Modern Writing Styles

[ray gower]

There are two trends that are becoming alarmingly noticeable in modern writing and broadly they can be divided between English and American styles. The overall result is much the same, the books are a lot duller.

Typically modern US writers, use short sentences and paragraphs.
Now while this may seem a minor point and does not cause the Microstuff paper clip to pop up complaining about your grammar with such mindless regularity, it does have an effect on how a story is read.

Shorter the sentences and paragraphing, the quicker it is read. The downside is that because it is read so quickly, nothing stays in the mind of the reader. This is a major downer if you are trying to create a character or build some semblance of mystery.

To take a random and simple example from a Patricia Cornwell novel:-
He stuck her with a pin.
She started in surprise.
“Why you do'd that?”
Stacato wording and phrasing like this is read very quickly and it barely registers on the mind.
This is not necessarily wrong, it is an excellent way of speeding up the reading when the action is coming thick and fast.
Sadly for Ms Cornwell, it signifys nothing in her rather dull story as it is all written like that. In four hundred pages I doubt there is more than three paragraphs of more than 4 lines and three sentences.
Overall it is rough, bitty and is the written equivalent of a teflon machine gun, lots of words nothing sticks. I couldn't even tell you the name of the central character, I think it is the female.

On this side of the pond, writers tend to work the other way. Sentences and paragraphs are longer.
Again there are benefits, the reader takes more time reading what is written, they understand more and are drawn deeper into the story and characters. But the story slows down to a crawl.

An example of a similar scene to the above from an Iris Gower novel (No relation!)
He playfully jabbed her in the buttocks with a pin, making her jump in surprise.
She turned on him, face flushed with the crimson tinge of anger. “Why did you do that?”
This is a lot more languid, easier to read and comprehend. We are being invited to observe a private and intimate moment. And ultimately I could tell you a lot about the heroine, if I could have faced reading the whole book.
Unfortunately I can't, because again there is no variation. Even when there is a fire in the loft and she is in iminent danger of being turned into crispy bits we are treated to long passages of how the fire is licking at the stonework and I am sat there thinking 'Sod the fire. Do something about it you stupid cow!'
It is a treacle swamp monologue read by a Brummie.

Neither of these trends is, in my humble and dated opinion, good.

To me it suggests that writers both sides of the Atlantic are missing a very basic and important point in their craft. You need to write your prose in a fashion that suits the mood of the moment- Long and deliberate to build your characters and build suspense, short and crisp to get the heart thumping and excitement building.

If the trend continues I fully expect American novels to look like SMS word lists, while European ones will be indecipherable masses of text

I've had to step back a few years to find a popular author who, in my opinion, managed to balance the writing properly and the best I can offer is Hammond Innes and Alistair Maclean. In science fiction circles we have to go back much further to early Clarke novels or even HG Wells!

[Highlander II]

I'm not sure what's more disturbing, the change in sentence / paragraph structures in the two locations or the fact that those two scenes are so remarkably similar, they could be from the same author... that's kinda scary...


Anyway - I see your point, and I agree - the short choppy sentences have their place, but shouldn't be used for the entire work, ditto on the longer ones.


A lot of fanfic is written both ways also. Some lack any description at all and some are so filled with it, the plot gets lost.

Authors need to find that 'happy medium' where words are written to the pace of the story.

Is it easy? Well, no, if it was, we'd all be millionaire authors. Writing is a JOB - it's supposed to be challenging, at least. So, it's hard. That's okay - some stuff is supposed to be hard. If everything was easy, nothing would be any fun.

[ray gower]

I can assure you they are different authors- Cornwell lives in Virginia US, Gower lives in Mumbles, UK

Sadly their works do sell well, which shows how there is little justice in the world in terms of writing quality.

The US version could perhaps be put down to the instant everything television culture.
But I have no idea how the English style came from, except to say that we have always tended to a fuller style.
You may think Hemmingway suffers a heavy dose of the verbals, but he is positively terse compared to the likes of Joyce.

[Highlander II]

I've read both Hemmingway and Joyce (if we're talking James Joyce here) -- well, okay - Joyce short stories - and personally, I prefer Joyce - if I had to choose...



Cornwell is well-known here - I've never read her, but she's not really my style.

As for the 'staccato' sentences - I do believe TV probably has a bit to do with it. I was beta'ing a fic a couple weeks ago that suffered a 'lack of description' - almost more like it was a transcript for a TV show instead of a story written to 'show' the program - not enough description of what the characters were seeing and how they were seeing it - it was very flat.


Probably part of why I like Jim Butcher's writing so much - There's description, there's action, there's romance, there's intrigue - it's all there - up to and including pop culture references.

There are still sample chapters from "Blood Rites" on my Harry Dresden site if you want to see an example.


I miss good writing - and it's not that it's not there - it's just harder to find.

[FeedMeTV]

I completely agree with you about the short sentences. I've read a few American modern novels recently, and picked one apart for a college course. By the end of the novel we were all sick to the back teeth of the author's style, for exactly your reason - there was no variation in sentence length or structure. We didn't give a damn about the character's and were hoping the heroine would hang herself quickly to finish the story.

Another modern style I've noticed is leaving the story dangling in mid-air with no firm conclusion. There's no real beginning-middle-end just a snapshot of the whole tale and a make-up-your-own-ending ending.

I've just started reading Lorna Doone by R.D Blackmore and the meaty sentences are very satisfying!

[ray gower]

Hanging endings or even non-endings are a problem and are there because so many authors are trying to string out their works into whole series.

This is frustrating for readers if they don't board the bus with volume 1, but I can see why authors like them, it gives them a chance of selling their next book to increasingly conservative publishers.

[Highlander II]

Originally posted by ray gower
Hanging endings or even non-endings are a problem and are there because so many authors are trying to string out their works into whole series.

This is frustrating for readers if they don't board the bus with volume 1, but I can see why authors like them, it gives them a chance of selling their next book to increasingly conservative publishers.

Personally - I feel that, unless an author has sold a *series*, s/he should not conclude book 1 with a cliffhanger ending -- I don't know of any that have - but I haven't been reading as much recently.

Book 1 ending as a cliffhanger w/o the *series* being sold, is dangerous, b/c what happens if the series isn't picked up? The first book is out there and the characters are hanging on the edge waiting for the next piece in their story - but it'll never come.

Cliffhanger endings are annoying and frustrating anyway - 1st book or 5th book - b/c there's no closure. And, since books are not usually published directly back to back - like TV shows are done week to week - it's terribly difficult to remember everything that happened at the end of the previous book - even if it's only a 6-month waiting period.

Then again - I'm not fond of cliffhangers on TV shows either.

[ray gower]

The hanging ending is by no means a new device in books. It is used a a large number of books, but as it is still part of the English Syllabus in the UK my prime exhibit is Wyndham's Day of the Triffids, can there be a book that screams for a follow on more?

[popa]

Please pardon me for getting in late on this conversation, but it addresses something I'm concerned about. I've recently retired from a 26 year very time-consuming career with the thought of doing some writing, but to my astonishment I've discovered that modern stories tend to be all conversation and usually have very little description of anything. I'm loath to give up description for the sake of trendiness. Is this really what editor's want? Below is an example from one of my stories (the character is suffering from amnesia):

I turned and saw I was lying at water’s edge, an ocean from the salty smell of it. Looking inland I saw an empty beach dimly lit by a full moon, and beyond, the windows and store fronts of distant tall buildings. The faint murmur of mechanized civilization slipped out on a slight warm breeze.

[Tobytwo]

I take the point, although I would substitute "popular" and "literary" for "American" and "British". To my mind the problem is with percieved genre rather than location.

As far as (so-called, as I find the term patronising) literary fiction is concerned, there seems to be a trend among a few authors towards denser sentences, purple prose and semi-poetry for the sake of it, which at best often doesn't help the story and at worst is simply pretentious. I suspect there are a few writers who regard telling the story and getting the reader emotionally involved as nothing more than crass populism.

On the other end of the scale I have read popular novels that contained literally no similies or metaphors whatsoever, incorrect grammar and many other signs of bad, simplistic writing. I recently read a British crime novel that went much like this: "Jim saw Dan by the bar. Dan's smug face made him mad. Smashing Dan's face would make his day. He said 'Oi, Dan, I'm going to smash..." and so on. Spot has a ball, see Spot run.

What both of these approaches miss is that readers' aren't stupid: they don't come to books to gawp at how clever the author is, and nor do they need to be spoken to like kindergarten kids. Chandler and Lovecraft started off as pulp authors, after all, and neither of them is exactly lightweight. In the '30s, Gollancz was putting out serious political writing aimed specifically at the man in the street.

A critic called B.R. Myers raised this issue in a recent essay called A Reader's Manifesto, and while I don't agree with all his points, his main argument is worth thinking about. It's certainly worth a look.

[ctg]

I find this very intriguing as here we have tried to make people write short sentences in the action sequences and vary their sentences in the description. But what is interesting is that some of the modern British people have forgotten to use colons in their work. This becomes annoying when you read the prose aloud and the sentence is very, very long.

Another thing that I noticed is that sometimes modern writers introduce characters and make them to do things that really doesn't make any sense in the intelligent readers mind. There's no reason for their actions, and the poor reader cannot under why the characters are doing what they are doing.

[Dozmonic]

At work we have a book by James Patterson I believe it is, London Bridges. I thought I would try and read it, but I felt I was developing ADHD while doing so. Each chapter is, at most, 3-4 pages long. This is a book with a large typeface. There are around 120 chapters in the book. I tried for half an hour to read it before completely giving up, and thought I would check him out online to see if it was his first book or something. It wasn't, and it seems he sells pretty well. I can't understand that ;-)

Someone like Conn Iggulden seems to have a much better balance of sentence length. I read Lords of the Bow in two sittings, having fallen asleep partway through the first. It has been a while since a book has kept me that entertained.

[Peter Graham]

Interesting points, Ray!

I suspect our old enemy fashion lies at the root of it. British fiction (and I'm talking in terms of the British Isles here, before anyone jumps on the upcoming Joyce example as being from the pen of an author who isn't British) has always had a tendency to the verbose. As people have commented, Joyce liked his long sentences - a work colleague of mine once said to me "I tried reading Joyce, but couldn't get past the first sentence. Unfortunately, the first sentence didn't end until half way through page 254."

We have always rather liked the introspective and the descriptive over here. The Radio 4 book of the week is usually about either someone's difficult relationship with their father or about grinding poverty in the Lancashire mill towns. We aren't good at action heroes in our novels, which is a shame, because our oral tradition simply bristles with the sort of people who would show your average tough-talking, wise-cracking literary Noo Yoik cops to be the half-baked, dangling chumps that they truly are.

That said, I like our current drift towards dialogue-heavy novels. At least it allows for character development beyond the main protagonist, who is all too often a worthy but rather dull and delicate little flower, keenly aware of the injustice of the world, but too hopeless to do anthing about it (I blame Tess of the D'Urbervilles).

I believe that we can learn a lot from the rather refreshing, punchy style adopted by some North American authors, but I agree that some take it too far, presumably as a means of showing just how tough and gritty their main character and their bleak world is - it appears that there is no place for adjectival swan songs when you're staring at a dead hooker on the streets of south central LA!

But as a general rule, I'd say that an aspiring author would do well to keep it punchy and short during the action sequences, but give the reader more depth (be that via dialogue, introspection, description or a mix of all three) the rest of the time, so at least we care about what happens during those action sequences.

Bring back Henry Fielding, Mark Twain, George Macdonald Fraser and Charles Dickens!

Regards,

Peter

[Tobytwo]

If I remember rightly, Stephen King said in Danse Macabre that when British writing goes wrong, it becomes a droning sound. On the other hand, has anyone tried to read some of the most recent James Ellroy? It's so terse and abbreviated that it reads like someone making fun of James Ellroy.

CTG's point about characters not acting credibly is an interesting one. I think this comes from the writer thinking about the book as "art" rather than a realistic, functional story. No amount of "ah, but it's artistically valid/beautiful/raises interesting debate" can answer the person who says "This guy wouldn't act like that." You can't imagine, say, Steinbeck or Orwell doing that, no matter how didactic their writing might be.

[ctg]

Toby, JJ told me to read this guy because "he's the most fluent writer" JJ has seen in twenty years and top of everything that book received Arthur C. Clark award. Still there are scenes where the protagonist got stabbed and he goes to buy clothes in next turn from a very fancy shop. The shop owner didn't say anything. In the next turn, he's meeting people in a old derelict house where's a young girl allegately slides down elevator cable and her mom doesn't get worried over her action. I was like wtf...