Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Existential ennui]

Apart from reading various authors and books, what else can be done to make writing more stylish/eloquence yet concise?

[Sy Borg]

You have taken the first step - wanting to write more eloquently and concisely.

When it comes to developing eloquence and vocabulary - read, read, read. Also, consider prosody, the "music" of your words.

My favourite writing advice comes from Kurt Vonnegut because my natural tendency is to blather on too much:

Readers have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school — twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers, ever willing to simplify and clarify, whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

Similarly, my mother was a writer and my favourite advice of hers was, "Murder your darlings", to remove any clever turns of phrase or awesome words if they do not further the flow of the piece. As with playing music - it is more appealing when artists aim to create something beautiful or interesting than to just express or impress, which both tend to bore people.

[Lone Wolf]

Try taking or auditing a creative writing class. The exercises and critiques of your writing will help if you have the ability to express yourself with the written word.

[Sy Borg]

It depends, Lone Wolf. Not long ago I wasted six hundred dollars on a creative writing course in Sydney. The trouble was that I'm interested in sci fi and speculative fiction but the the instructor was a renowned crime novelist who clearly detested sci fi. Once she found out my interests she snubbed me throughout while focusing on those in the class writing about crime or human interest stories. I could see there was no point asking her to read my manuscript.

The experience impacted on my confidence and stole some of the momentum and belief I had in my short stories. It took months to regather my equilibrium and mojo - and the information provided in the course was obvious anyway. All the info is online if you are disciplined.

It's well worth checking up on writing instructors to make sure that you won't be an ignored paying bum on a seat subsidising the instruction of "inner sanctum" students. Note that best selling authors won't necessarily have the equivalent capacities as a teacher.

[Lone Wolf]

I'm sorry it didn't help you, but as far as that goes, I dropped out of the class about two thirds of the way through for the same reason. However, the exercises at the beginning and the critiques by both the professor and other students of what I had written did help me. The focus at the end of the course was on fiction and I was more interested in factual information presentation.

[Sy Borg]

Yes, it's true there are always useful tidbits. Still, I found the confidence hit at being treated as a lesser being hurt more than the useful snippets helped.

Thing is, there's precious little money in writing. So most authors are a bit desperate. So they teach to make up the shortfall. Not only do they teach, but they deliberately make the courses seem more inclusive and wide-ranging as they are - precisely to maximise earnings by making sure potential suckers like you will waste/donate our money.

That makes it worthwhile for potential participants to be prepared to be an annoyance in finding out exactly who the course caters to before parting with cash.

[Lone Wolf]

Once around was enough for me. I am retired and my writing is for my own edification. I seldom share it with anyone. I tried writing fiction, but found that my years of technical writing as a quality management person kept me from being able to adequately express emotion on paper, so I gave it up.

[Sy Borg]

I know that feeling, Wolf. Writing the stories turned out to be easier than editing to "humanise" them. Philosophy forums probably don't help in that regard.

Too often I broke the rule - show, don't tell. Too often I used academic rather than relatable words. Too often I indulged in details out of interest without considering how it would impact on the story flow. I sent an early manuscript to a friendly online scientist acquaintance and he suggested that I ease up on the extraneous scientific detail, which says much about how turgid the text was at first :)

After seven months of editing, though, it's improving. I am going to put these infernal ideas I've had out into the world or burst! If that means editing for a decade, so be it. Apparently Stephen King can produce six pages of clean copy in a day, which simply makes my jaw drop. ix pages is easy. Clean copy is not. To be fair, that impressed GRRM too so that made me feel less plodding.

[Lone Wolf]

Greta:
Several years before I retired, I wrote a book and self published it just to test the market. It sold 37 copies (I bought six) and got no reviews. A couple of years later, I went back and re-read it only to find it totally devoid of emotion. So I gave it up and stuck to writing my opinion of things I think about. Just to give you an example, here is the introductory paragraph of a lengthy document I call UNDER MY THINKING CAP.

Since I entered my mid-life crisis back in 1983, I spent a great deal of time thinking about life as we know it on this planet. I think about why I am here and wonder if there is really some unknown plan for my life or if there is some deity that put me here for a purpose. I wonder about IT (God to some, Allah to some, Yahweh, Jehovah, or any of a myriad of other names to others). I wonder about truth and how it is defined. I wonder about gravity, electricity, magnetism, sunspots, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, droughts, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, asteroids, planets, galaxies, stars, black holes, novae, super-novae, binary stars, elements, molecules, atoms, sex, abstinence, animal nature, ids, egos, super-egos, infinity, infinitesimals, atmospheres, vacuums, sciences, occult sciences, philosophies, internal combustion engines, electric motors, all kinds of vehicles, dogs, cats, horses, and other animals, construction of the human body and how it manages to be a chemical factory more complex than anything man could conceive, diseases, injuries, or whatever. I also wonder about germs, bacteria, viruses, reptiles, mammals, fish, plankton, earthworms, wasps, hornets, honey bees, bumblebees, birds, dinosaurs, wind, ocean currents, beaver dams, American Indians, black people, white people, brown people, Eskimos, Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, cartoons, movies, actors, construction workers, judges, prostitutes, junkies, drug dealers, gay people, straight people, and just about any culture one can imagine. From this list, you should be able to ascertain that I spend a lot of time considering weird things. I thought about all the things I had considered this afternoon while I was driving by myself. It occurred to me that I should try to write down some of my thoughts over the past thirty years.

I've been jotting down my opinion of these things and have come to a realization that I know almost nothing worth writing about. As I said, I write for my own edification.

[Sy Borg]

Haha - I get that! I wonder about many of those things too, and you want to include everything to elucidate exactly what you mean rather than present it in shorthand. Alas, we all want shorthand or, rather, need shorthand with our limited human brains.

Many's the time I've had to trim my lists back. You want to include everything :)

Mum was a writer and gave me some excellent (if atavistic) advice - "murder your darlings". I now have a file titled "Murdered Darlings" where I put those snippets I wanted to include but had to edit out for the sake of flow.

[Felix]

"I've been jotting down my opinion of these things and have come to a realization that I know almost nothing worth writing about"

Yes, someone opined that 99.999% of the books in all of our libraries are based on the ideas in the remaining .002% of books, but that is probably an exaggeration, it's more like .00000000000000000000000002%.

[Haicoway]

I would find a friend who is a good writer and ask him or her to critique short essays you write.

Keep your sentences and paragraphs short, and write actively. Look up examples of active versus passive writing. Follow Hemingway’s passion for le mot juste – finding just the right word for what you are trying to say. I so often look up synonyms for a word I am using to see if there is a better, more exact term, for what I am trying to convey.

I’m not sure reading a lot helps. I have asked close, academic friends if my writing deteriorated over the last two years, because when my wife died I found I couldn’t read anything, because I couldn’t concentrate, and nothing meant anything to me anymore. They said they hadn’t noticed any change in my ability.

But if you want to read for examples of good writing, read good literature. A tautological suggestion, I know. But I think I write a lot better than many authors. I used to read Henry James, regarded by some critics to be the best writer, ever, just to study his style. I didn’t pay much attention to his plots, which were pretty much non-existent, anyway. I loved the fact that nobody ever got hurt or killed in any of his novels I read. They were full of eloquent parlor conversation.

[Haicoway]

Just for the heck of it, I am going to post here a passage of Henry James' writing. He was writing about a character in his novel, "The Golden Bowl," but I think he was writing about himself. I think it is masterful writing, and a good example of why critics say he was the greatest:

"The simplest, the sanest, the most obliging of men, he habitually indulged in extravagant language. His wife once told him, in relation to his violence of speech, that such excesses, on his part, made her think of a retired General whom she had once seen playing with toy soldiers, fighting and winning battles, carrying on sieges and annihilating enemies with little fortresses of wood and little armies of tin. Her husbands exaggerated emphasis was *his* box of toy soldiers, his military game. It harmlessly gratified in him, for his declining years, the military instinct; bad words, when sufficiently numerous and arrayed in their might, could represent battalions, squadrons, tremendous cannonades and glorious charges of cavalry. It was natural, it was delightful—the romance, and for her as well, of camp life and the perpetual booming of guns. It was fighting to the end, to the death, but no one was ever killed."

[Jklint]

"I've been jotting down my opinion of these things and have come to a realization that I know almost nothing worth writing about"

Yes, someone opined that 99.999% of the books in all of our libraries are based on the ideas in the remaining .002% of books, but that is probably an exaggeration, it's more like .00000000000000000000000002%.

Ideas always get repeated. Even though they seem endless there's a finite amount of them. What may be new depends on their interpretation. Music is the best analogy. One can take a trite little theme and build a massive complex of variations creating new and distinct ideas of their own in the process. In much the same manner, writing causes known and even age-old ideas to mutate into different perspectives of the same idea. We have a limited inventory of archetypes that can be expounded endlessly upon which our whole complex of ideas are based. Writers, composers, thinkers worthy of the name are first and foremost improvisors.

[Sy Borg]

Yes, everything may be the same in general, but not in detail. Also, this is not the same world as even one year ago. Certainly not ten, a hundred, a thousand or a million years ago. So there's always something new going on. A lot of people today write about AI and aliens. A thousand years ago, they didn't. Back then, they dreamed of kings and gods instead.

Another writing tip. Don't forget the machines! It's easy to be cynical, but some of these free online Flesch-Kincaid readability analysers are surprisingly helpful. If you don't have anyone to read your work, they are much better than nothing.