A prosodist is not a writer of prose but a linguist who studies stress and intonation, for a start.
Anyway, the hegemony of the plain style is unfortunate but necessary. It is the only way to stop young Americans, including you, from using words they don't understand. Just a few instances:
"This is the showdown I had walked into at high noon, all 28 American years of age: my overlarge violet pistol against a cavalcade of water guns."
Cavalcade: "A formal procession of people walking, on horseback, or riding in vehicles". I think you meant a cannonade.
"Who, having more parity with artlessness than art, espied annihilation on the horizon and said, “I recognize you brother, come hither.”
Parity: "the state or condition of being equal, especially as regards status or pay." To say that a person has parity with an abstract quality is nonsense, and even aside from that, the idea of greater or lesser degrees of parity is questionable. I think you meant to say affinity.
"This heinous fact has become so nonchalant as to hardly register as understanding or awareness."
Nonchalant: "(of a person or manner) feeling or appearing casually calm and relaxed; not displaying anxiety, interest, or enthusiasm". The heinous fact has not become nonchalant, the people who are aware of the fact have become nonchalant. "To register as understanding" is a extremely clumsy way of saying "to be understood".
You claim not to use clichés, but you do use them. In fact, you don't even understand the clichés you use:
"I have been subpoenaed by the Republic of Letters to make a spirited defense of “maximalism” and “purple prose,” two arbitrary and meaningless pigeon holes I’ve supposedly been smoked out of by both “critics” and “fans” since my debut into the wet swaddling blanket of American awareness last Christmas"
You seem to think that pigeons live in holes in the ground like moles. A pigeon hole is a small box, not a hole in the ground, so you wouldn't need to use smoke to clear it out, and there'd be no point anyway because the pigeon is meant to be there. Even if this bit wasn't ridiculous the introduction of the swaddling blanket would make it so.
If you cannot write ornate prose without committing crimes against the English language you should be writing plain prose. Amis and Joyce would've torn you apart for precisely this kind of thing. Amis often dissects clumsy, inflated writing word-by-word in his criticism. Joyce was so sensitive to linguistic solecisms that he could point out blunders in Flaubert's French:
"As they drank champagne and Fendant de Sion, Jaloux, who happened to be carrying a copy of Flaubert’s Trois Contes, began to praise the faultlessness of its style and language. Joyce, in spite of his own admiration for Flaubert, bristled, “Pas si bien que ça. Il commence avec une faute.” And taking the book he showed them that in the first sentence of “Un Cœur simple”, “Pendant un demi-siècle, les bourgeoises de Pont-l’Évêque envièrent à Mme Aubain sa servante Félicité,” envièrent should be enviaient, since the action is continued rather than completed. Then he thumbed through the book, evidently with a number of mistakes in mind, and came to the last sentence of the final story, “Hérodias, ‘Comme elle était très lourde, ils la portaient alternativement.” “Alternativement is wrong,” he announced, “since there are three bearers.” "
Joyce, Amis, and Nabokov are good stylists because they can be abundant and precise at the same time. "Demi-impressionist" flailing about has nothing to do with this; it is bad writing.
There's no rule saying that you should use words with some respect for their meaning. It's a precondition of any communication. It's also generally understood that if you use words without respect for their meaning, or their proper spelling, you have something special to offer in return for the reader's annoyance. So, for example, you might believe that using "pulchritudinous" where you ought to have preferred "voluptuous" offers me something. It does! It tells me that you learned the word in high school, as a way to call a girl hawt. The problem is that this is something I didn't really want to know. Look, I read Thomas Browne and John Florio, so I like words. Thomas Browne's neologisms were so apt, however, that they became part of the English language. Perhaps it's the effect of the decades-long hegemony of the Gordon Lish aesthetic that we have a generation of writers who've never encountered any longer Latinate words in prose, and now plop them onto their writing like the crenellations and finials that rich people in my area (Northern VA) insist on decorating their ugly, bloated houses with.
You write to Barney: "Amis and Joyce would've torn you apart for precisely this kind of thing." How would you know? Do you commune with them? While you take these masters' names in vain, Barney simply celebrates them. You comment under the guise of defending the standards of literature and language, but your comment reads like an attempt to make Barney look stupid and to make you look smart, to make Barney look ignorant and to make you look properly educated. Barney, it seems to me, is having fun by stretching the limits of language. Does he sometimes stretch it too far? Yes, but that's what makes it gutsy, because he makes himself vulnerable to people like you.
If you make oracular pronouncements on prose style this is the kind of criticism you're laying yourself open to.
Writers aren't supposed to have fun, they're meant to keep the language sharp. Careless writing destroys language. Someone who learned the word “nonchalant” from this piece would be unable to communicate with someone who knows its actual meaning. A writer who doesn't care about using the right word is not doing their job.
I agree with you about the importance of accuracy and not poisoning the well, but I actually think the use of “nonchalant” here is fine in itself because he’s personifying the “fact”. There it is, sloping about the factual landscape, whistling, with its hands in its pockets (although, ironically, the personification of abstract quantities is a hallmark of LLM fiction, as recently pointed out by Nostalgebraist: https://www.tumblr.com/nostalgebraist/778041178124926976/hydrogen-jukeboxes). You don’t have to like this particular instance, but if you bar unexpected figurative formulations on the grounds that they might mislead a naïve reader, you’re going to end up throwing out a lot of babies with your bathwater.
That's a good rationalisation but I don't think you can establish a conceit that outlandish with a single word, and I don't think he intended to. There's no trace of that personification in any of the other words in the sentence, and it wouldn't make sense anyway.
Thinking through the personification: the heinous fact has a mood swing and “becomes” nonchalant, which then induces people to forget that it's heinous. But what causes a fact to have a change of heart independent of the people who are aware of it?
The problem isn't the outlandishness itself; it's that it would only need a slight correction to turn it into something straightforward. It's not convincing. Applying nonchalance to the fact is bizarre, but it would make perfect sense to apply it to the people with awareness of it. It's far easier to believe that he wasn't thinking clearly, got confused between the fact and the people, and misapplied a word.
Aside from that, the personification would weaken his argument. He's trying to attack the literati for being apathetic and indifferent, why would he let them off the hook by attributing that apathy to a personified fact instead of the people themselves?
Unknotting all this is very tedious, but my point is that you can rationalise anything. When good writers use an unexpected figurative formulation, it doesn't look suspiciously like a blunder. If you want to take liberties, your reader has to trust that you understand what you are doing. If you can't establish that trust, you are making verbal noise.
I’m not sure that either “heinous” or “nonchalant” are “moods.” “Heinous” is an intrinsic quality, independent of mood (Goebbels was heinous, whether wetting himself with excitement over a mark of the Führer’s approval or gloomily requisitioning bicycles for the Eastern Front); “nonchalant”, by the definition you give, could qualify, but I’ve always thought it was primarily about appearance rather than feeling. In fact, it often implies a divergence between appearance and feeling. ‘“So… when exactly are you leaving for Ravenna?” Lord Byron asked, nonchalantly’: I assume Byron has an agenda here, and I will definitely not be leaving my wife and two teenaged daughters with him in Venice. Put the two together, and we have something that is very bad, but is evading detection by its casual demeanour. I think that’s exactly what was intended. Is he overplaying his hand, ending up with something unwieldy in his determination to demonstrate an ornate style? Perhaps. Is this the howler you make it out to be? I still think not.
One last barrage of pedantry: I wasn't saying heinousness or nonchalance are moods, but I probably should have made myself clearer. I was trying to interpret the personification in the context of the sentence. The word “become” in that sentence implies a change of state. If the literati had ”become nonchalant” about the fact, the meaning would be clear: they may not have been nonchalant about the fact originally, but eventually it became familiar, and now they no longer worry about it. But what would it mean for the fact to “become nonchalant”? It's not that the fact can afford to be nonchalant now that no one is worried about it any longer, that would be circular. He is saying that the nonchalance came first: people stopped worrying about the fact because it “became nonchalant”. This is inexplicable. To speak of a fact becoming nonchalant of its own accord and thus affecting societal attitudes is bizarre. Since nothing external has caused the fact to become nonchalant, I jokingly proposed that the fact had a “mood swing”. This doesn't imply that nonchalance is a mood, it implies that the nonchalance was the *result* of a mood swing. The corresponding mood might be something like “insouciance”. I wasn't saying that its mood shifted from heinous to nonchalant, I was using heinous merely as an epithet. I skipped a few logical steps and didn't express myself particularly well.
I've clearly gone to ridiculous lengths to explain why I don't like one word, but I only meant it as a representative instance. There are hiccups in every paragraph where his words aren't quite doing what he wants them to do, and the reader has to make a slight internal correction. If he strove for plainness rather than richness (as many great writers have done) he would write better.
I as the reader am supposed to have fun. I find Italo Calvino fun. I do not care if he had any fun while writing. Standup comedy is fun; it might not be not at all fun for the comedian to refine his timing and his words so that I eventually have fun.
Barney defends his style well, with intelligence, flair and humor. And he's absolutely right about the following: "The only reason generative AI technologies like ChatGPT have a snowball’s chance of replacing mainstream professional writing is because mainstream professional writing has been devolving toward the vapid, voiceless, informative 'style' of algorithmic writing for three decades."
This piece is fun. I miss when writing was fun. Death to writing for the algorithm in "reverse pyramid" style assuming readers won't read the whole thing—if we incentivize thoughtlessness in the name of "getting to the point" where does good art, art with layers, go?
I don't want to spend any more time with Vanity Fair than I have to but after a very brief inspection your style is not "purple". It's possibly ornate and people who are used to reading online prose may justifiably say that the style is more interested in getting people to pay attention to itself than what it is supposedly describing. More exposure to any kind of 19th-century English would help people to deal with elaborate styles involving complex sentences.
That too but I was lucky to have a 7th-grade English teacher who used "tagmemes" and "metaphrasing" for this endeavor and made it slightly more whimsical
(Vanity Fair is concealing some unprinted interview material with Jon Hamm from approximately Season 3 behind paywall) (Grudge ensues) (Of course any Jon Hamm interview is the opposite of purple prose, in fact an "Omit needless words" clinic)
It's all taste. If you have taste you can write however you please. If you do not have taste I think writing "purple" will really just cause you more emarassment than anything else. You probably wouldn't be any good even if you simplified it. You would just get less shit for it.
I know that taste is a subjective term, but that's sort of why talking about writing or art is tricky because there is some thing that is beyond our understanding happening.
It's sort of like how some people are funny, and you can maybe learn on the margins to be a little bit funnier if you want to, but the really funny people just have an internal "taste" that tells them when the timing is right and just how to deliver a joke so it lands. They don't have to think too hard; it's instinct. Writers aren't completely born with this, but once theyve read enough, and if they have that inborn ability, this instinct takes over-- at least, I think.
The grammarian pedants criticizing this article must never under any circumstances be allowed into contact with Hunter S. Thompson -- the Faulkner of his age.
I disagree with a few points, but am on board for the essay itself. The worst writing advice comes from "writing" and "rhetoric" courses and the inept people who teach them .his essay is a huge step in the right direction. I would, however , suggest that writing is not so much about seeing as about hearing, though really effective style must have both of these engines running.
Thank you, Vincenzo, for making what may be the last stand against the somnambulistic hordes of the Chicago Style (which of course is no style at all, just a list of rules from which if you break even one in the sense of wandering into the purple-hued bush of an original sentence, results in you being hunted down and assaulted by red pens). I recently read The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch and it was "flooded" (is that too obvious a choice of word?) with intense, descriptive prose about how the ocean mirror's the human subconscious. Would she be allowed to write that way and then have a publisher agree to stuff between the covers of a book, with its most colorful phrases escaping through the binding out of sheer exuberance? And, yes, Nabokov -- i learned a lot about writing from smiling through his prose -- so exact yet so profuse. And don't forget Moby Dick. I will go down with the Pequod myself in calling this one of the top five novels of all time.
I see the literary types are already out here in force to crucify you about your hit piece. English is not my native language but I do recognize a good writer that does indeed say something, quite clearly. I'd say we need more courageous writers like you, debunking the myth that one needs to stick to all those high brow rules made by hmmm, what do I call them without giving offense?!
Sincerely,
Nicolai Moiseyev
BTW you should perhaps write a satirical about the AI slob being pushed as "writing" and the wannabes using AI to be more creative; you do seem to have a certain knack to do that...
Brother. Turn back now. Instead of defending bad writing, you should choose to improve. I like your energy, and you’re talented. But this article is shot through with not just purple but nonsensical writing in places. You will look back on all this one day and be embarrassed. Nabokov, Amis, etc, these were not purple writers. They easily could have been, but they studied up and honed their styles. You should too.
Flawless writing that takes no risks is everywhere. It’s a burger in a small town. I live in the same small town and I want spicy food. Imperfect writing that swaggers and teases. I think it’s stupid we’re taught to assume Conrad and Carlyle and Woolf are boring when their styles are LESS boring than anything I’ve seen published this century. Now here’s a guy writing like Carlyle and owning it. Let me enjoy it, please.
Most of us teach *ourselves* that great literature is boring in high school. Being made to read books that few people under 20 can fully appreciate tends to do that. I took the lower level English classes on purpose in HS because they were more fun - my 16 yo self would rather watch movies in class and read John Grisham than pretend to understand Hamlet.
The fact that my favorite novels now include Ulysses and Moby-Dick would’ve shocked my teenage self
I think Sam has pitched us against each other for his amusement, so game on. Funnily hard you try, your prose cannot be purple because there is meaning in it.
I have been held hostage to write the other spectrum of your argument which I'm sure Sam will role out at a discreet interval.
But seriously, this was a fun read and even though I did not have to be held hostage to write my verision, because I'm a stickler for minimalism, it is fun to read this kind of style ONLY if the writer has a clear purpose.
Otherwise shoot me in the head.
Luckily you sound like you'd have to be terribly drunk not to make any sense. So try as you did, you did not achieve purple.
When I think purple prose it's hard for me to think of any writer of any literary acclaim because like them or not, they have achieved acclaim because of some good in their work. I may not like DFW, for eg, but he's not purple ...the writers you mention, i would not dare call purple.
I like the indigo talk.
I shall spend the rest of the day thinking of language in colours.
The glory days of books, magazines and newspapers on paper are dead and gone. For all sorts of reasons. Will florid, rule-breaking purple prose, however intelligent or witty, make things any better? I doubt it. As a default position, however, in our present age of 140 (or 280) characters, a writer could do worse than to heed this time-honored advice: make it short and sweet, clear and to the point. If one really has something to say, that is, and is not just showing off.
A prosodist is not a writer of prose but a linguist who studies stress and intonation, for a start.
Anyway, the hegemony of the plain style is unfortunate but necessary. It is the only way to stop young Americans, including you, from using words they don't understand. Just a few instances:
"This is the showdown I had walked into at high noon, all 28 American years of age: my overlarge violet pistol against a cavalcade of water guns."
Cavalcade: "A formal procession of people walking, on horseback, or riding in vehicles". I think you meant a cannonade.
"Who, having more parity with artlessness than art, espied annihilation on the horizon and said, “I recognize you brother, come hither.”
Parity: "the state or condition of being equal, especially as regards status or pay." To say that a person has parity with an abstract quality is nonsense, and even aside from that, the idea of greater or lesser degrees of parity is questionable. I think you meant to say affinity.
"This heinous fact has become so nonchalant as to hardly register as understanding or awareness."
Nonchalant: "(of a person or manner) feeling or appearing casually calm and relaxed; not displaying anxiety, interest, or enthusiasm". The heinous fact has not become nonchalant, the people who are aware of the fact have become nonchalant. "To register as understanding" is a extremely clumsy way of saying "to be understood".
You claim not to use clichés, but you do use them. In fact, you don't even understand the clichés you use:
"I have been subpoenaed by the Republic of Letters to make a spirited defense of “maximalism” and “purple prose,” two arbitrary and meaningless pigeon holes I’ve supposedly been smoked out of by both “critics” and “fans” since my debut into the wet swaddling blanket of American awareness last Christmas"
You seem to think that pigeons live in holes in the ground like moles. A pigeon hole is a small box, not a hole in the ground, so you wouldn't need to use smoke to clear it out, and there'd be no point anyway because the pigeon is meant to be there. Even if this bit wasn't ridiculous the introduction of the swaddling blanket would make it so.
If you cannot write ornate prose without committing crimes against the English language you should be writing plain prose. Amis and Joyce would've torn you apart for precisely this kind of thing. Amis often dissects clumsy, inflated writing word-by-word in his criticism. Joyce was so sensitive to linguistic solecisms that he could point out blunders in Flaubert's French:
"As they drank champagne and Fendant de Sion, Jaloux, who happened to be carrying a copy of Flaubert’s Trois Contes, began to praise the faultlessness of its style and language. Joyce, in spite of his own admiration for Flaubert, bristled, “Pas si bien que ça. Il commence avec une faute.” And taking the book he showed them that in the first sentence of “Un Cœur simple”, “Pendant un demi-siècle, les bourgeoises de Pont-l’Évêque envièrent à Mme Aubain sa servante Félicité,” envièrent should be enviaient, since the action is continued rather than completed. Then he thumbed through the book, evidently with a number of mistakes in mind, and came to the last sentence of the final story, “Hérodias, ‘Comme elle était très lourde, ils la portaient alternativement.” “Alternativement is wrong,” he announced, “since there are three bearers.” "
Joyce, Amis, and Nabokov are good stylists because they can be abundant and precise at the same time. "Demi-impressionist" flailing about has nothing to do with this; it is bad writing.
Rules! Thank you keep them coming.
There's no rule saying that you should use words with some respect for their meaning. It's a precondition of any communication. It's also generally understood that if you use words without respect for their meaning, or their proper spelling, you have something special to offer in return for the reader's annoyance. So, for example, you might believe that using "pulchritudinous" where you ought to have preferred "voluptuous" offers me something. It does! It tells me that you learned the word in high school, as a way to call a girl hawt. The problem is that this is something I didn't really want to know. Look, I read Thomas Browne and John Florio, so I like words. Thomas Browne's neologisms were so apt, however, that they became part of the English language. Perhaps it's the effect of the decades-long hegemony of the Gordon Lish aesthetic that we have a generation of writers who've never encountered any longer Latinate words in prose, and now plop them onto their writing like the crenellations and finials that rich people in my area (Northern VA) insist on decorating their ugly, bloated houses with.
You write to Barney: "Amis and Joyce would've torn you apart for precisely this kind of thing." How would you know? Do you commune with them? While you take these masters' names in vain, Barney simply celebrates them. You comment under the guise of defending the standards of literature and language, but your comment reads like an attempt to make Barney look stupid and to make you look smart, to make Barney look ignorant and to make you look properly educated. Barney, it seems to me, is having fun by stretching the limits of language. Does he sometimes stretch it too far? Yes, but that's what makes it gutsy, because he makes himself vulnerable to people like you.
If you make oracular pronouncements on prose style this is the kind of criticism you're laying yourself open to.
Writers aren't supposed to have fun, they're meant to keep the language sharp. Careless writing destroys language. Someone who learned the word “nonchalant” from this piece would be unable to communicate with someone who knows its actual meaning. A writer who doesn't care about using the right word is not doing their job.
I agree with you about the importance of accuracy and not poisoning the well, but I actually think the use of “nonchalant” here is fine in itself because he’s personifying the “fact”. There it is, sloping about the factual landscape, whistling, with its hands in its pockets (although, ironically, the personification of abstract quantities is a hallmark of LLM fiction, as recently pointed out by Nostalgebraist: https://www.tumblr.com/nostalgebraist/778041178124926976/hydrogen-jukeboxes). You don’t have to like this particular instance, but if you bar unexpected figurative formulations on the grounds that they might mislead a naïve reader, you’re going to end up throwing out a lot of babies with your bathwater.
That's a good rationalisation but I don't think you can establish a conceit that outlandish with a single word, and I don't think he intended to. There's no trace of that personification in any of the other words in the sentence, and it wouldn't make sense anyway.
Thinking through the personification: the heinous fact has a mood swing and “becomes” nonchalant, which then induces people to forget that it's heinous. But what causes a fact to have a change of heart independent of the people who are aware of it?
The problem isn't the outlandishness itself; it's that it would only need a slight correction to turn it into something straightforward. It's not convincing. Applying nonchalance to the fact is bizarre, but it would make perfect sense to apply it to the people with awareness of it. It's far easier to believe that he wasn't thinking clearly, got confused between the fact and the people, and misapplied a word.
Aside from that, the personification would weaken his argument. He's trying to attack the literati for being apathetic and indifferent, why would he let them off the hook by attributing that apathy to a personified fact instead of the people themselves?
Unknotting all this is very tedious, but my point is that you can rationalise anything. When good writers use an unexpected figurative formulation, it doesn't look suspiciously like a blunder. If you want to take liberties, your reader has to trust that you understand what you are doing. If you can't establish that trust, you are making verbal noise.
I’m not sure that either “heinous” or “nonchalant” are “moods.” “Heinous” is an intrinsic quality, independent of mood (Goebbels was heinous, whether wetting himself with excitement over a mark of the Führer’s approval or gloomily requisitioning bicycles for the Eastern Front); “nonchalant”, by the definition you give, could qualify, but I’ve always thought it was primarily about appearance rather than feeling. In fact, it often implies a divergence between appearance and feeling. ‘“So… when exactly are you leaving for Ravenna?” Lord Byron asked, nonchalantly’: I assume Byron has an agenda here, and I will definitely not be leaving my wife and two teenaged daughters with him in Venice. Put the two together, and we have something that is very bad, but is evading detection by its casual demeanour. I think that’s exactly what was intended. Is he overplaying his hand, ending up with something unwieldy in his determination to demonstrate an ornate style? Perhaps. Is this the howler you make it out to be? I still think not.
One last barrage of pedantry: I wasn't saying heinousness or nonchalance are moods, but I probably should have made myself clearer. I was trying to interpret the personification in the context of the sentence. The word “become” in that sentence implies a change of state. If the literati had ”become nonchalant” about the fact, the meaning would be clear: they may not have been nonchalant about the fact originally, but eventually it became familiar, and now they no longer worry about it. But what would it mean for the fact to “become nonchalant”? It's not that the fact can afford to be nonchalant now that no one is worried about it any longer, that would be circular. He is saying that the nonchalance came first: people stopped worrying about the fact because it “became nonchalant”. This is inexplicable. To speak of a fact becoming nonchalant of its own accord and thus affecting societal attitudes is bizarre. Since nothing external has caused the fact to become nonchalant, I jokingly proposed that the fact had a “mood swing”. This doesn't imply that nonchalance is a mood, it implies that the nonchalance was the *result* of a mood swing. The corresponding mood might be something like “insouciance”. I wasn't saying that its mood shifted from heinous to nonchalant, I was using heinous merely as an epithet. I skipped a few logical steps and didn't express myself particularly well.
I've clearly gone to ridiculous lengths to explain why I don't like one word, but I only meant it as a representative instance. There are hiccups in every paragraph where his words aren't quite doing what he wants them to do, and the reader has to make a slight internal correction. If he strove for plainness rather than richness (as many great writers have done) he would write better.
If you think writers aren't supposed to have fun, if you think writers have a "job" to do, then you and I simply do not read for the same reasons.
I as the reader am supposed to have fun. I find Italo Calvino fun. I do not care if he had any fun while writing. Standup comedy is fun; it might not be not at all fun for the comedian to refine his timing and his words so that I eventually have fun.
Oh, my. I missed that flagrant misuse of "nonchalant".
How would you rewrite that? "Readers have become so nonchalant about this heinous fact as to barely notice that they understand or are aware of it."
What is the opposite of "nonchalant," "chalant"? Perhaps only James Joyce has the answer.
Barney defends his style well, with intelligence, flair and humor. And he's absolutely right about the following: "The only reason generative AI technologies like ChatGPT have a snowball’s chance of replacing mainstream professional writing is because mainstream professional writing has been devolving toward the vapid, voiceless, informative 'style' of algorithmic writing for three decades."
This piece is fun. I miss when writing was fun. Death to writing for the algorithm in "reverse pyramid" style assuming readers won't read the whole thing—if we incentivize thoughtlessness in the name of "getting to the point" where does good art, art with layers, go?
I don't want to spend any more time with Vanity Fair than I have to but after a very brief inspection your style is not "purple". It's possibly ornate and people who are used to reading online prose may justifiably say that the style is more interested in getting people to pay attention to itself than what it is supposedly describing. More exposure to any kind of 19th-century English would help people to deal with elaborate styles involving complex sentences.
Or…practice diagramming sentences….
That too but I was lucky to have a 7th-grade English teacher who used "tagmemes" and "metaphrasing" for this endeavor and made it slightly more whimsical
(Vanity Fair is concealing some unprinted interview material with Jon Hamm from approximately Season 3 behind paywall) (Grudge ensues) (Of course any Jon Hamm interview is the opposite of purple prose, in fact an "Omit needless words" clinic)
We’re never going to mount a literary Butlerian Jihad unless we adopt writing styles that actively taunt ChatGPT for its inability to replicate them.
Here’s the ethos I want to see in prose style: “Generative AI of the future, look upon my work, and despair!”
And this piece is that. Not much is, but this is. Take a bow Vincenzo!
It's all taste. If you have taste you can write however you please. If you do not have taste I think writing "purple" will really just cause you more emarassment than anything else. You probably wouldn't be any good even if you simplified it. You would just get less shit for it.
I know that taste is a subjective term, but that's sort of why talking about writing or art is tricky because there is some thing that is beyond our understanding happening.
It's sort of like how some people are funny, and you can maybe learn on the margins to be a little bit funnier if you want to, but the really funny people just have an internal "taste" that tells them when the timing is right and just how to deliver a joke so it lands. They don't have to think too hard; it's instinct. Writers aren't completely born with this, but once theyve read enough, and if they have that inborn ability, this instinct takes over-- at least, I think.
Great and refreshing. Looking forward to your book.
Yes, it’s the music of Nabokov, McCarthy, Houellebecq, that is so satisfying. Thanks 🙏
The grammarian pedants criticizing this article must never under any circumstances be allowed into contact with Hunter S. Thompson -- the Faulkner of his age.
I disagree with a few points, but am on board for the essay itself. The worst writing advice comes from "writing" and "rhetoric" courses and the inept people who teach them .his essay is a huge step in the right direction. I would, however , suggest that writing is not so much about seeing as about hearing, though really effective style must have both of these engines running.
Thank you, Vincenzo, for making what may be the last stand against the somnambulistic hordes of the Chicago Style (which of course is no style at all, just a list of rules from which if you break even one in the sense of wandering into the purple-hued bush of an original sentence, results in you being hunted down and assaulted by red pens). I recently read The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch and it was "flooded" (is that too obvious a choice of word?) with intense, descriptive prose about how the ocean mirror's the human subconscious. Would she be allowed to write that way and then have a publisher agree to stuff between the covers of a book, with its most colorful phrases escaping through the binding out of sheer exuberance? And, yes, Nabokov -- i learned a lot about writing from smiling through his prose -- so exact yet so profuse. And don't forget Moby Dick. I will go down with the Pequod myself in calling this one of the top five novels of all time.
Hi Vincenzo,
I see the literary types are already out here in force to crucify you about your hit piece. English is not my native language but I do recognize a good writer that does indeed say something, quite clearly. I'd say we need more courageous writers like you, debunking the myth that one needs to stick to all those high brow rules made by hmmm, what do I call them without giving offense?!
Sincerely,
Nicolai Moiseyev
BTW you should perhaps write a satirical about the AI slob being pushed as "writing" and the wannabes using AI to be more creative; you do seem to have a certain knack to do that...
Brother. Turn back now. Instead of defending bad writing, you should choose to improve. I like your energy, and you’re talented. But this article is shot through with not just purple but nonsensical writing in places. You will look back on all this one day and be embarrassed. Nabokov, Amis, etc, these were not purple writers. They easily could have been, but they studied up and honed their styles. You should too.
You’ve misunderstood the point I was making profoundly if you think I alleged Nabokov and Amis were purple.
Flawless writing that takes no risks is everywhere. It’s a burger in a small town. I live in the same small town and I want spicy food. Imperfect writing that swaggers and teases. I think it’s stupid we’re taught to assume Conrad and Carlyle and Woolf are boring when their styles are LESS boring than anything I’ve seen published this century. Now here’s a guy writing like Carlyle and owning it. Let me enjoy it, please.
Wait a minute who taught you that Conrad, Carlyle and Woolf are boring? Is this some widespread thing in school? That's preposterous.
Most of us teach *ourselves* that great literature is boring in high school. Being made to read books that few people under 20 can fully appreciate tends to do that. I took the lower level English classes on purpose in HS because they were more fun - my 16 yo self would rather watch movies in class and read John Grisham than pretend to understand Hamlet.
The fact that my favorite novels now include Ulysses and Moby-Dick would’ve shocked my teenage self
I think Sam has pitched us against each other for his amusement, so game on. Funnily hard you try, your prose cannot be purple because there is meaning in it.
I have been held hostage to write the other spectrum of your argument which I'm sure Sam will role out at a discreet interval.
But seriously, this was a fun read and even though I did not have to be held hostage to write my verision, because I'm a stickler for minimalism, it is fun to read this kind of style ONLY if the writer has a clear purpose.
Otherwise shoot me in the head.
Luckily you sound like you'd have to be terribly drunk not to make any sense. So try as you did, you did not achieve purple.
When I think purple prose it's hard for me to think of any writer of any literary acclaim because like them or not, they have achieved acclaim because of some good in their work. I may not like DFW, for eg, but he's not purple ...the writers you mention, i would not dare call purple.
I like the indigo talk.
I shall spend the rest of the day thinking of language in colours.
I must be between white and black i dare say.
See you on the battleground soon.
Writing in the first person by the ‘I’
Gender Generation is not new, exciting or experimental anymore .
Mauve Gas Oven Liturgical Diaries
where they are the subject not us the reader .
The glory days of books, magazines and newspapers on paper are dead and gone. For all sorts of reasons. Will florid, rule-breaking purple prose, however intelligent or witty, make things any better? I doubt it. As a default position, however, in our present age of 140 (or 280) characters, a writer could do worse than to heed this time-honored advice: make it short and sweet, clear and to the point. If one really has something to say, that is, and is not just showing off.