Brief Aside: Why Do Renowned Authors Give Bad Writing Advice?
Consider this sentence:
He got up, went downstairs, and took a taxi.
Graham Greene, and English writer and journalist, once used this sentence as an example of how not to write. John Braine, a writing contemporary of Mr. Greene, suggested that the sentence might be improved by having the character leap from the chair, run downstairs, et cetera.
I don't understand how such renowned writers can make such absurd assertions. They're trying to suggest that this sentence is dull, but did it not occur to them that, in context, this kind of simple, unadorned phraseology might be the point? That it might be underscoring the mundanity of the action, or contrasting the mundanity with concurring events?
I'm not one of these guys who thinks that "art is subjective," and that you can never really know anything, but surely a literary elite could imagine at least one scenario in which a brief, syntactically fine sentence like the one above could rightly make its way into a novel.
And this isn’t the only reputed author who gives advice that he himself doesn’t follow. Consider Mark Twain, who said that adjectives should be avoided. Well, that’s interesting, I thought, adjectives are as important as strong verbs if you ask me. One of my favorite openings to any story, long before I appreciated writing on a sentence level, was an adjective-festooned recounting of a deer, sensing it’s being pursued, fleeing a predator. Its antlers get caught in some wind-blasted branches and, at the last moment before it’s set upon by the old wolf, Wolverine shows up and eviscerates the wolf and eats it raw. Good stuff.
Anyway, I figured I’d check out Tom Sawyer and see if ol’ Twain was followin’ that anti-adjective advice his own self. As it turns out, well, just look:
Well, isn’t that interesting? The old lady, small a thing, state pair. That’s three in one paragraph. The next page fairs no better under Mark Twain’s literary suggestion:
Not content with the number of adjectives, he even manages to make adjectives out of other parts of speech:
Adverbs: “She went to the open door.”
Nouns: “[She] looked out among the tomato vines. . . .”
Phrases: “She lifted up her voice at an angle calculated for distance.”
And, of course, adjectives: . . . high, gentle, small, old, slight.
How about that? Another author practicing in opposition to what he preaches. And why? He need only have taken the most cursory glance at his own authorial discography to realize that he was wrong about how to write. He himself was an authority, but he failed to use primary sources, contenting himself instead to use the secondary source of. . . also himself.
Give me a freakin’ break.
