Florid: In Defense of Flowery Language

As a writer or would-be writer perusing the internet, you are likely to come across articles that recommend writing one way or the other.  Many of these articles belong to the “pare it down” camp, as if writing were like peeling potatoes.  The trick here is to remove all the skin, so you have a perfectly white, unblemished potato.  The problem is, I like the skin.

One common complaint is that a writer’s work is full of flowery language.  Flowery language is defined, presumably, as any extra words or description which does not add to the overall sense of the piece.  If the writer is not carrying you on a speed train journey from point A to point B, he is, by definition, not doing his job well.

Call me old school.  I believe a writer can insert “unnecessary” description into a piece and yet still do his job well.  I know this is sacrilege, and many who make their living as editors may disagree vociferously, but there it is.  I prefer a piece with too many notes, rather than too few.

Vegetable vs. Pleasure Gardens

I like to compare writing with gardening.  There are as many schools of thought about gardening as there are about writing books, but the advice to be parsimonious with your words seems to echo the advice given to vegetable gardeners. 

In vegetable gardening we care about yield.  We care about abundance and bang for the buck.  Input leads to output. The point is to put fewer inputs in and get more output out.  Price per unit is the yardstick we use. 

Of course, there are many creative vegetable gardeners out there, who care about experimentation with exotic vegetables, or nutritive value, or who include certain plants purely for aesthetic or historical reasons.  But generally, a vegetable garden is an exercise in practicality.  The purpose is to produce vegetables: as many as possible, as efficiently as possible, at an acceptable level of quality. 

People were told to plant their own home vegetable gardens during World War II because vegetables were scarce, and the farmers’ produce was needed, to be sent to the troops.  We no longer suffer from such rationing, but the rationale seems to have stuck.  A garden that produces a lot of vegetables at a minimal cost is today’s Victory Garden.

Good, abundant fiction, fiction that does not skimp on words or excise all superfluous detail, in service to the sense of the piece, reminds me instead, of a flower garden. And not just any flower garden. 

A cut flower garden, for example, is meant to serve the needs of florists or those demanding bouquets on a regular basis.  Its purpose is the same as that of any agricultural endeavor: production. Although, of course, its output may have the added bounty of being beautiful.

No, what I am talking about is a pleasure garden.  Think Versailles.  Think the Biltmore.  A garden meant to be walked in and enjoyed as a respite from–whatever you need a respite from.

A pleasure garden’s value is not measured in price per unit.  Its value is in the experience, in immersing ourselves in it.  It entertains us, like a trip to a theme park.  It relaxes us, like a trip to a spa.  It injects novelty into our lives, through our eyes and other senses.  It refreshes us, as a break from the humdrum of ordinary life. 

This value cannot be measured in terms of dollars and cents.  It is incalculable and immortal.  We carry the experience with us, ever after, in the form of memories.

Pared Within an Inch of Its Life

Such is the power of a good meaty book.  It may be all the rage to remove adjectives, prepositions, description, and detail from modern manuscripts, but does that trend really help us, if, although we can read faster, and log more finished books, none of them are memorable?

I recently read two very different books.  One made the attempt, at least, to put me in the world of the book.  Afterwards, I felt as if I had been somewhere new.  The other book just sped from scene to scene, filling pages with outrageousness, touching familiar notes briefly, but focusing on action to the exclusion of all else.  Sure, it would have been possible to read the second book quickly.  What a wild rideit would have been! It was so wild, in fact, that I had to get off.  I felt hyperactive, overstimulated.  And a bit annoyed.

This is the difference between an amusement park and a pleasure garden.

Slow down, I wanted to say.  Take your time. 

Perhaps the books that I like, or have liked over the years, are from a time, with more time.  Novels must have filled a need, after all.  What did people do, years ago, when it was dark outside?  No computers, no cell phone, no TV?  The large family sizes give us one clue.  Perhaps they also slept more.  But chances are, books helped fill that space, at least for the literate few. 

Perhaps Books held more cachet, back in a time when fewer people could read.  Perhaps it was a status thing.  Perhaps the cost of printing books prevented access by the masses, and that alone increased any individual book’s value, making it a mark of prestige, if you owned it.  Perhaps education in general was more rare and more costly, and therefore valued more highly, and nurtured assiduously through constant tending. That is, by reading.

It is strange to me, that now that so many people can read, the sophistication of language used in texts seems to be uniformly down.  The message seems to be, if you can’t reach everyone, don’t bother writing. 

It is the opposite of the Schiller quote I love, here roughly translated by me:

Kannst Du nicht allen gefallen durch deine Tat und dein Kunstwerk, Mach’ es wenigen recht; vielen gefallen ist schlimm.

(If you can’t please the many with your work and art, please only a few.  Pleasing the many is evil.)

Friedrich von Schiller

Trying to Remain Relevant

This modern dumbing down, or oversimplification of language in books finds parallels in many walks of life.  Would you rather eat a five-course gourmet meal, or fast food?   The latter is cheap and quick and practical, but not especially nutritious or delicious.  Transportation moves more quickly now, as well.  Would you prefer to get there in an hour on the highway, or two on the backroads?  One is clearly more efficient. But think, what it sacrifices, in terms of variety. In terms of whole communities, neglected and undiscovered.

We live in an era in which we cannot help but wonder, whether books themselves have a shelf life?  So many in their online habits seem to prefer their “content” (the most despicable word in the English language at the moment, in my opinion) in video format, as opposed to the less grabby written or spoken word.  Search engines have had to transform to account for this shift. 

Is it just ease of use?  Is it because some people, myself included, prefer to read from a static, paper page, rather than from a movable, changeable light screen? I cannot answer that question, any more than I can put together and understand the pile of jigsaw pieces that make up the fragmented and punishing world of modern publishing.

Too Easy

My point is–as I slowly inch closer to the tail end of this absurdly detailed, unnecessarily superfluous and flowery essay–that we have lost something in trying to be too easy, too direct. 

My husband, the engineer, moans when he sees my emails.  He would prefer a single-sentence memo, or better, a phone call.  I had to abandon editing his master’s thesis, because I was editing it for how the language sounded.  He was writing to make a point.  He showed me a few papers published in engineering journals, and suddenly, I got it.  His was no better and no worse than those papers.  This was the writing style the industry expected.  My red pen was of absolutely no use.

It worries me, that in our own era, we are making similar allowances for writing style, to the detriment of the writing industry and of the English language.  Our language is, after all, at least in part, a product of that industry.

My point is, don’t stop using words, or using words in a certain way that fits your purpose, just because those words or that usage are not popular.

If reading were transportation, perhaps we would focus on getting from point A to point B in the quickest manner possible.  Streamlining in design has been popular most of my lifetime. Sixties and seventies furniture and Mid-Century Modern design has had a resurgence with the young.  It’s all about clarity, about discouraging detail.  Much like the writing mantras of today.

Rigid Rules

I recently read a headline that said that certain parts of speech should not appear at the beginning of sentences. The headline then went on to use the wrong tense, which, to me, somewhat compromised the credibility of the piece.   

I remember having the hardest time in German with word order. There was the basic moving around of subject and verb as we do with questions, but then there were also these “time, place and manner” restrictions. Modifying clauses of this type had to be put in the sentence just so, placed always in a certain order. And I always got it wrong.

When I got to law school, this same trio, time, place and manner, referred to the reasonableness of restrictions on free speech in public places.  These three elements alone could be controlled by government regulation.  The content of the speech could not.

In each of these instances, someone is telling us to do things in a certain way. Most Americans I know have a tendency to resist being told what to do.

Law can be very rigid.  German can be rigid. The English language, I would argue is not so rigid as some would claim. Often touted rules have less to do with how the language works, than with what is, at that moment, the prevailing consensus of opinion.

Rigid rules beyond basic syntax are the bane of writing well.  If you speak or write at a high level, with a decent command of the language, you will hear your errors.  You will have developed a trained ear, like a musician, and you will be able to spot the false notes. 

When people say beware this or that in writing–beware the passive voice, beware adverbs or prepositions or overly flowery language–it sounds like a warning.  There’s a bear in them thar woods, and you’d better stay away.

But really, the warning amounts to this:  If you do happen to go into the woods and you do happen to come upon a bear, you’d better know what to do.  Otherwise, things may go sideways.

Some parts of writing can be tricky and can go horribly wrong.  That does not mean that you should never, for example, use two “had”s together, in a single sentence.  One “had” may get the point across, in a fuzzy, general way.  True.  But if it’s not right, it’s not right.  Being a writer involves, above all, a stubborn commitment to getting it right.

For a caution to take extremes with a grain of salt, read In Defense of Moderation. For a poem on how scarce materials affected modern construction read Post-Modern.