Lately, I've proofread some friends' articles, native and not, on political and technical matters. In no case, did I only guide them to my preferred style (poetic diction, preferring verbs over nouns, participles over finite verbs, archaicizing, Germanic purist including V2, no hyphens) and rather enjoyed seeing, sampling (and rejecting) their distinct tastes. I once wanted to ask a friend who wields fiery invectives to liven up my (technical opinion) prose, but realized his style was ill-suited to sewing my bullet points together.
What is beautiful literature to you? Or clear and precise technical style? What do you just hate? Most importantly, what do you aim for and avoid when writing yourself?
I'm curious for opinions on all languages (even programming or e.g. programming code comment style) but naturally English is our community's shared tongue.
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Notes -
It's a complicated question. While I can determine what kind of writing is bad, I have little experience producing good writing. I don't find writing easy, so I haven't been able to make myself sit down and write something at least the size of a short story since I was a teen.
But perhaps if I invert everything I don't like about fiction, I'll be able to show what writing I consider good. Let's alliteratively name these aspects plot, pacing and palatability.
The plot is the harmonious interaction of three conflicting ideas:
Take Noble House by James Clavell as an example. The protagonist has an almost herculean list of tasks to solve and watching him come out on top is the principal appeal of the novel. Among other problems, his company urgently needs a line of credit and his daughter has a loser boyfriend. He strikes a deal with an American bank that needs a foot in the door in Hong Kong and when he notices the banker catching the eye of his daughter, he asks her to give him a lift. The only problem is that the banker appears at his doorstep out of the blue. This fits the goals of the author and doesn't violate the rules of the world he's writing about. Why shouldn't a foreign bank capitalize on the vulnerable financial position of a major company in a mutually beneficial way? But it still violates the rules of drama.
The pacing is the amount of prose it takes to get from the one scene to the next. It's a flexible quality: shorter narrative forms require faster pacing, and the same form can be faster or slower-paced. But there's always a limit to how much you can stretch or compress a story: children usually write at a breakneck pace, web serials are too long for me to enjoy.
The palatability is the textural quality of the prose itself. Douglas Coupland has extremely palatable prose. Some of his novels have meager plots, but the prose is so good the books just slide down your throat. Stieg Larsson has terrible prose. His first novel had a good editor, but the second one, published posthumously, probably didn't, and I found it extremely uncomfortable to get through. However, I do not have enough experience to dissect and analyze this quality.
...and I'm off to the gym without editing this or writing a conclusion.
It’s funny you mention that, I just recently watched the miniseries adaptation with Pierce Brosnan. The TV version is pure 80s soap opera cheese, but also a very interesting look at a time and place that no longer exist.
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