Yeah, you’re not good enough at it to do that.
Novels are art. English teachers are not teaching you how to write as an art form. This is because our schools are designed to make good little worker bees. They are teaching you language so that you can then go on to learn technical writing. Now, I do think they should split the two apart, and let kids experiment and have fun with writing. That does not mean that they are wrong. Technical writing requires precision and a strict adherance to rules. It is the same concept as it being entirely fine to have a bit of fun when painting a mural, but not when you’ve been hired to paint someones house.
I’m gonna say it: Jack Kerouac sucks. I’ve read many different authors, but none have been as annoyingly unreadable as him. You’re supposed to “ride the wave of his thoughts?”. No thanks. To me, that just sounds like a vain excuse for bad writing.
If you’re going to the trouble of writing something, my assumption is that you want to communicate. We can only communicate clearly with each other, if we all agree on and use the same word spellings and grammar rules. Otherwise, why bother?
One of the more frustrating things I see daily is titles that don’t make it clear whether OP is asking a question, or about to present an explanation.
“Why my dogs throw up in the house” instead of “Why do my dogs throw up in the house*?*”
(I don’t know how to italicize the question mark.)
You need to know the rules to know how to break them with intention.
Cormac McCarthy doesn’t use punctuation because he “doesn’t believe in it”. His books are terrible to read. They’re clunky, unclear, difficult to parse, and read like a middle-schoolers first try at story time. James Joyce, his inspiration, same story; I can’t even get through one chapter of anything he’s ever written.
I realize I’m in the minority when I say this, but grammar has rules for a reason. When you don’t follow the same rules as everyone else, when you don’t adhere to the reader’s expectations, that makes it more difficult for the reader, not less.
Joyce is meant to be read like poetry. It plays off the sound of the language. His stuff is genuinely awful to sit down and read, just like it would be awful to sit down and read through a collection of poetry (to me anyway). Some Authors play with language in a good way, like the way Hemingway rarely attributes dialogue and forces you to pay attention and understand why the character would say something like that. It also reads very minimalist and leaves a lot to your own imagination and voice.
And this is where I feel like the mental state of the reader affects the way they are likely to respond to a given text.
Whenever I’m reading a good book (or poetry), I am able to mentally narrate the text and enter a flow state. Dialog is narrated with purpose, and with a story it basically turns into a film in my mind. My appreciation of the text is affected by how well I can conceptualize it.
But my friend has aphantasia. He can read and understand the words on a page just fine, but that’s all they are to him. It’s hard to puzzle together certain elements of deeper meaning when all you’re really looking at is the relation of words to one another.
Point of clarification. I think there’s a big difference between reading something where your internal narrator is a beat poet as opposed to a broadcast news presenter. If you slowly absorb Joyce and narrate it yourself properly it can be enjoyed. But if you sit down and read it like you would a news article, just trying to scan for info as fast as you can, you miss the entire point of the endeavor.
If you were to take the list of all professional basketball players, and sort them by the number of free throws missed per game, you’d see the top of the list is dominated by Hall of famers.
That’s not because missing free throws makes for a good basketball player. Or even that it isn’t important in basketball to be able to make free throws. It still remains important at every level of the game! But some of the people who miss a lot of free throws were just so utterly dominant at other parts of the game that they had long successful basketball careers despite being bad at an important skill for basketball players.
Cormac McCarthy and James Joyce have a signature style, yes, but I’d argue that they’re successful despite that, rather than because of that.
The Road is one of my favorite pieces of writing. It’s art like anything else. The lack of punctuation really made it feel raw and close to home.
The road felt like a stream of consciousness to me. It flowed so well that I tore through it in 2 days because I just couldn’t stop reading lol. I’ve learned to be that immersed in a book again but nothing else I’ve read has come close
I think that’s the point too, you know? His writing style acts as a literary device in and of itself. It’s not always like that, but when it’s like that I feel it helps drive home the scene.
And I say that while I agree 100% that it’s hard to read.
I think you’re in the vast majority.
When it comes to the readers expectation, things become a lot more complex. I don’t remember the exact words, but Brandon Sanderson talked about promises to the reader, where it’s OK to do surprising things, but expectations must be carefully managed in that surprises must not feel like betrayal. Poor execution of this is why everyone hates the “…but it was all a dream” trope.
Ok theres 2 replies about Cormac McCarthy, there’s clearly something I’m missing contextwise about understanding rules and how to break them.
I agree. I read The Road recently since it’s my wife’s favorite book and holy shit it was exhausting at times. I enjoyed the story to a degree, but the stream-of-thought writing style and unspecific grammar took me out of it. If it had been written in a more understandable prose I think I would have enjoyed it more; but would it have been as famous then I wonder
The Road is so god damn depressing that the writing style was the least of my concerns while reading
All I do, is sit down at the typewriter, and start hittin’ the keys. Getting them in the right order, that’s the trick. That’s the trick.
If anime taught me anything It’s that character development is just padding
This is the standard line, but a lot of the time I find it to be bullshit. Sure, Cormac McCarthy gets to look cool and modernist by not using quotation marks, but my view is you would spend less time trying to decipher narrator vs. character if he did use them, and you would have a better reading experience at the same time.
This is not an inflammatory response, I am just curious- How do you feel about “House of Leaves?”
Generally considered to be a phenomenal work of art, but it DEFINITELY doesn’t follow the vast majority of standard grammar rules.
I thought House of Leaves dragged on, but I think the confusion was kind of the story too, you know? You have this scenario going on in the book, and the book itself has you looking left right up down here and there for the context.
Jumping in.
I tried ‘House’ and noped out about fifty pages in.
Too much work and not much payout.
imho it was a gimmick book.
I hadn’t even heard of it until your comment.
I respect going all in on breaking convention for the sake of art a lot more than leaving out punctuation as a style.
I agree- which is the way I believe most Cormac McCarthy fans view his writing style. I have never read his books, they aren’t for me- but I feel that bucking trends is the way art is meant to evolve. Some trends getting bucked are more annoying than others, though.
Do you have any authors that you suggest to others?
I tend to read books about religion and history, so there isn’t really a lot of breaking the mold there unfortunately.
Gormenghast and Neuromancer are the kind of heavy atmospheric and descriptive fiction I like, but they don’t really deviate from standard punctuation or presentation in any way.
Doesn’t Gormenghast have that dinner scene that’s a massive stream of consciousness curveball?
Edit: Book 1 Chapter 57 The Reveries
Well, I forgot about that. Looking at it, I’d say it was a part that I managed to get through quite quickly, since it wasn’t just describing the texture of a wall for a full page.
Fair enough- I had never heard of either of those before. However, I know Mervyn Peake has been a heavy inspiration of modern fiction. I may have to give the Gormenghast series a try- just super daunting.
Anyways, thanks for indulging my curiosity. Just had time to kill. Have a good one!
Yeah, you can break the law as long as you know what it says, right?
Fuck off, you bad faith shitstain.
Yes tbh, with the same reasoning too. The difference is if I do the right thing and break the law, the fun police (aka the actual police) will arrest me.
To break the rules you gotta first learn the rules.
That being said I remember in late high school feeling pretty frustrated because I had a good grip on the rules by now and wanted to try adding some zest to my writing.
But zest is difficult to grade, my teachers were not paid well enough to deal with ambiguity and to be honest most of them didn’t strike me as particularly imaginative in the first place.
aw man… but you still write, I hope?
Not really. Sometimes I think about it but it’s sort of hard to find the time. My interests also just started to shift away from writing after high school.
I was going to ask if that went for lawyers as well, But then I realized it was obvious.
Yea, it’s just that pedants deep down believe that good grammar is good writing; they don’t understand the difference. Therefore, they’re going to struggle to recognize good writing, and be incapable of producing it.
It doesn’t take a chef to spot a bad meal.
No- but since a good “meal” is subjective to the person eating it, one person calling it a bad meal is not a good metric to base your opinion on.
If the meal has seasonings you don’t like, or is missing components you do like (grammar, in this case)- it doesn’t make the meal bad. It just means it isn’t for you, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Missing grammar is the wrong grammar. And that’s more akin to a spoiled component.
You literally just started your sentence with a conjunction. At the very least practice what you preach.
And that’s your opinion. A subjective view of your own. See how that works?
“Missing grammar” is usually not an issue unless you’re reading self-published, unedited books.
Rarity of it makes it more pronounced
That’s why I always read the applicable statute(s) before I run red lights and stop signs and ignore speed limits.
I know the rules, which means I get to break them, right?
The rules and norms of writing are not the same as laws. Either contribute something meaningful or fuck off.
no that’s not what that proverb means at all… but you know what you will get when you are caught.
Students when English teacher get pregnant and she’s off for this year. Again.
Also:
English Teachers: “Lets now analyze and decode the deeper meaning the author meant in chapter 23 paragraph 6” Authors: “There was supposed to be a deeper meaning?”
Death of the Author is real and the creator doesn’t really matter once the art is finished.
Sometimes the curtains are just blue
And sometimes they’re not. The point is to know how to recognize when there’s a difference.
Being able to analyze a piece of writing for authorial intent, conscious and unconscious, intentional and unintentional, is a good skill to have.
That’s not even getting into understanding metaphor, simile, and symbolism in writing which can also show the author’s intent and how the author views topics.
A fun little example by me:
I was velociraptoring around the kitchen at 2am.
The cheese cried out, but it’s pleas fell on deaf ears.
There’s a lot that can be interpreted from those 2 sentences. Why was it written? What does it describe? What metaphors are deployed and why? What symbolism is used? Why was symbolism used? How does the writing make you feel? What was the author doing in their kitchen at 2am? How does the author view their actions at 2am? And on, and on, and on the analysis can go. And it only stops when you choose to get off of Mr Bone’s Wild Ride.
Now a less fun example is the kind of language someone might deploy when describing a group of people they do not like. How would a fascist report on a crime? A new food bank? The results of a sporting event? The release of a new video game? A new movie? Etc, etc, etc.
Being able to parse media is the biggest defense against being manipulated by propaganda.
So take the time to take a proper gander at the media you see and consume.
EDIT: TLDR Media Literacy is a learned skill that anyone can and should learn and practice.
EDIT2: me seeing the results of praising media literacy in an anti-media literacy thread
Authors: “There was supposed to be a deeper meaning?”
English Teachers: “You are already dead"
Authors: “There was supposed to be a deeper meaning?”
English Teachers: “You are already dead"
Salman Rushdie: “I know that was figurative, but it still hurts!”
Salman Rushdie:“I support genocide and zionist fascism!”
I got smacked down so hard when I suggested that instead of identifying symbolism and metaphors in the writing we should be looking at the author’s intent in the context of their time.
Author intent stops meaning anything outside the head of the author anyways. Individual perception is the only source of meaning. No one can understand a subject without the context of their culture and personal experiences. Hence why two people can interpret the same subject in different ways that are both valid.
That may sound overly reductionist, but that’s genuinely what it boils down to. Someone’s artistic intent could be pretending to be stupid to prove a point, but if the audience only sees a stupid person, the author has no control of the message.
That’s because you can never know the author’s intent. That’s a very outdated (and very overdone) way of thinking about literature. It’s also one that we have realized isn’t actually very useful for the purposes of most literary analysis. While it can be useful to look at the historical conditions under which the text was produced (New Historicism), there is much more insight into what literature “means” when we look at aspects of the text itself such as symbolism and metaphor, because these aspects can evolve with the text and with time and with the reader, and this unfolds many more possibilities about ourselves and the work of art. There is certainly a place for combining New Historicism with other forms of literary analysis to use knowledge about the historical conditions to inform the interpretations of things like symbolism and allegory, but attempting to ascertain the author’s intentions is a futile endeavor that usually makes for a lackluster analysis.
Well that, at least, makes sense in that it’s really just an exercise in finding evidence for your argument.
now do music teachers
no thanks they’re not my type
you don’t have to do all of them
music teachers when you make a wrong note: 😡
Music teachers when jazz: 😍
That’s actually a great example.
Back in the day, jazz records would have the jazz version of the song on Side A, and a non-jazz version on Side B.
To the people hearing jazz for the first time it sounded terrible, but after they realized the musicians knew what they were doing, many were won over.
Irvine Welsh has entered the chat.
