One particular joy I have as a writer and a reader is sentences that work, because they don\u2019t. Here\u2019s an example (from Dodie Smith again, but I\u2019ll stop banging on about her soon). The narrator is talking about her brother, Thomas, and observes that he can be both older than his years, and absolutely consistent with them, almost in the same minute. She exclaims:<\/p>\n
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Really, the puzzlingness of people!<\/em><\/p>\n Puzzlingness isn\u2019t a word and there are obvious, easy ways to rephrase things to avoid that clumsiness. Smith could have said, \u201cHow puzzling people can be!\u201d Or, \u201cWhat a puzzle some people are!\u201d Instead of just inventing a word \u2013 and a rather clumsy word at that \u2013 she could have used a regular noun or a regular adjective in precisely the regulation way.<\/p>\n So why didn\u2019t she?<\/p>\n Here\u2019s another little oddity, from Gillian Flynn \/ Gone Girl<\/em>:<\/p>\n So I know I am right not to settle, but it doesn\u2019t make me feel better as my friends pair off and \u2026 as I go to endless rounds of parties and bar nights, perfumed and sprayed and hopeful, rotating myself around the room like some dubious dessert.<\/em><\/p>\n In that case, the oddity isn\u2019t quite as blatant, but it\u2019s still there \u2013 lurking in the phrase rotating myself around the room.<\/p>\n Mostly, we use the word rotate intransitively \u2013 that is, without a direct object. (\u201cThe spindle rotated furiously \u2026\u201d). The most common transitive equivalent is the verb, to turn. (\u201cI turned the wheel \u2026\u201d)<\/p>\n And, OK, in this snippet, it\u2019s clear we want the word rotating not the word turning, but we surely don\u2019t need the word myself. Why doesn\u2019t Flynn just write: \u201crotating around the room like some dubious dessert\u201d? The meaning of that is totally clear. It avoids the awkward \u201crotating myself\u201d construction. It just works.<\/p>\n So why didn\u2019t she write that? She\u2019s (by a mile) the best crime writer of her generation, so she presumably had the ability to find the easy, natural, grammatically unobjectionable option.<\/p>\n While you consider that, I\u2019ll offer you one further example from another (less classy) crime writer. Here\u2019s my very own Fiona character talking about a \u201cWorld\u2019s Best Mum\u201d silver cup that her father has given her mother, and then placed on a shelf above the kitchen door:<\/p>\n On the way through into the kitchen, we had to stop to admire the \u2018World\u2019s Best Mum\u2019 trophy, which now looms over the kitchen door like something about to collapse.<\/em><\/p>\n There\u2019s no grammatical problem there, as such, but the phrase that ends the sentence (\u201clike something about to collapse\u201d) feels almost like a placeholder, just there to fill space until I actually find the image I was after (\u201ca landslip waiting to fall\u201d, for example.)<\/p>\n \u00a0And look \u2013 none of these three writers, myself included \u2013 are dummies. We put words on a page because we think they\u2019re the right words. I don\u2019t know about Gillian Flynn\u2019s creative process, but Dodie Smith spent more than two years painfully editing and re-editing I Capture The Castle<\/em>, so I\u2019m pretty damn sure she didn\u2019t write puzzlingness just because she was in a rush and couldn\u2019t be bothered to retype.<\/p>\n So what\u2019s going on?<\/p>\n I hope you sense the answer already.<\/p>\n In Dodie\u2019s Smith\u2019s case, she wanted to achieve a sense of how knotty and intractable it is to understand others. She could have delivered that thought via a fluidly grammatical sentence \u2013 but then the sentence itself wouldn\u2019t have been knotty and intractable. So she placed a knobbly, awkward block right at the heart of the sentence: There! People are knotty and awkward, just like this word.<\/p>\n With Flynn, the same thing.<\/p>\n Amy, the narrator of that little quote, doesn\u2019t go to those parties with the ease of someone wholly comfortable in her surroundings. On the contrary, she approaches those parties self-consciously, as though clumsily executing a plan in which she does not fully believe.<\/p>\n And how to achieve that sense of awkward self-manipulation? Why, how about using a verb\/noun pair that embodies that awkward manipulation: rotating myself around the room. It sounds as though she\u2019s heaving some recalcitrant piece of machinery around, not her own beautiful self.<\/p>\n It\u2019s that phrase that really gives the sentence its coherence and its wit. She starts out perfumed and sprayed and hopeful \u2013 but hauls herself around like a clunky machine part \u2013 and ends up as popular and wanted as a \u201cdubious dessert\u201d. It\u2019s the bit in the middle that lends utter credibility to the transition from perfumed to dubious.<\/p>\n Crucially, it\u2019s also the bit that identifies where the blame lies. So it\u2019s not the other party-goers who are at fault for being too aloof or too drunk or too whatever. It\u2019s her own damn fault, because she wields herself like a lump of machinery, instead of just being a wonderful human. The grammatical faux pas manages to identify precisely where and why the party-experience is going wrong.<\/p>\n Same thing with the \u201cthing about to collapse\u201d phrase. Fiona wants to suggest that the shelf is rickety \u2013 and, more than that, she wants to convey that the whole idea of giving a fun trophy to her mother was a terrible one in the first place. And what better way to convey a ramshackle bad idea, than using a clumsily ramshackle and provisional-seeming phrase to end the sentence?<\/p>\n Boom!<\/p>\n Building it bad to build it right.<\/strong><\/p>\n As I say, I have a stupidly fond spot for anything like that. I actually prefer a prose style that takes the risk of messiness. It feels more alive and more creative, though I acknowledge that\u2019s a matter of taste, not an Ultimate Truth.<\/p>\n Although \u201cbuilding bad\u201d as a technique will tend to work only when you are dealing with something that is bad \/ awkward \/ puzzling \/ self-conscious \/ ramshackle \u2013 those things have a billion different shades of use, which means a billion different ways to express yourself, gloriously well through glorious badness.<\/p>\n And you? If you have an example of \u201cbuilding bad to build it right\u201d from your own work, then drop your examples into the comments below. I\u2019m agog.<\/p>\n And Britain needs gogs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One particular joy I have as a writer and a reader is sentences that work, because they don\u2019t. Here\u2019s an example (from Dodie Smith again, but I\u2019ll stop banging on about her soon). The narrator is talking about her brother, Thomas, and observes that he can be both older than his years, and absolutely consistent<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":6456,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-harrys-friday-email"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n