I’ve said before that I think writing workshops and the like can do as much harm as good and that they, along with editing processes, can have a homogenizing effect on writing, making it more similar rather than improving it.
This is because biases are contagious, and the rule which each individual writer gets beaten into their head the strongest is the rule they in turn feel the most need to beat into others. For instance, somebody who schooled themselves hard to get rid of inappropriate use of “as” or other linkage of non-simultaneous actions (like the, “Turning the doorknob, he went up the steps and into the living room.”-style sentence) will tend to see them everywhere and might even question or jump on any use of “as” even when used correctly to denote truly simultaneous action.
Consciously or subconsciously, people in a writing group with an individual with “anti-as syndrome” will shy away from using a perfectly fine word in their writing, and as they train themselves to avoid it, they’ll internalize the behavior and may become offenders themselves.
That’s just one example, which comes readily to my mind because I’ve seen that one example happen before. Another is the area of modifiers. Writers as a group, or at least the portion of that group that’s most vocal on the subject of how to write, seem to have come to embrace the idea that modifiers are bad. Adverbs most of all, particularly the ones which end like particularly: in “-ly”, followed by the rest, and then followed by adjectives.
“Never use an adjective and a noun when you could just use the noun.” is the sentiment. Throw an adverb in to modify the adjective and you’re really asking for trouble.
I’ll use an example from the most recent chapter of Tales of MU: a character brings his (rather large) hands down on a harpsichord keyboard, producing what I describe as “a twangily discordant cacophony.”
One reader, who by his comments is also a writer of some sort, offers the constructive criticism that I should eliminate the adverb and adjective and simply say “cacophony.” This is actually what motivated this post… I responded to his advice on the page, but I think the whole subject of writer bias is worth elaborating upon.
Now, the poster was right in that neither being twangy nor discordant falls outside the boundaries of the definition of “cacophony”… however, the phrase as used offers three advantages:
1. It is precise. Not all cacophanies are the same, after all. Not all are twangy, and while discordance is to be expected in a cacophony, not all are equally discordant. The same note being played from multiple sources within the space of a second is a cacophony. Multiple notes can lead to a more notably discordant cacophony.
2. It is evocative. That is, it is poetic. If you make every phrase in your prose poetic, you end up with what’s called “florid prose” and that’s a bad thing. If you’re trying to drive home a single point or single image (or sound), however, a little poetry can be a good thing.
3. Not every reader will know right off the top of their head what a “cacophony” is. They will more likely know what “discordant” means… and if they don’t, the “dis-” prefix is more familiar as meaning something bad than the “caco-” one is. The description of it as “twangy” lets them know in no uncertain terms that a sound is being described. By telling them the cacophony is “twangily discordant”, the potentially unfamiliar word is given a context in which its meaning can be understood. This allows a writer to use a really fun word like “cacophony” without fear. Note, of course, that “discordant” and “twangily” are fun, too… so much fun that one wonders why anybody would avoid them when they have the option not to.
(On an offhand note, I suspect that the thinking behind point number 3 is among the reasons my writing style is frequently pegged as “Young Adult” when my content is anything but. You know what? I’m okay with that. Young Adult writers are frequently better, in my mind, than Adult Adult writers. Look at the great literature of yesteryear. It’s conversational. It’s fluid. It’s natural. It’s everything that YA fiction frequently is and Just Plain Adult fiction rarely is. Granted, it’s somewhat more limited in depth and scope of subject matter, but that’s a matter of demographic targeting, not anything inherent in the style. Forget any workshop rules: the more fun a sentence is to write, the more fun it will be to read.)
The argument against the modifiers is that they “weaken” the noun. How? Unless somebody can refute the points above, I think I’ve demonstrated that they strengthen it. It’s a bias to see a modified noun as weaker… like the “as” example above, I believe it grew out of a very real mistake that some writers have made.
It is possible to ruin the pacing of a passage that legitimately works better tight and terse by piling on modifiers. It’s possible to use adverbs to try to convey something happening with shocking swiftness when simply baldly stating it would get the point across better.
However, it’s harder to codify and internalize how not to make those mistakes than it is to remember “Don’t use adverbs. Adverbs weaken.”
There’s other bad habits writers learn from each other, and race to pick up in order to impress each other (and of course, to impress editors), but they don’t actually make for better or stronger writing. They make for blander writing. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” and the proof of the story is in the reading. Readers who don’t “know better,” who haven’t been spoiled by apprenticeship to a writing mentor or by endless feedback sections in which one learns the evils of adverbs aren’t going to be thrown by a phrase like “twangily discordant”, they will be drawn in by it.
These are writers’ complaints, writers’ biases. Propagating them does no service to readers.
