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I don't understand why writing styles go out of style though. My prof can read Whitman and love his work (for example), but in the same breath he cautions not to write like that. Even though people still read Whitman. Does that make sense? I understand his point was that it won't sell. I get that. My point was that I don't understand why not. I'm not complaining -- just saying it makes no sense to me personally. If people are reading and loving Millay, why then are poets cautioned to avoid the sonnet (according to my prof)? Obviously people still like the sonnet? Why no rhyming if rhyming has worked for centuries? I find that advice arbitrary and therefore suspect. If people are still reading and loving Bleak House with it's incredible opening, why in the world are writers coached to trim their opening down to a single journalistic line because "no one will read it"? People read what -- 50,000 pages of JK Rowling? People are definitely still reading.

I don't consider myself a poet. I have written a few poems to keep my writing juices alive (and obviously I took a poetry class) but I think I prefer the idea of writing a novel. I might change my mind on that, but that's how I feel today. I only mentioned the poems as an example of the strange way writers today are cautioned not to do what has worked so well in the past. I also personally believe that it's best not to try to write "like" a particular author. Find your own voice. But this prof suggested against ANYTHING in poetry that smelled of frame. That seemed at odds with his love of classic poems filled with rhyme and structure. I'm not saying he's wrong: just that it feels off to me. I feel like he was saying, "Get into this box, and that is how to be successful." Maybe it is, but is that success?

Great writers didn't follow the fads. Whitman created free verse in America. Quite revolutionary. Percy Shelley (whom I LOVE) plucked up the poor forgotten sonnet no one wanted anymore and said, "Let's try her again, shall we?", and then he burst it to the frame.

Apparently before Shakespeare, a sonnet was written to woo a woman: "Hello, fair maiden. I think you are lovely in all these ways. Everything about you can be compared to the sun. Therefore, allow me to bed you." Really unrealistic over-the-top odes to the female in fourteen lines. Shakespeare comes along and uses the sonnet form to write about real love (for example, friendship), to acknowledge that humans are flawed, to poke a giant hole in the idea that women are everything the sonnets had been saying for years they were (the ideal -- the most chaste, beautiful, glorious, sun-like angels ever), and to generally revolutionize the genre:

Fair is my love, when her fair golden hairs
With the loose wind ye waving chance to mark:
Fair, when the rose in her red cheeks appears,
Or in her eyes the fire of love does spark:
Fair, when her breast, like a rich laden bark
With precious merchandise she forth doth lay:
Fair, when that cloud of pride, which oft doth dark
Her goodly light, with smiles she drives away
But fairest she, when so she doth display
The gate with pearls and rubies richly dight,
Through which her words so wise do make their way,
To bear the message of her gentle sprite.
The rest be works of nature's wonderment,
But this the work of heart's astonishment.

- Edmund Spenser

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
   As any she belied with false compare.

- William Shakespeare

Decades of how holy and chaste and lovely she is, then, "So here's the deal, friend. You're not beautiful. Many things are more beautiful than you. Here is a list of all the ways you are flawed. But guess what? I love you -- as much as all those other guys love their angels. I love you despite your very human imperfections, because I don't love the ideal. I love YOU."

TOTALLY AGAINST THE FAD!

Anyway, you maybe can't tell from my voice because you can't hear my voice, but I wasn't bemoaning the state of affairs. I was just matter-of-factly pointing out that they are historically silly. As in, every era thinks it's fad is the best, and then someone comes along and breaks all the rules, and we remember that person. So as writers, we should trod softly until we are read (if we want to be commercially successful, since there are fads and we are unfortunately not in charge, ha ha), but never believe them. Never forget our own voices, because the trajectory of a fad can be moved.

Anyway, thank you for the warm words, Tirz! And hello, by the way! I hope all is good. xox

I took a poetry-writing class once, and the prof and I were discussing how much we love the work of Walt Whitman -- namely "As I Ebbed With the Ocean of Life" (written after a battle when Whitman had been nursing ACW soldiers. We had just read it aloud in class.) I was telling him how much I love Whitman's long, yawning verses -- they feel to me like swaying, like a song he's singing from forever-ago, and all of it colored with vivid images. I could just sink into it. My professor agreed with me adamantly, then he cautioned, "But you know, you can't write like that now, right?"

Wait, why? "Well, no one will read it. It's out of style." This made no sense to me, because we were reading Whitman. So obviously people would read it. He said no -- no rhyming, no verses anymore, no strict form, no old-fashioned stuff. Free verse is the thing now. You think of a metaphysical point you want to make, and then you make that into an image with words, and you write it almost as if it's a jumbled dream, and you think about where to place a caesura because it will impact the sound of the work, and that is a poem. Where he got this stuff, I don't know. It's certainly one way of writing a poem, and I've read a lot of recent poems that sound like this, and I suppose he's right: that's what people are buying, but I don't understand it.

I don't think the great writers worry about that sort of thinking -- the fads. Perhaps at first, to get in the door, but the great writers set the fad. And they're remembered in part because they're the dissonant note. When you read a poem (for example, a sonnet), what you notice is the moment when the author violates the rules of the frame. Yes? The author sets a rhythm: iambic pentameter, but two-thirds into the poem, he tosses in a trochee, and that's the moment you sit forward, because that trochee doesn't belong there. It's out of rhythm. Whatever word or image or thematic moment is underlined by that trochee stands out. Then the author tosses an extra unstressed beat on the end of five feet of iambs: "To be, or not to be, that is the quest -- ion."

On first read, people probably don't realize the iambic pentameter has been violated, but it has, and that's the magic. That's the harp.

I think publishers or editors or whoever accepts books for publication are (understandably) wary of wasted words. Each word costs exponentially in the business, so they turn away books these days which are fat with words they believe have been wasted. The rumor begins: don't waste your words! Open curtly! Get to the point! (Propagated by people who make a career of having writing advice and distributing it with an exclamation point.)

When really what a sound publisher means is, "Give me this image creatively and intelligently. And if that takes three paragraphs, great. But it better be worth it." Imo, the Le Carré opener above is. But you and I have also read a great many openings that believe they are cinematic, when really they are self-indulgent and over-egged. That's what (I think) publishers are advising against. Somehow that has translated in the faddish world of writing as: "Minimize everything! Condense, condense!" Which is patently unimaginative. Condense when it contributes to the story, and expand when it contributes to the story. If you've got 100,000 words to tell the tale, use them well, not sparingly. Advice I can only imagine any reputable editor would extend to that reviewer.

I don't think it makes any sense to suggest description be condensed unless that's right for the particular novel and story. A long, lush description slows the moment. It creates a sense of stillness, as with the Le Carré example. Curt lines speed a scene and can (often) impersonalize it -- perhaps the very effect you want. It seems far more important to contemplate what the writing accomplishes than to suggest a cut without understanding the whole. I'm assuming the reviewer must have read the whole, but unless he or she gave a sound reason for suggesting the cut, that seems like auto-pilot reviewing. To me. I'm guessing Le Carré wanted that still first moment for a reason.

That poor kitty! She looks terrified.

Oh, I love that about the harp!

lump of coal(ridge)

(I hate that poem! I had to read it as a freshman & couldn't penetrate it.)

"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of these subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time."

- Ernest Hemingway (Death in the Afternoon)

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Congratulations!

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