I can't stop listening to Sage Francis.

I think I'm extra grumpy today, or just lack patience thanks to my excessive coffee drinking this morning. (Both, probably.) Basically, you can't say I didn't warn you.

When I was reading Morine's article "Ideas in Creative Writing," I couldn't stop thinking about Dickens. I HATE Dickens. I only ever managed to make it through Hard Times (and only then because I had to for class) and it was full of 'static characters' (or characters that had a complete flip in personality FOR NO REASON). I completely agree that "an entire cast of these cutouts will render any appeal to emotion or to any level of gravitas completely useless." However, two of my college English professors must not agree, because I had to read it for both their classes. Despite my hatred, even I have to acknowledge how firmly entrenched he is in literary canon... in direct contrast to Morien's point. I understand that he’s trying to give general help, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there's no accounting for taste. Novels chock-full of stock characters can do well, and even having lasting, uhh, ‘merit.’


In Tolbert’s “Getting Started Writing Science Fiction” just made me think of how much I love Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein and not much else. Oh, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is pretty awesome, too. TANSTAAFL.

And then I got to “Descriptive Writing” by Rita Putatunda... I understand her point that the writer should make the language as descriptive as possible. But my favorite short story is by Hemingway - “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” I suppose you could argue that it’s written using pretty much only descriptive writing, but Hemingway made a point of cutting out any unnecessary words. There were no “nuanced interpretations” to it. We don’t know the color or size (or, hell, the smell) of the shoes. Through omitting these things, Hemingway is able to focus more on the emotion behind the story. AND a pet peeve of mine is the use of a thesaurus. While a thesaurus can usually list that follow a general concept, they are not all interchangeable. Through constant misuse words begin to lose their ‘nuanced’ meaning, and pick up one that’s more general. Although Putatunda doesn’t exactly encourage thesaurus use, I feel like she omits the importance of looking at the actually meaning of a word - it seems more important to her that it’s a descriptive word, not that it’s the correct descriptive word.

*sigh*