicality of a sentence prior to considering its dictation is very familiar to me. I write trip reports by meditating on the core metaphors I find most evocative of the experiences I’ve had within the trip and listen for the music I hear in response that carries what will ultimately be translated into words. In fact, I think glossolalia may be reflective of this process when it occurs at near-seizure amplitudes – and so narrative and chronology are very much secondary concerns in inspired writing for me.

I agree with the advice to mix sentences so as to punctuate a point through contrast. When we consider the interplay of sentential and paragraph-level efforts in the production of rhetorical effects we’re delving into an oasis of knowledge, which I think is part of the fundamental landscape of the sensorium that constitutes our sense of conceptual meaning in experience. I find it deeply fascinating.

Thanks for your contribution PainSucks. I've read through your past posts – that’s something you can do after you make more than 50 posts, IIRC – and you strike me as a highly articulate, passionate, and resilient person. I hope you’ll stick around. Bluelight could benefit from your presence. Often you won’t get the replies you’re hoping for, but people of all persuasions are drawn to drugs, and that means despite this your posts are read by a diverse community (and a massive lurker population) that is especially representative of the normal population, at least relative to other “topic-based” online forums that offer this degree of high-profile interaction. Remember that when find yourself frustrated here.

 

[PainSucks]

Sure, it was in a Paris Review interview from '93. Whatever faults the mag may have as a whole, I've always founds its reviews to be a good source for mining the hard-earned tricks of the trade, and for getting a more well-rounded glimpse into a writer's head. The relevant excerpts are below, and the whole interview can be had here: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo

INTERVIEWER

How do you begin? What are the raw materials of a story?

DeLILLO

I think the scene comes first, an idea of a character in a place. It’s visual, it’s Technicolor—something I see in a vague way. Then sentence by sentence into the breach. No outlines— maybe a short list of items, chronological, that may represent the next twenty pages. But the basic work is built around the sentence. This is what I mean when I call myself a writer. I construct sentences. There’s a rhythm I hear that drives me through a sentence. And the words typed on the white page have a sculptural quality. They form odd correspondences. They match up not just through meaning but through sound and look. The rhythm of a sentence will accommodate a certain number of syllables. One syllable too many, I look for another word. There’s always another word that means nearly the same thing, and if it doesn’t then I’ll consider altering the meaning of a sentence to keep the rhythm, the syllable beat. I’m completely willing to let language press meaning upon me. Watching the way in which words match up, keeping the balance in a sentence—these are sensuous pleasures. I might want very and only in the same sentence, spaced a particular way, exactly so far apart. I might want rapture matched with danger—I like to match word endings. I type rather than write longhand because I like the way the words and letters look when they come off the hammers onto the page—finished, printed, beautifully formed.

INTERVIEWER

Do you care about paragraphs?

DeLILLO

When I was working on The Names I devised a new method—new to me, anyway. When I finished a paragraph, even a three-line paragraph, I automatically went to a fresh page to start the new paragraph. No crowded pages. This enabled me to see a given set of sentences more clearly. It made rewriting easier and more effective. The white space on the page helped me concentrate more deeply on what I’d written. And with this book I tried to find a deeper level of seriousness as well. The Names is the book that marks the beginning of a new dedication. I needed the invigoration of unfamiliar languages and new landscapes, and I worked to find a clarity of prose that might serve as an equivalent to the clear light of those Aegean islands. The Greeks made an art of the alphabet, a visual art, and I studied the shapes of letters carved on stones all over Athens. This gave me fresh energy and forced me to think more deeply about what I was putting on the page. Some of the work I did in the 1970s was off-the-cuff, not powerfully motivated. I think I forced my way into a couple of books that weren’t begging to be written, or maybe I was writing too fast. Since then I’ve tried to be patient, to wait for a subject to take me over, become part of my life beyond the desk and typewriter. Libra was a great experience that continues to resonate in my mind because of the fascinating and tragic lives that were part of the story. And The Names keeps resonating because of the languages I heard and read and touched and tried to speak and spoke a little and because of the sunlight and the elemental landscapes that I tried to blend into the book’s sentences and paragraphs.

~

Thanks for the friendly outreach and appeal to stick around. I may just do that. I was wary at first, my prior experience with drug forums being below board in content, but there seems to be a broad array of interests and perspectives worth participating in here. And getting feedback from a representative sample of the general population, to someone who writes for a non-specialist audience, is definitely an inviting prospect. Thanks for pointing that out. If you're up for shopping your work around, I think you might be interested in a new journal called Sixfold, which is based on the idea of the contributors being the collective editorial voice: https://www.sixfold.org/

 

[pup]

I always feel a shorter piece somehow commands attention: A tagline, a one liner, fortune cookie fortune, a haiku, flash fiction, limerick. make every word work to support itself and others. I liked chuck palahniuk's style - to the point and winding, and his twists and turns which i guess is more story-telling than grammar. Sometimes to introduce complex story lines the language has to be clear. Or anything Ernest Hemingway has ever said. These are short and way sweet: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/ernest_hemingway.html

You don't want to intimidate anyone with a wall of text, do you?
That said, when it's good, it's good. I never want to put Nabokov down.

I have a tendency to be cryptic, though lol.

 

[Captain.Heroin]

Walls in harsh noise are best, so why not walls in words?

 

[thujone]

He also said a couple of things in an interview that I liked and think may be tangentially related: that he gets the sound of a sentence in his head before he writes it, like the length and timbre in terms of a syllabic music, and then finds the words for it, and if the words he finds don't fit the length-music, he keeps looking until they do; and also that his composition practice had a major breakthrough when he started working in paragraphs, meaning he starts a new page for each paragraph and doing so brings his attention much closer to what's going on there and how we can affect it.

Agreed. Flow is the key. It doesn't matter how short or long a sentence is, if the writer has a good sense of rhythm then the reader will lock into a steady pace and their imagination will bring the words to life. I think that the lyrics to Hotel California are an ideal example of 'less is more' done right. On the surface, it's a simple and straightforward plot, yet it also manages to be deeply metaphorical without having to take any unnecessary detours to explain itself.

 

[psood0nym]

Here's a phenomenal long sentence about sentences from William H. Gass' "On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry" that does a profoundly good job of showing as it tells:

So sentences are copied, constructed, or created; they are uttered, mentioned, or used; each says, means, implies, reveals, connects; each titillates, invites, conceals, suggests; and each is eventually either consumed or conserved; nevertheless, the lines in Stevens or the sentences of Joyce or James, pressed by one another into being as though the words before and the words after were those reverent hands both Rilke and Rodin have celebrated, clay calling to clay like mating birds, concept responding to concept the way passionate flesh congests, every note a nipple on the breast, at once a triumphant pinnacle and perfect conclusion, like pelted water, I think I said, yet at the same time only another anonymous cell, and selfless in its service to the shaping skin as lost forgotten matter is in all walls; these lines, these sentences, are not quite uttered, not quite mentioned, peculiarly employed, strangely listed, oddly used, as though a shadow were the leaves, limbs, trunk of a new tree, and the shade itself were thrust like a dark torch into the grassy air in the same slow and forceful way as its own roots, entering the earth, roughen the darkness there till all its freshly shattered facets shine against themselves as teeth do in the clenched jaw; for Rabelais was wrong, blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell, and which we follow warily, as Alice after that rabbit, nervous and white, till suddenly—there! climbing down clauses and passing through ‘and’ as it opens—there—there—we’re here!…in time for tea and tantrums; such are the sentences we should like to love—the ones which love us and themselves as well—incestuous sentences—sentences which make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye; that have a kind of orality transmogrified: not the tongue touching the genital tip, but the idea of the tongue, the thought of the tongue, word-wet to part-wet, public mouth to private, seed to speech, and speech…ah! after exclamations, groans, with order gone, disorder on the way, we subside through sentences like these, the risk of senselessness like this, to float like leaves on the restful surface of that world of words to come, and there, in peace, patiently to dream of the sensuous, and mindful Sublime.

 

[alasdairm]

Less is not more, more is more -- is the common wisdom about better writing wrong?

such a false dilemma.

a piece can be 1 word or a 1000 words and everything in between.

alasdair

 

[Tude]

I can't choose between one or the other for the simple fact that I see the merit in both. In other words, it depends on what I'm writing which philosophy I adhere to. It sometimes fluxes in the same piece.

 

[buffalobillygoat]

Good stuff is always its own thing. Then when you look at a writers wider canon, there'll be identifable idiosyncrasies across their work. Whether terse or more flamboyant. And when flamboyant, it should still be the case that there is nothing included that is not totally essential to whatever it is you are trying to convey.