It Ain't Necessarily So...

In response to yesterday's post, The Frisky Pagan takes the received wisdom on Hemingway out to the woodshed:

Now, I don’t think this is the style of today’s popular literature. If anything, Fitzgerald is closer to what is now popular (because it’s more natural) than Hemingway. There’s really nothing natural or short about Hemingway. Oh, sure, he did write some (very famous) short sentences, and you can’t write a whole book only with half-page sentences anyway, and he did play with sequences of short sentences, then followed by unholy, 200-word abominations, but he did NOT write in journalese or like a “telegraph.” It’s true, however, that he had a DIRECT style (and a phobia of commas, I guess,) with little to no abstraction, emotions, or introspective digressions. Perhaps from there his fame of writing concise, direct literature comes from, but you certainly can’t jump from there to “he wrote short, simple, clear sentences, like today’s bestsellers.“

He provides a few examples from Hemingway's writing that do torpedo the claims made yesterday. Or at least show that some strange telephone game happened between what Hemingway's actual technique and what everyone thought he was doing. It isn't the first, and as the Frisky Pagan brings up, it isn't the last:

It’s also clear that writers like those (and there are many) are constricted, terrified of something, so afraid of breaking some unnamed writing law that they mutilate their texts and don’t allow them any freedom. And it gets even worse when action scenes kick in since some fool once said that short sentences enhance the immediacy and strength of action, and now everybody writes stuttering, two or three-word action-scene sentences.

(That fool might be Mary Robinette Kowal.)

The focus on such things is First and Second Things all over again, with good writing using technique, so the use of technique means that this should be good writing. But, when second things get placed first, you don't get first or second things, which explains why, in an age where technique is bandied about online so readily, there's precious little good writing. Here at my blog included.

Anyway, thanks to the Frisky Pagan for setting the record straight in an article well worth reading.