trends in writing
Lately, I’ve been reading Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, snickering from time to time about expressions like “I ejaculated from the depths of my heart”, weird story composition and so on. There’s a certain nasty pleasure in reading a book way more popular (and way better, but that’s conveniently forgotten) than whatever you’re writing, and noting various writing “mistakes”. It makes one feel, well, better.
However, I stopped myself at the thought that–hello, I’m reading this book despite the vocabulary that makes me feel like an illiterate monkey, despite that I’ve read and re-read those stories before, and despite the hopelessly outdated style. And I love these stories.
So now I’m thinking: there are trends that are taking place at this moment (“ejaculating” your words is stupid; action beats are cool; showing is great; telling sucks; passive voice shouldn’t be used and ditto for adverbs), and in a hundred or even fifty years those years these trends might very well be gone. In fifty years, people will read currently popular books and snicker about the lack of adverbs, overblown verbs and active voice overuse, and the horrible tendency to obsessively “show” everything instead of emphatically telling. And why didn’t those people use omniscient point of view when it’s clearly the best choice for majority of books?
There, of course, isn’t anything we can do about this now–as long as our reader demand what they demand, it’s reasonable to try to stick to these trends if we wish to get our work out of the door.
However, for writers who don’t see publication, recognition etc. as their goals (I tend to think there are more writers like that than we are aware of–they are considerably less outspoken than publication-oriented writers), these trends are not essential. Also, this is a small consolation for writers who tend to break the rules from time to time. For example, I am writing a fantasy novel in present tense right now. I realize that this is a kiss of death publication-wise (since genre readers don’t enjoy this kind of “experimental” writing), but this is how the novel works for me and I don’t see any rational grounds for writing a novel in past tense just because it is a genre novel.
If you, just like me, find some trend to be useless in terms of your story, well, you can always remind yourself that in fifty or hundred years that probably won’t matter.
