Re: He shall Purify the sons of Eli...
Brendan McKennedy (suburbantourist@hotmail.com)
Sun, 08 Mar 1998 22:34:29 -0800 (PST)
>
> What most of us have to face are more our own limitations
> in clarifying our thoughts & then writing them down in good,
> clean prose - that more than the range of available formats
> in which the stuff can be laid out on the page.
>
> The charming, distinctive, even exotic, look that can be given
> to the most mundane material after a little experimentation with
> fonts, layouts, & so on, is something we all discover in the
> honeymoon of our first word-processor - or even, in the old days,
> typewriter.
>
> It certainly took me a while to realise that writing is less an act
> of seduction than a process of refining[...]
I agree with you entirely, but don't think that messing around with
conventions is the same as putting a pretty face on a bad or mediocre
piece of writing. Gimmicks are always gimmicks, but it is a writer's
job to find the Best way to tell a story. The reader will know if it's
a gimmick or not. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut didn't *need* to
write certain things in his own handwriting to conceal the ineptness of
his writing, but he did because it helped create the atmosphere of a
WWII prisoner camp outhouse where all the Americans puked like pigs
while the Brits and Germans looked on, disgusted.
Brendan
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