No longer so, Orson?

Orson Scott Card, the author of Ender's Game, has a nice series of articles on writing based on correspondence and questions from writing classes he has occasionally taught. The newest is now over ten years old, and the advice on publishing is thus out of date, but any blog-readers who are interested in writing will still find helpful the thoughts of a successful author (and, they say, an even better teacher of writing).

One of his older posts gives me pause, however. In an essay on "rhetoric and style" from 1998, Card attacks the idea, too common (in his judgment, anyway) in creative writing programs, that an author needs to develop a distinctive, individual style. That an author will have his own style is, Card says, an inevitability, but there is no point in belaboring it; rather, the author should seek to tell the story he needs to tell. By focusing on the story itself, not on the language in which it is being told, the author will arrive at real clarity, and good style, too.

Anyone who has read overwrought, self-consciously "literary" writing will know exactly what Card means, and most will probably agree with his judgment (I certainly do). However, I wonder if Card isn't overlooking something, or rather, whether the rise of self-publishing hasn't changed the advice one might want to give.

"Vow" is also Latin: an addendum on register

In a recent re-post from her old blog, Ella gives a quotation from The Silmarillion as an example of grand, yet simple diction. She notes that Tolkien uses only a few Latinate words: "'terrible', 'mountain', 'pursue', 'vengeance', 'possession'". However, there is at least one other: "vow," which is ultimately derived, through medieval French, from the Latin votum (of much the same meaning as the English derivative, though it can also denote the thing for which a vow is offered). The reason, I imagine, why she overlooked the word is that it feels so very Anglo-Saxon: it is short, has a w (not a very Latinate letter), and has been a part of ordinary English diction for a very long time.

Register, Part II

Adapted from a post from 2014 on the NaNoWriMo Fantasy forum, in response to a writer who requested tips for 'developing a good fantasy voice' for high fantasy.

A fantasy story of the kind that you describe will have two different categories of voice, the first of which is the speech patterns of the characters.  These should naturally vary, not only from character to character, but also by context.

Register, Part I

First posted in 2013 on the NaNoWriMo Plot Doctoring Forum, in response to a writer who wondered what would happen if he wrote in a 'casual' style except with 'somewhat archaic and uncommon' adverbs, such as 'peradventure', 'hitherto', and 'forasmuch'.

The main problem I foresee is not one of comprehension but one of register. For anyone unfamiliar with register, I will explain, as well as I can:

Register might be described as the level of formality and technicality of a piece of writing. For example, in English, 'The king hired an assassin to kill his rival' is probably medium-register. If he hired a 'hit-man' to 'bump him off', that's fairly low register; if it were the 'head of state' trying to 'eliminate his competitor', that would be slightly higher but more technical-sounding; and so forth. In other words, register is the 'feel' of a passage. It's influenced not only by vocabulary but also by sentence length and structure and word-order.