Flowery (Purple?) Prose

[cathschaffstump]

The current book I’m reading has yet to really grip me. It is very much one of the fashionable books at the moment: let’s take a secondary character or minor character from a work of literature, and fashion a story from their point of view. I myself have a few chapters of one of these started, so I certainly like the genre.

Since the book hasn’t sucked me in yet, I find myself analyzing it. There are two things I’m finding about this book that are proving to be distractions.

1. Linearity. Rather the lack thereof. The characters in this book live in flashback city. The reason we start the book with childbirth and a slave escape, and then clearly move back to the main character’s childhood, while putting in another section about the birth of her first child (not the miscarriage that occurred during the slave escape) is to pull you, the reader, in with drama. For me, it just bounces around. And feels overwrought like an iron fence in the French Quarter.

2. Flowery prose. The book is told in first in first person which allows the author to gratuitously use stream of consciousness examination of subjects (dig that crazy river wheel section!). Also, the book is very adjective heavy. Sometimes the writing hits (I love the orange gash in the sweet potato), but most of the time, I’m drowning in the prose.

I’ve always been a spare writer, perhaps to my detriment. So, today, fellow writers and readers, I solicit your opinion on

1. Flashbacks. Do you like them? Do you use them?

2. Adjectives: How much description is enough? Too much? How do you know?

3. What is your writing peeve?

I’m giving the book more time (only 50 pages in, and it’s huge), but we’ll see. Life’s too short, and I have too many books on my shelf. I’m not condemning it as a bad book–there’s just too much in it that keeps popping me out of the narrative, which is creeping slowly at best.

Have a great weekend. I’ll be at an anime con in Minneapolis, checking papers and working on my own papers as much as I can. Which may not be at all if I’m terribly unlucky.

Catherine

Originally published at Writer Tamago. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[themorningstarr.livejournal.com]

I'm a little embarrassed, but I'm one of those readers who all too often skips over lengthy description, mostly of settings. I really just don't care how the grass looked as the wind gently tickled the blades, blah blah blah. I want characters, action, dialogue. Anything more than a succinct paragraph about the setting and I find my eyes moving automatically into skim mode. So flowery prose is definitely not for me.

This does become a problem when I write though. Since I hate reading about the description of a setting, I never think to write the description of a setting except to say that it's an old-fashioned kitchen or a small meadow or a large classroom. Which isn't really any good either.

[awelkin.livejournal.com]

I too care little for tickled grass.

Catherine

[kurtoons.livejournal.com]

Flashbacks can be good, effective and entertaining; but I prefer it when they're used sparingly and when it's clear to the reader what's going on.

I remember reading an Isaac Asimov novel in junior high entitled The Currents of Space. It was a pretty good story, but one thing about it bugged me. It was about an amnesiac trying to find out who he was and kept bopping back and forth between his story and bits in the past. I was annoyed by the constant back and forth, mostly because I realized that the story had to be told that way to keep the secrets from the reader. The structure of the story wound up overshadowing the actual story, and I found that irritating.

Alan Moore's Watchmen, on the other hand, made an obsessive use of flashbacks, but for the most part they were linked to the main narrative in a way that didn't seem as artificial. Okay, after a while it got a bit formulistic, and when he repeated the same techniques in The Killing Joke it started to feel contrived.

Um, what was the question again?

Ah! Adjectives. Well, I'm a cartoonist, so I tend to see the story as a series of panels and then I try to describe those panels. I have a bad tendency towards "Tom Swifties" in my writing, ("He said grimly; they glanced nervously; she chortled amiably"), but those are adverbs. (And my reliance on passive verbs is much worse).

I try not to saddle a noun with more than one or two adjectives if I can help it. But then again, I go mostly by sound, and rely on my ear to determine if a phrase sounds right.

As for peeves, the things that annoy me most in other people's writing are bad plot and characterization; but I'd say that writing that calls attention to itself and distracts me from the story is bad.

[awelkin.livejournal.com]

Which is why I'm not sure if this is a good book or not. The writing is distracting me.

Catherine

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

1. Flashbacks - Now that I'm not writing fanfiction I use these much more sparingly. I'm differentiating between flashbacks and passages written in the past perfect; my flashbacks are set apart distinctly from the main story, usually italicized, but written in the same tense as the main story. The almost-flashback is enmeshed in the main story but in past perfect:

While giving her version of a loving, motherly lecture she always smoked nonstop; it helped her to think, she said. Of course, she smoked nonstop while doing everything except for sleeping; even in the bath she needed her ciggies “to relax”. “No sense,” she’d said to him bitterly before he’d left for Montana, waving a cigarette with a dangerously fragile length of ash. “Just like your father. Doing something you know is likely to get you good and killed.”

I used "she'd said to him" because it wasn't happening at the time the protagonist was remembering his mother saying this to him. Most of my so-called flashbacks are done like this, although I have one or two moments in the book I'm editing (the above passage was cut out of this book but will be in a sequel) where the protagonist gets lost in a memory from when he was very young, which is related like a dream sequence and in italics. But a novel that's MOSTLY flashbacks? That's a badly-structured book, IMO, especially if it leaves the reader feeling like there's no forward momentum, which it does, from what you've said.

2. Adjectives/Description -- You can see a little of how I treat description above. I try to enmesh it with action rather than something you have to wade through to get TO the action: the mother was "waving a cigarette with a dangerously fragile length of ash". You don't know her hair or eye color or how tall she is or what she's wearing or what the room looks like, none of which are really important or relevant; I think I've told enough about the woman's priorities in life that a reader can extrapolate what they think that person would look like, how her house would look, etc. I try to stick to describing what's actually important.

Like words lacking vowels, people can fill in a surprising number of gaps with their expectations; if you're talking about something happening in a kitchen, calling it small and shabby and saying it hadn't changed much at all since 1958 is evocative enough; you don't need to describe the fridge and stove and sink or explain that the room HAS a fridge and stove and sink because that's simply what people EXPECT; if something is singular about the room and will actually prove to be important to the story, THEN you mention it, but otherwise don't bother. (For instance, if the stove will cause a fire later on you can mention that the pilot light keeps going out and that anyone who wants to use it has to light it with a kitchen match; if this fact ISN'T important people will consider the defective pilot light to be like a loaded gun mentioned in the first chapter that never gets fired.)

In a fanfic I read that started with a detailed description of every bit of a flat, for instance, there is a chase through the flat later on, which is where the description SHOULD have been, as the pursuee and pursuer were running through it. Then only the things that are necessary to the chase scene would be described and it actually has some relevance to what's happening in the plot.

When it comes to floweriness in language, the sparer the better; I prefer very straightforward description that doesn't border on hyperbole. Irony and even sarcasm in descriptions are things that please me, especially. I love the subtlties of John Irving in this regard.

3. People trying to mask their deficiencies in plot and characterization with flowery language irritate the hell out of me; they also usually have their characters saying completely unlikely things for who they are or doing unlikely things. The other big peeve is folks who do no research. In the age of the internet there's no damn excuse for that.

[awelkin.livejournal.com]

I seem to know people who prefer spare.

Lack of research also peeves me immensely. That *could* be a gripe for another time.

Catherine