I’m sometimes amused by submissions we receive at Orca—or maybe the word is bemused—in which it’s clear the writer is being deliberately pretentious in an effort to impress our readers.
“Merton was big and heavy, a ponderous rhinoceros of a man, who moved like a bulldozer at a construction site.”[1]
But mostly, these passages have the opposite effect. This kind of overdone prose colors the writing with phoniness. It makes it sound artificial, cartoonish, self-absorbed, unnecessarily adorning something that’s supposed to communicate its value unadorned—like the gold-plated toilet in Donald Trump’s penthouse. It is motivated, often, by ego. But I think there’s another factor at play, one that causes even sincere writers to wander into the meadow of purple prose. (Yes, like that.)
When we first learned about the written word—in school, from our parents, in our own explorations—it was a new and wondrous experience. Imagine, some stranger had used the words we were just learning to tell a story, a thing that somehow created in our minds images of people and places maybe far away, acting in events we could only see in our heads. And as we continued to encounter more complex texts, filled with words we did not always understand, the mystique of writing grew. How awesome it must be to be able to do that.
But we were children then, naïve and impressionable. Unfortunately some emerging writers appear to have retained the idea that good writing is supposed to sound mysterious and incomprehensible. If the writing sounds dense it must be smart. And they would like to sound smart, as opposed to stupid, which is not good for a writer. So they try to pump up their prose with flowery, overwritten language that sounds “literary” without actually being literary.
When critiqued they may point to successful writers who use longer words and complex constructions, but what they don’t understand is that those writers use those words and techniques because it is natural for them to do so; they understand both the meaning and nuance of the words they choose. They’ve spent years working on their craft, and when they use a big word it is the right word to use, and when they employ a complex sentence they have a certain idea they wish to communicate, and to write it another way would not be as effective.
I recently re-read one of my favorite books, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of essays by Joan Didion. There are many more aspects of her genius than I can cover here, but one of them is the exactness of her writing. She used lots of big words because those were the words that communicated exactly what she wished to say. Here’s a sample, writing about her home in the Sacramento Valley: “Many people in the East…have been to Los Angeles or San Francisco, have driven through a giant redwood and have seen the Pacific glazed by the afternoon sun off Big Sur, and they naturally tend to believe that they have in fact been to California. They have not been, and they probably never will be, for it is a longer and in many ways a more difficult trip than they might want to undertake, one of those trips on which the destination flickers chimerically on the horizon, ever receding, ever diminishing.” Notice the inventiveness, joined with the straightforward imagery of her reportage, in long sentences that stress the point she is making. It is complex, but clear. This creates a tension in the writing that transcends the vague immaturity of the example at the top.
Throughout much of human history, writing was deliberately intended to sound obscure and distant, as though delivered from an intelligence far superior to ours. People spoke in their local vernacular, but writers sometimes used archaic, pompous language—often in Latin or Greek—as evidence they were smarter than the average person, and by extension, to keep the average person from trying to achieve the prestige and power they had. (Like the Catholic Church then; like lawyers today.)
It wasn’t until the late 13th century that a movement began in Florence to write in the people’s language. It culminated with Dante Alighieri’s writing of La Comedia Divina (The Divine Comedy), which became wildly popular in its own time and was one of the key events of the beginning of the European Renaissance, an era marked by a radical shift in the way artists and people understood their world. It was writing that anyone who could read could appreciate. It abandoned the bombastic obfuscation (like this!) of previous forms and was focused on being meaningful and relatable.
Since then much published writing has been focused on communicating the story over the writer. Yes, there are many writers who adhere to the other, more pompous way, and they have and probably will always have an audience (but not at Orca). And there are still some emerging writers more interested in promoting themselves instead of the story they are telling. (I imagine they dream of publishing books that have their name printed larger than the title). They communicate too, but what they’re communicating is their own overblown sense of self-worth. I doubt they can change.
But I’m speaking to the others who still have that childhood impression nagging them as they write: if I use a three-syllable word instead of a two-syllable one, my writing will sound more intelligent.
Literary is not about the length of words and sentences, and not about how many adjectives a writer can string together. It’s not about, “how many different ways can I say this?” Think of literary writing as going deep, not wide. It’s writing with focus and purpose, drilling down to the smallest meaningful detail, not a hazy view of some far-off horizon. Literary goes below the surface of the writing into character and meaning. Make sure the big word is the right word. Make sure the long sentence says something worth saying. Better to remember the advice of Elmore Leonard, who said, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
– Joe Ponepinto
[1] The mixed simile alone is killing it. BTW, examples of writing mistakes are always made up. I’d never use anyone’s real writing.
Photo by Thomas William on Unsplash (screen text added by Orca)