The Writer’s Nightmare, or Words which obscure rather than reveal.

The most important thing about getting a novel published isn’t the fame (what fame?) or the money (ditto), it’s the thought that someone will read it. I’ve banged on before about the collaboration between reader and writer; it’s something that happens without your knowledge. Occasionally you meet people who’ve read one of your books and you may chat about it, but that’s a tiny fraction of those who’ve relived their version of your fiction. All the others are and remain strangers. That’s sort of eerie but magical.

So what? Well, if you want to make money out of writing, you have to do other stuff – commercial stuff. It’s just as challenging but it does carry its frustrations, so I thought I’d use this posting to share a few of them with you.

As writers we love words, rhythms, sounds – the way a happy combination opens up meanings you didn’t know were there. So when we come across their misuse, we get apoplectic (or pissed – in the British not the American sense).

First example. I was writing a DVD script for a promotional video and I suggested to the MD of the company that, rather than appear in the programme himself, it would have greater impact if we interviewed some of the workforce and heard them saying what a great company it was, how terrific the stuff they produced was, etc. He saw the point and agreed. Then, the following day, I got an email from him with his scripts of what they should say. One went as follows. (I haven’t corrected the punctuation but I’ve changed the names of the company and the individual concerned.)

“My name is Fiona Campbell, Product Development Manager, Acme Corporation International. My function within the group is to research and develop innovative new products. In today’s ever-changing marketplace, the development of exciting and convenient, quality value added products, is of paramount importance for continued success in a highly competitive market. At Acme, joint ventures with customers on the development of new and existing products shall continue to play an important role. At Acme an important part of my teams duties is to liaise with customers and various departments, including quality control, production, sales and marketing, to obtain as much information as possible to help achieve quality products with a quality company image.”

Nice, natural, flowing chat, eh? That’s bound to convince people. And he used the same strangulated, constipated style for all the others too, however high or low their station. I ignored him.

Another company wanted a DVD for a product launch. I asked them for a description of the product and their reply, consisting of a single sentence, was a master class in the orchestration of subordinate clauses. It’s something I’ve quoted many times in talks and I still love it. I’ll call the product Acmeclad and this is what it does:

“Acmeclad is of a monocoque construction comprising a polymeric textile reinforcement encapsulated within a neoprene outer layer complete with integral neoprene strakes, bonded to a polypropylene penetration-resistant felt impregnated with a corrosion inhibitor or biocide contained within a water resistant thixotropic gel as dictated by the application for which the system will be supplied.”

Unsurpassable, you might think. But wait. Listen to another wonderful sentence written by a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature. (I have the full reference for this but I’m withholding it to spare her blushes).

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

Wow.

Now I know you’re desperate to be able to write just as eloquently, so in Just Write, the book I co-authored with Kathleen McMillan, we created THE NONSENSE GENERATOR. It’s an instant key to demonstrating your intellectual superiority to a reader. First, you take a straightforward sentence: “Studies have shown conclusively that (A) (B) (C) lead inexorably to the paradox of (A) (B) (C)”. Now think of any random sequence of six numbers from 0 to 9 and use them to choose words from columns A, B and C.

A………………...............B…………...............……C
0 Intuitively……......…interdependent……..anomalies
1 complementary.....deconstructive……....paradigms
2 fundamentally…....disparate…………......morphologies
3 indecipherable…....internalized………....data sets
4 pathologically….....polymorphic…….....…meta-analyses
5 intransigent…….....politicized…….....……structures
6 exponentially…...…volatile………......…….periphrases
7 ethically……….......…post-modern…...……values
8 pharmaceutically....inert……………........…variables
9 metaphysically…....dysfunctional…….....dichotomies

For example, if you chose 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, your sentence would read:
“Studies have shown conclusively that intuitively deconstructive morphologies lead inexorably to the paradox of indecipherable polymorphic structures.”

See? Writers-R-Us.

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