Strongly agree. Of course editing is a good discipline, but sometimes a writer chooses to use two words instead of one for sound stylistic and aesthetic reasons. I love words, I love language, and I don’t regard them as simply a means of conveying information about plot and characters. (I do love Hemingway, as it goes, but I’m glad not everyone wrote like him and that writers like Dickens and Wilde and Fitzgerald and Greene and Wodehouse and Amis, K., and Amis, M., and Easton Ellis wrote their way.)
Some of this comes out of inherited machismo — of being influenced, and perhaps oppressed, and perhaps even killed off, by the lineage of Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver/Gordon Lish, Elmore Leonard, Chuck Palahniuk.
Finally someone says it! Someone please save us from every creative writing course using Hemingway's method as the barameter for good fiction.
In which Toby Litt’s words arrive in my inbox and my brain at the precise point in time I needed them. Many thanks
Good to see some scepticism about the received wisdom of cutting back.
Strongly agree. Of course editing is a good discipline, but sometimes a writer chooses to use two words instead of one for sound stylistic and aesthetic reasons. I love words, I love language, and I don’t regard them as simply a means of conveying information about plot and characters. (I do love Hemingway, as it goes, but I’m glad not everyone wrote like him and that writers like Dickens and Wilde and Fitzgerald and Greene and Wodehouse and Amis, K., and Amis, M., and Easton Ellis wrote their way.)
Some of this comes out of inherited machismo — of being influenced, and perhaps oppressed, and perhaps even killed off, by the lineage of Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver/Gordon Lish, Elmore Leonard, Chuck Palahniuk.
Finally someone says it! Someone please save us from every creative writing course using Hemingway's method as the barameter for good fiction.
Thank you!