Monday 26 September 2011

The Bare Essentials

It can be incredibly easy, when you are writing, to fall in love with the language you are using (guilty as charged!) For me, finessing the perfect sentence so that it conveys meaning, trips the reader's imagination, sounds as elegant and and unexpected as possible, with the stresses and emphases all in the right places, is all part of the obsessive challenge of writing well.

However, I have to keep reminding myself that  language is only a means to an end, not an end in itself and the writer's primary obligation is to tell a story. With this in mind, try writing a short story, or even a paragraph, that is stripped of all its garnish.  Allow yourself enough linguistic leeway to convey character and crank up tension, but nothing else.  See if, by stripping everything down to the bare essentials, your prose becomes more concentrated and more urgent.  It may become more dull, who knows? But at least you will start to develop a sense of the range in which descriptive writing works and by doing that you will learn to find your place within it.

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