I have just finished Ameena Hussein's book The Moon in the Water. While writing my review for goodreads, various thoughts crossed my mind about writing, the expression of ideas, and how our own writing and ideas are shaped through what we read.
When it comes to poetry, I enjoy, and dabble in, free verse. I think it brings out more raw emotion than pretty, structured verses, though I am aware of how much effort that takes. When reading though, there is nothing I relish more than a beautifully structured sentence. Punctuation, grammar, spelling are all things that are very important to me in being able to wholly enjoy any written work, be it from a book to a blog post.
I grew up on Enid Blytons and the Anne series; two very different authors. I think the one thing they had in common, though, was good sentence structure, and good flow, which again is so very important. Blyton may not have had Montgomery's gift for the descriptive, but her books had the same flow, the same rhythm, that draws a reader in and doesn’t let go until the last page. When I graduated into the adult world of reading, I came across many books that lacked this rhythm. In what I think may be an attempt to make the characters more realistic and present, some authors engage in a choppy, abrupt style of description and speech, punctuated by exclamation marks. For me, a golden rule is less exclamation marks, more commas. I could wax eloquent about the beauty of a well-placed comma but I won’t. I’ll just say that you don’t have to shock! the reader at every sentence, but you do need to place commas appropriately, so as to divide and conquer. If I have to go back even one time to re-read a sentence because it didn’t make sense due to an absence of a comma, you have failed in your job as a writer.
Next, characters. I need to feel connected to the characters; I need to be emotionally invested in them; I need to care about them. In the book I have just finished there were several main characters, and I found that, at the end of the book, I didn’t really care what happened to any of them. They were too haphazard; their personalities had too many conflicting facets to make them real. The last book I read where I felt incredibly drawn to the characters was Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. They were beautifully crafted, the depth of their characters intensified with each page and I cared about them. I hated the father, and yet I found myself pondering over his disparate nature: how could he be this admirable man who did these terrible things? Do we all have that contradiction in us? Do I have it in me? This a goal authors should have when writing; you have to make the reader care and you have to make the reader think.
Language. Language, language, language; don’t overuse it, don’t underuse it. Moon in the water had too much unnecessary Sinhalese. Some books have too much descriptive, some books have too much detail, some books have too much background information (The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo comes to mind). Less is more. Every word in that book should be essential to the plot; every statement needs to have a purpose. The worst feeling for a reader is when they end a book and think ‘well, that was pointless’.
And then I come full circle to my own writing. In the last year my writing really dried up. I felt I had nothing to say, I wasn’t motivated to write, and a plethora of other excuses. In a bid to overcome this, I thought I would blog more frequently, with less thought to the content and style of writing, with less effort put into the writing. This I did quite happily until I was reading JP’s blog and admiring his style of writing, which made me reflect on my own, and how choppy and disjointed it had become. Being out of uni and not having to write research papers regularly, the only place I write prolifically is on twitter, and 140 characters at a time is no breeding ground for beautiful writing. Beginning with this post, I intend to put a lot more thought into whatever I write, be it a review or rant.
Thinking further on writing styles, I pose to you a question. If you are what you read, then it is easy to assume that the style you write with is acquired by an amalgamation of the styles you have been exposed to. Should we then only read books which we like? This appears to be an easy no, but on further thought I wondered, if the acquisition of a style is an unconscious effort, then unbeknownst to us, when we read not-so-well-written work, are we absorbing those styles as well? Can I blame my choppy writing style not just on twitter, but on the badly-written books and blogs I read as well? :)
Disclaimer: I am neither a writer, nor an editor, only a slave to a good book. The views expressed here are not supported by any piece of paper proclaiming that I have any authority to judge any written work. Don’t get snippy.
