In Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin mentions one of the exercises she has used most with her creative writing students, the so-called chastity exercise. To avoid overloaded and bombastic styles, she asks that an entire page of prose be written without adjectives or adverbs. It's complicated, she tells us, because even words as basic as “just” or “then” are adverbial, so sometimes it's not possible to eliminate them all. But surely you can remove all the adverbs ending in “mind” and the pompous adjectives. In the end, the result is a very chaste and very plain prose text. And because you have put all your energies into the verbs and nouns, it is stronger and richer.
Conspicuous and elaborate styles abound, it is true, and chastity would not hurt at all for a few. Where does this false idea come from that to write well you have to overload the text? It is evident that, when this happens, the writer is more concerned with demonstrating how well he writes and the number of adjectives he uses than with conveying a specific idea or emotion. He wants to impress and fears he won't be able to do so if he doesn't use inflated language. And he does not fail: he who writes this way is not in the least interested in hearing that he has enough words to spare. He is happy with his fatness and takes offense at the suggestion of a diet.
And what about oral language? Contrast this “obesity” in written expression with the current verbal poverty, especially among young people. Generalizing is never fair, as always, there are exceptions, but I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that sometimes it's truly terrifying to listen to young people's conversations. I am sitting in the cafeteria of a Faculty of Letters in Madrid. Next to me, there are some students talking and I listen. “Like, man,” one of the young women begins, “I'm amazed that Marta caught Chema. Like, I don't understand how that guy rents you. He is ugly mallet.” To which her friend replies: “Like, me neither.” Fillers, clichés, limited vocabulary. In two seconds, all hope of nourishing the imagination with a compelling story vanishes.
I suppose that this anemic oral language, at least in appearance, is due to multiple reasons. One of the reasons always given is that people read less and less. I think that no one doubts the importance of reading and it is not my purpose to delve into it here. The abbreviated language of social networks permeates the language, which suffers from a serious illness: it is remaining in its bones. In any case—and here we return to written language—it is not about improving expression with a caloric diet based on adjectives and adverbs. It is not (only) about expanding vocabulary, but about giving weight to what is truly important, which are verbs and nouns. Deep down, and although they have a different origin, both languages suffer from the same obesity: that of building from scraps and flourishes, from everything that adorns the language.
The language has to be effective, appropriate for what is being told. Whenever they ask me which novel I have learned the most from, I answer the same thing: The big notebook, by Agota Kristof, the story of two children, twin brothers, who during World War II are left by their mother in the care of their grandmother in a small village. Well then; This novel has a vocabulary that does not exceed a thousand words. “Just enough, without filler, without fat,” as she herself would explain in an interview. In what, then, does the magic of its expressive vigor consist?
Kristof herself wrote in her autobiographical book The illiterate that the style of the novel was due to the fact that he was writing in a foreign language; After fleeing Hungary for political reasons, crossing the border with her husband and her young son, she settled in Switzerland and had to learn French. She writes in what may seem like clumsy French, but whose economy and harshness have hypnotic effects, necessary for what she is telling. She had never said so much with so little.
It occurs to me that the exercise of chastity that Ursula K. Le Guin talks about is something similar to an exercise in efficiency. And effectiveness, both in written and oral expression, has to do with whether we manage to convey an idea or an emotion. Avoid flabby language full of clichés, adjust substance and form, look for the vivid phrase and the right word. Flaubert claimed to have found the latter when his ear told him: when it sounded good. Virginia Woolf expressed it with some beautiful words addressed to her friend Vita Sakville-West: style is rhythm, “a wave in the mind”, the wave, the rhythm come before the words and make the words fit. And the fact is that, beneath the smooth surface of the text, a hidden life has to pulsate, something that makes us feel and that somehow disturbs us. Poet Emily Dickinson said “if I have the physical sensation of my brains being lifted off, I know that is poetry.”
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