Fashions and Fictions
Harmful Prescriptions for “Good” Writing
“Less is a bore.”
—Robert Venturi
Very few of the qualities and abilities that people pride themselves upon or admire in others are things people are born with, things people just inherently have. People like to believe stuff is inborn, that they just fortunately received these gifts from some higher power, while other people just did not receive the same or as much. Untrue.
Nobody is born a good writer, for instance. Nobody is born knowing how to write or how to evaluate writing for “goodness” and, further, what makes writing “good” is changing all the time just like the shape of jeans.
I extend the same principle to things like “beauty” and “intelligence.” These aren’t inherent qualities, but an amalgamation of several factors—a tiny dash of what you may have been born with (eg, bone structure or curiosity), a large helping of the society in which you live and the circumstances of the family that raises you, and the rest is in the choices you make. What kind of intelligence is valued in your society right now? It’s changing all the time. People who have an aptitude for and who put their resources into developing the type of intelligence that is in vogue at any given time are going to be considered the intelligentsia of their day, but drop them 100 years in the past or future and there’s an excellent chance they’ll be completely unappreciated there. Village idiots.
Great artists, for instance, aren’t born. Someone could be born with steady hands or with the ability to visually discriminate colors to a very high degree, but those factors are only the smallest part of what contributes to being a great artist. Developing a sense of taste; having the funds and the leisure time to study art; coming from a family that values art and funds your studies and materials; practicing technique until you become great—those are all circumstances and choices. Some people have to work harder than others to become great artists but it’s not because they inherently have less aptitude. It’s because of social and cultural disparities and inequities.
Even if you do become great, you still have to have the right skin color and sex characteristics for the society you are presently living in to accept your validity as an artist. That contributes to whether you may be successful as an artist in your lifetime, but not whether you are a great artist. Many artists were not successful during their lifetime because they were born with the “wrong” parts or born in the “wrong” hemisphere, who we now understand were great artists.
Writing is like this. Being a great writer has almost nothing to do with any inherent characteristics of a person and instead has everything to do with the opportunities they are given, the standards of the society in which they live, and their degree of dedication to those things that lead to becoming a great writer.
Anyway thanks for listening to me pop off, today’s article is about the concept of what makes “good” writing versus “bad” writing.
When I was a young lass in the 1980s, teens and cool adults who cared about fashion were wearing jeans with tapered legs. I understand that this was a reaction to the bell bottoms of the 1970s and 1960s. By the time I was a teen in the 1990s, boot cut and then flared-leg style jeans were already back. We mostly weren’t calling them “bell bottoms” but that’s what they were. When I was in high school you could not purchase jeans with tapered legs. They were not being made, or at least they were not made available to people who bought their clothes at the mall. If you wanted to dress up like someone from the 1980s in tapered-leg, acid-wash jeans, you had to raid the attic for your mom’s old stuff or visit a thrift shop.
In the early 2000s, the style began to shift back to tapered legs and by 2007 or so most jeans were “skinny jeans” again and you couldn’t find a flare style for sale except around Halloween. I don’t remember calling them “skinny” in the 1980s but they were the same thing. The latest fashion whispers to reach me say that the Zoomers are eschewing skinnies in favor of wide-leg “mom jeans.” When I was their age, skinnies were for moms and wide-legs were for cool teens but whatever.
Over the last ten or fifteen years, there’s been a change in how clothing is sold. With the advent of internet shopping and more people cultivating non-mainstream aesthetic styles, out-of-fashion jeans styles aren’t disappearing from the world entirely until they come back into fashion. All kinds of jeans are available all the time. You can walk into an Old Navy today (wear your mask!) and find skinny jeans, wide-leg jeans, straight-cut jeans, flares, boot cuts—all the jeans styles. Jeans for everyone.
This is great news because I am not giving up my high-waisted skinny jeans any time soon. I am now too old to change.
The important thing is that these different denim cuts are all, objectively speaking, equally good. Sometimes high-waisted skinny jeans are in style and they suit some bodies better than other bodies. Sometimes low-slung bell bottoms are in style and they suit some bodies better than other bodies. But at the end of the day they are all just piles of cotton (and these days, I guess, elastane). The different shapes have no inherent virtues over one another. The only things that make them good or bad, better or worse, are peoples’ personal preferences and the overarching societal preference for how we want silhouettes to look at the moment (the latter preference often informing the former, though almost nobody thinks they are personally affected in that way).
Writing is like this, too. There’s an ever-tilting landscape of genres, plots, and prose styles coming into and going out of fashion. This is the reason it’s so hard to evaluate any given slate of recent “bestsellers” to see what elements they collectively contain that are capturing the public’s affection, to try to duplicate them in your own writing. By the time you have written your manuscript (at least a few months), sold it to a publisher (a few more months, presuming you already had an agent standing by to rep you), and shepherded it through editing and production (a matter of even more months), the new hot thing will be something else. A friend of mine signed a major deal last autumn (2020) and her book comes out in 2023.
Publishing is weird like this. Each individual book moves at a glacial pace from idea to finished product, but a stuffed pipeline keeps new bestsellers hitting shelves all the time. Somewhere, an author who will become a huge breakout success is typing “the end” on her first manuscript, but it’ll be three to five years before any of us hear the title—even those of us who have our ear to the ground.
All that said, there’s one style of prose writing that has an outsize share of writing advice dedicated to promoting its inherent supremacy and that’s what’s been on my mind the last few days.
The phrase “Less Is More” often (erroneously) gets attributed to Coco Chanel. First of all, she did not say that. What she said was, “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” Much less eloquent but the sentiment is the same. Second of all, she was a Nazi and I don’t mean it in the “aren’t all rich people kind of fascists?” sense but no I literally mean a Nazi agent.
I despise the philosophy that less is inherently better than more. In the context of fashion, I understand Chanel to be saying “I can’t see you, and I don’t know what you’re wearing, but ladies you are too much. Make yourself less before exposing anyone else to your presence.” I did not put on twelve necklaces and red leopard-print shoes by accident, Coco. Do not even get me started on the persistent and ridiculous concept that women somehow don’t know what we look like and need a third party to tell us.
Women know what we look like. Also, I’m not taking fashion advice from an actual Nazi.
In the first half of the twentieth century, this Chanel philosophy was being parroted around the literary world by a number of bigwigs, including the poet-critic Orwell of “if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out” fame (I would like to point out that the word “out” could have been cut out of that sentence—twice) and modern English’s favorite writing instructor E.B. White, the Charlotte’s Web guy, who much more succinctly included “omit needless words” in his list of eleven principles of composition.
There are, essentially, two flavors of prose styling—plain and fancy, as Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Dillard described them—and then there’s a third flavor, purple, which is fancy done badly. Note that there is no term for plain done badly since “plain” writing is considered inherently good by the very nature of its plainness, while “fancy” writing must be done with great care else it is purple.
I did some googling. I already had in mind a few of the most famous writers who use “plain” style and a few who use a fancier style but I didn’t want to rely on my own internal judgment; I wanted some backup. When I googled “authors with plain prose styles,” I expected I would see Orwell and White and Hemingway—who I did, indeed, see—along with Bradbury and Twain and Swift.
Next I googled “authors with ornate prose styles” and, first of all, I got a lot of links to articles about purple prose, which is not what I was looking for and indicates (again) that people want to conflate ornate or elaborate prose with purple prose. I took some examples from this search but also tried “authors with elaborate prose styles” in case my word choice was the problem. Interestingly, the authors that came up prominently for these searches—after wading through approximately fifty entries devoted solely to Nabokov—were Christie, Hurston, Woolf (which by the way was consistently spelled “Wolfe” on one site that mentioned her), Morrison, and Shelley.
(I did not spot Flaubert on the list, though I expected to see him. I would have omitted him from the discussion anyway since he wrote in French but it was just interesting that he didn’t come up.)
I feel like there is kind of a pattern here.
All the writers I listed are famous authors today. Not all of them were appreciated properly during their lifetimes (I am thinking of Hurston who, in spite of publishing prolifically in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, died in a welfare home in 1960, and rested in an unmarked grave until 1973). But all of them are in print and sell books today. We can conclude that all of them were great writers—some with plain writing styles and some with ornate or elaborate writing styles.
It’s not that we don’t appreciate both styles in our literary awards. Of the writers listed, Hemingway and Morrison each have a Nobel and a Pulitzer (none of the others have either). We appreciate elaborate styles commercially—Christie is far and away the best seller on the list.
And yet somehow, most if not all of the prescriptive advice on how to write well focuses on only one of those prose styles and I feel like I can leave it unsaid why that might be. I humbly suggest that perhaps this is, again, a function of the society in which we live and not the inherent quality of the writing style itself.
Here, I made a new and improved list of writing advice, use this.
Tired Remove as many words as you can for the leanest and most concise text.
Wired Write every day. Every single day.Tired Replace long or complex words with simpler synonyms.
Wired Read a lot of books, a wide variety of books, and with a writer’s eye.Tired Write the kind of prose dead white dudes say you should.
Wired Write the kind of prose you like to read.
That’s it, that’s all I got. I’ve got an article in the works on the concept of bestsellers and what that term actually means, so make sure you stop by on Thursday to check it out and, in the mean time, May the 4th, etc.
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