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divergence
Sep. 20th, 2016 01:01 pmOver on my more academic/public-facing blog I recently wrote about writing fiction vs. writing nonfiction. I've been ruminating on an interesting difference lately.
One of the things I struggle with in my academic prose is to simply say what I want to say, and not try to dress it up fancy or make it complex. JUST SAY WHAT YOU'RE TRYING TO SAY! Sometimes it takes two or three or four parings down of extraneous words until I get rid of all the fluff, and just make a simple statement.
On the other hand, when writing fiction, what I've been finding lately is that I have to stop myself from simply saying what I want the reader to know -- it's the whole "show, don't tell" advice (advice which has been in the forefront of my mind for the last year or so because I am consistently telling Gwen "tell me, don't show me", in an attempt to get her to describe things to me rather than make me look up from what I'd doing to see yet another X). I will write what I want the reader to know, and then delete the final clause, the explanatory clause, and see if what is left, just the action, is enough to get the point across.
It's an interesting divergence.
One of the things I struggle with in my academic prose is to simply say what I want to say, and not try to dress it up fancy or make it complex. JUST SAY WHAT YOU'RE TRYING TO SAY! Sometimes it takes two or three or four parings down of extraneous words until I get rid of all the fluff, and just make a simple statement.
On the other hand, when writing fiction, what I've been finding lately is that I have to stop myself from simply saying what I want the reader to know -- it's the whole "show, don't tell" advice (advice which has been in the forefront of my mind for the last year or so because I am consistently telling Gwen "tell me, don't show me", in an attempt to get her to describe things to me rather than make me look up from what I'd doing to see yet another X). I will write what I want the reader to know, and then delete the final clause, the explanatory clause, and see if what is left, just the action, is enough to get the point across.
It's an interesting divergence.
