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

[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