Remember: “the style is the man himself” (Buffon, a certified eighteenth-century count). Your writing style says a lot about you as a person. It can reveal you as a Scrooge (closed punctuation), or demonstrate that you are a generous soul in whose mouth butter would refuse to melt (the vowels of compassion).
Don’t count on your computer to sweeten your style. That bitch is just waiting to demonstrate that, with you, the style is the monster.
FIGURES OF SPEECH
Despite the name, we don’t need to be speaking in order to use figures of speech. They can work equally well in writing. In moderation.
Excessive use of simile or metaphor can slow a novel down to a snail’s pace. (See? that one snuck in right there.) This can be absolutely fatal to a screenplay, let alone a financial report.
The two most abused figures of speech are the simile and the metaphor. “Quick as a flash” is an example of a simile that has gone into menopause. (A metaphor there, possibly offensive, for demonstration purpose only.)
The difference between a simile and a metaphor is that a simile says that something is like something else, whereas a metaphor says that something is something … else. (That definition may be clear as mud — right? [Another simile ready for burial.]) And here we have a demonstration — fully deserving of a footnote, if this work had feet — of how brackets and parentheses may be used to titillate the reader who relishes confinement.
Both similes and metaphors have been used by writers for centuries in order to create a picturesque style. This method of creating pictures has gone into decline with the arrival of television, which of course conveys pictures without having to hold a book while strumming one’s lip.
Today’s writer leaves more to the reader’s imagination, which is normally more lurid than anything the writer could picture without having his work banned by school libraries.
Instead of graphic description the writer may turn to hyperbole. Hyperbole is very effective for humour. Woody Allen is a master of comedic hyperbole: “… her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak.”
Hyperbole is used almost exclusively for fun, but may cause an allergic reaction in a reader who is unfamiliar with exaggeration.
A safer tool for humorous effect is understatement. This is an English, rather than American, device and should be served with a cup of tea with lemon.
GRAMMAR
This is not, as most of us know, Grandpa’s wife.
But what of the questions: Does correct grammar interfere with creativity? Or, may grammar itself be creative, introducing novel relationships between subject and verb?
Certainly, the rules of grammar are now more flexible than in the days when Fowler was ordering stiffer sentences than a criminal court judge with a toothache. In his Modern English Usage, Fowler is especially hard on the dangling participle. He verifies that this pendulous construction can induce more gratuitous hilarity in a reader than perhaps any other blooper: “The girl grabbed the steering wheel from him and, causing a loss of control, he was killed in the crash. ”
This kind of unattached construction results from trying to cram more into a sentence than it can reasonably accommodate. This is another reason why successful writers today mostly adopt a simple style that avoids the participle as a grammatical land mine, primed to blow up an otherwise dignified paragraph.
How much should a creative writer depend on an editor to correct his grammar? Answer: as little as possible. Most editors are writers in need of gainful employment. They don’t edit just for the joy of salvation; they are in a correction facility. They can’t wait to get out the minute another editor finds their work publishable. (See section on Editors.)
INVENTION
No, we are not talking here about the latest technical gizmo to accelerate your Internet consumption. You are probably already spending too much of your morning deleting yesterday’s stroke of genius, or forming attachments less than lifelong.
Inventive writing is that which says something new. An impossible goal, you may protest, given the sheer volume of verbiage being discharged into the atmosphere. How, you ask, do I know for sure that what I am writing hasn’t already been done, possibly better, by someone with a creative lawyer?
“Great minds think alike” won’t satisfy a judge.
The best way to avoid subconscious plagiarism is, of course, to read nothing. But don’t depend on the belief that pinching material is hard to prove if you have taken the precaution of changing the punctuation.
All’s fair in love and war, but in writing you need to be careful. And to resort to that more estimable source of creativity: imagination. Even if the author has led a remarkably adventurous life, crowded with incidents and relationships that provide a bushel of grist for the mill, this will need to be leavened with imagination for it to make real dough. (Note the example of an extended metaphor that may strain the reader’s patience.)
IMAGINATION
Imagination is the mind’s eye. For too many writers it’s an optical illusion. So how does the writer come by a lively imagination?
Is it something he is born with? Or is it the product of a sheltered childhood? Does it grow, like the pearl in the oyster, as a result of a confined and irritating social environment? Or is it just a way for the mind to compensate for what the body is missing? Nature’s reward, for example, for remaining a virgin while normal people were having fun?
Are you a naturally shy person? Yes? Congratulations! You have met the first requirement of writerly imagination. You have been keeping all your sex fantasies in your head rather than in motels. At first blush this may not seem as exciting as meeting a really charming nymphomaniac in a bar, or a nice naval officer on the beach. But on the plus side you have reduced your chances of contracting a quite tedious venereal disease.
Imagination is less of a factor if we are writing non-fiction (which may include autobiography). Most other literary genres do depend on the author’s imagination, something harder to measure when sober.
Imagination is especially vital if the writer has been leading a cloistered life. Very few fictional bestsellers are written by nuns or monks.
“Living it up, so that you can write it down” is a formula that requires examination before leaping — in the larger context of avoiding arrest on charges of illicit sex with a minor while operating a vehicle under the influence of an illegal substance.
With due respect to poet Dylan Thomas, literary invention isn’t a genie in a bottle. Or a brothel. The trick is to live a full life without spilling any. Female authors seem to be better at this than the guys, who tend to prefer not to draw on their sexual experience unless writing comedy.
AIDS TO INSPIRATION
One genre that is especially dependent on personal experience is the travel book. It is very difficult to write an effective travel book without, at some point, getting out of the house. Casanova’s memoirs take him all over Europe, affording him international access to women and phenomena he would never have experienced had he stayed in the Italian jail.
(Note: memoirs are a special category of writing, less popular today than in the days when people wanted to record what they were doing with their lives. Also, the laws of libel constrain public recounting of romantic adventures. In fact, you can’t even narrate an amusing episode from a Tibetan guest house without expecting a formal letter from a Lhasa law firm.)
Now, if you don’t have much imagination (especially on Monday mornings), you may be tempted to enhance the modicum by using a controlled substance. Luckily, most substances (alcohol, pot, Italian coffee) are out of control these days in the Western world. But certain hard drugs serve as an accelerant of imagination only at considerable