A friend was recently assigned to write about her weaknesses as a writer. This prompted me to analyze my own weaknesses and where I can improve:
Of all my foibles as a writer, perhaps the one that stands most prominent is my penchant for brevity. I cannot, despite all the force of my will straining behind such action, compose a stylized stanza when a single syllable will do. Such brevity, considered by society to be an asset when uttered aloud in polite company at formal cocktail parties, prevents a writer from garnering the accolades that his ideas may be worthy of. “War and Peace”, a fine novel, to be sure, finds fame today based solely on the number of pages a reader will find within its covers. Would such a book be as popular were it disassembled to fundamental parts and regurgitated to the audience in a condensed version of its former self? I think not. Proust, while writing “Swann’s Way” found his inclination to produce run-on metaphors to be an asset when looking for publishers. We monosyllabic writers face a daunting task when searching for an audience for our ideas as publishers are less inclined to reward those who are more economical in word choice. Though brevity can be an obstacle to finding an audience for significant ideas, it should not be so. As Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “Shorter does not mean less important.” (If he didn’t say that, he sure thought it. He had a complex named after him that shows he felt that way.)
Of all my foibles as a writer, perhaps the one that stands most prominent is my penchant for brevity. I cannot, despite all the force of my will straining behind such action, compose a stylized stanza when a single syllable will do. Such brevity, considered by society to be an asset when uttered aloud in polite company at formal cocktail parties, prevents a writer from garnering the accolades that his ideas may be worthy of. “War and Peace”, a fine novel, to be sure, finds fame today based solely on the number of pages a reader will find within its covers. Would such a book be as popular were it disassembled to fundamental parts and regurgitated to the audience in a condensed version of its former self? I think not. Proust, while writing “Swann’s Way” found his inclination to produce run-on metaphors to be an asset when looking for publishers. We monosyllabic writers face a daunting task when searching for an audience for our ideas as publishers are less inclined to reward those who are more economical in word choice. Though brevity can be an obstacle to finding an audience for significant ideas, it should not be so. As Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “Shorter does not mean less important.” (If he didn’t say that, he sure thought it. He had a complex named after him that shows he felt that way.)
Aside from brevity, I also have a weakness for
alliteration. Something about the
stylized sounds of smooth syllables stuttered from strained tongue, which adds
an air of authority to any paper.
Actually, I really do like alliteration. It’s much better than onomatopoeia, though 8 year-old me
would strongly disagree with that assessment. Perhaps if there were a way to combine the two literary
devices, there would be a compromise there that we both could agree on. “The cacophony of cookware cascaded
down the causeway, CLANG, CRASH, KABOOM!”
I think that’s a sentence we all can be proud of.
Perhaps my greatest
strength as a writer is my ability to ignore negative feedback. Through my years of writing, I have had
tough critics. My critics, by and large, are my
professors, though that might be due to my poor prose and inability to publish. There are those
who vehemently disagree with my use of passive voice, though Shakespeare and
Thomas Jefferson made quite a career employing such devices. There are those that dislike my use of
the first person. But would the
opening line in “Moby Dick” have carried as much weight if it were “Call him Ishmael”? I have learned that my critics really
have no room to criticize. They
themselves have, at best, merely written an article or two for some scholarly
magazine that no one reads, at worst, received a useless degree from some
liberal arts college. They criticize because that’s what they believe teaching is. That being said, my writing is truly terrible. But for that, I can blame my critics and their inability to get through to me.
