I took two fiction writing courses while in college as electives. To be honest, a lot of my college courses fell into the “elective” category. The sage advice I got from mom and dad was “You can study whatever you want. You’re going to college for your MRS. Degree.”
They told my brother that he should enroll in Pre-Med.
On the positive side of my parents advice, I took classes in whatever interested me. From ballet, to writing and drama, with a mind’s eye out for credits I needed to graduate — science courses like Botany, Astronomy plus math.
I loved my children’s lit class. I struggled more with literary fiction. I enjoyed it just as much and worked on a story based on my experiences working part-time in a hotel restaurant with a creepy customer who was a stalker. My professor didn’t see much merit in my writing style. He said my sentences and paragraphs were too concise. He gave me suggestions of authors to read including William Faulkner.
Have your read Faulkner?
In describing the writing process for his work, “The Sound and the Fury,” Faulkner said, “One day I seemed to shut the door between me and all publisher’s addresses and book lists. I said to myself, ‘Now I can write.'” After its completion, Faulkner insisted that Wasson, his literary agent, not do any editing or add any punctuation for clarity.
I wasn’t a big Faulkner fan. I told my literary fiction professor that I was graduating as an editorial journalism major.
“That makes sense,” he said. But he encouraged me to expand my writing style for his class.
In the old format of writing for newspapers — before websites and blogs — the goal was to use as little space as possible, write clearly and and get important information up front. As it’s said in Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, “Omit needless words.”
In a 1957 New Yorker column, writer E.B. White (Cornell Class of 1921) praised “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr., his former Cornell English professor, as “an attempt to cut the vast tangle of English rhetoric down to size and write its rules and principles on the head of a pin.”
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2009/03/omit-needless-words-elements-style-turns-50
Here’s another famous quote from “Elements of Style:”
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
― William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style
I believe there are different styles of writing used for different formats and purposes. I’m trying to expand my sentences and paragraphs a bit for my NaNoWriMo manuscript that I wrote about HERE. But, then I think with our micro-attention spans, maybe short chapters with shorter sentences works in today’s world.
How would you describe your style of writing?
Have you used Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style?“
