A nice review and a jumping of point for discussion...

[anghara]

I just got a very nice review posted out there in the blogosphere. Stephanie from "Someone's read it already" has given me four out of five stars - ant it's a terrific review.

The star that got taken off? Well, here's what she says in the review:


The writing style on the book was perhaps the only part I did not find excellent. Alexander has quite a turn for poetic language, but sometimes her paragraph-long sentences did not quite match the intended audience for the book. These sentences are not in the dialogue, which was fine; they were in the narration. Again, individual parts of these sentences were lovely, and they were all grammatically correct, but the length was sometimes oppressive. I can’t imagine that fourteen-year-olds would find these more appealing than I do. For example:

Grimoires were temperamental books, sometimes with a life of their own, unpredictable and often dangerous; they were usually kept well apart from the main part of any library, but even so accidents happened every so often and the consequences could be dire.

Again, the story was lovely, and a nice introduction to Thea’s world. I’m very interested to read the next book in the trilogy (which I have on a shelf, quite nearby), and I’m sure I won’t be able to wait for book 3. This book comes recommended to readers who like interesting settings and vibrant characters, but who wouldn’t mind waiting a few months for book 3, and for whom short, choppy sentences aren’t a necessity.

To which my response is, well, yes, but it isn't a bug, it's a *feature*.

Perhaps I am underestimating my readership, at that. Perhaps there are folks out there for whom short and choppy sentences ARE a necessity. But that's just the thing - I've never been able to write them. Short choppy sentences exercise no fascination for me - I get no charge from creating them and therefore I cannot see any reader getting a charge out of reading them, and if I TRIED to write like that I would come off sounding like the very worst of what I've always tried to avoid both reading and writing - someone who is *writing down to her readership*.

When my first ever solo effort got published, a slim little volume of three Oscar Wilde-like fairy tales called "The Dolphin's Daughter and other stories" (you could try AmazonUK, or occasionally you get lucky at Amazon US, but at any rate you can see the cover art if you scroll down to the bottom of this page) what they did was put together these three stories that I had written *for an adult readership*, written in as lush and complex and uncompromising a manner as I knew how, and they had put them together in this little book which was aimed at a 15-year-old demographic. When the proofs of that book came to me to check, I remember holding them out to my father in a hand that literally shook, and saying "You look, I daren't, they must have eviscerated the language." Because I figured they had to have done, in order to make it palatable to a young readership.

You know what? They hadn't. Those proofs remain one of the most lightly edited sets of proofs I've ever seen. Longman trusted the audience; that the trust wasn't entirely misplaced is that - although it currently seems to be on the outs with both Amazons - the book, published in 1995, STILL brings me a trickle of royalties every so often. Still being read. No, it wasn't Potterological, it didn't sell ten million copies, but it sold a respectable number of copies for a thin little book that was never published commercially but only under the auspices of a strictly defined reading project by an educational publisher.

So I throw it out to you. What do you think? Should children's books in general, YA books in particular, be written in short choppy sentences - or is it all right to be lush and complex? sartorias, cynleitichsmith, tltrent... others who are involved with/write/write ABOUT/review YA... what do you think about this issue? How important is language? Should we be making readers stretch beyond what they thought might be the limits of their linguistic capabilities, or should we be writing to the LOWEST common denominator and using language that will make a work of fiction accessible to the less well linguistically endowed? Is it the level of language used or the themes within a story that differentiate a children's book from a YA book?

I was very aware of my audience, of the changed demographic at which the Worldweavers books were aimed, when I wrote these books. And yet... I was writing them for the reader who was once myself, a reader who always wanted more, bigger, brighter, wider, mroe complex, more dramatic. In my own family I was always treated as though I had a mind of my own, and the rule was that if I picked up a book that was in my house and I could understand it and it interested me there were no borders or bans enforced on what my reading material "should" have been. In point of fact I pretty much skipped the whole YA demographic altoghether - which isn't REALLY unexpected, seeing as how recent a marketing bracket that particular genre actually is - and I simply read what were considered to be adult books by the time I was in my early teens. The classics - Austen, Bronte, Stendhal, Hugo - as well as the more "modern" oeuvre which encompassed several Nobel prize winners (Henryk Sienkiewicz, Ivo Andric, Pearl Buck, Sigrid Undsett, John Galsworthy). I thought lush and complex was the way language was SUPPOSED to be.

So. Am I - are writers like me - asking too much of our young readership...? Or can we be said to be nursing these fragile hopes that some day those readers... will grow up as blindly, powerlessly, hopelessly tenderly in love with the lushness of language and word, and believe in it with the same kind of deep and all-encompassing faith...?

Comments

[tobias-buckell.livejournal.com]

If you write short and choppy (like I do), you'll still get flamed ;-) I get reviews that both praise me and damn me for a shorter, choppier delivery.

I like it, so it stays.

[brownnicky.livejournal.com]

Me too. It is a stylistic choice. I prefer to write simply and I don't patronise my readers. On the other hand I can't see any reason why sentence length should be an issue in YA. It matters in writing for younger children but for older children and adults it is merely a matter of taste.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

But that's a whole diff'rent controversy [grin] You haven't written something directly aimed at a YA audience, so YOUR "short and choppy" is the differential between a Hemingway style and a Faulkner style - which reminds me of those duelling quotes which you probably know but which seem particularly apt right now:

Faulkner on Hemingway:
"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."

Hemingway on Faulkner:
"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"

This IS a stylistic and writer-determined kind of thing - you write short or you write long and it's something that's instinctive to your own style and although it's probably possible for a good writer to do both and switch between them when need be there is always ONE style which sits better and is the default. But both are aimed at a (arguably different) adult readership.

The vibe I tend to get in the YA-vs-adult camp is that somehow the kids are incapable of reading complex and writing needs to be simplified for them (which is in no way, by the by, intended to denigrate those writers who (like Hemingway) do it short by nature, inclunation, and stylistic preference). And this is a view I simply cannot subscribe to...

[guinwhyte.livejournal.com]

somehow the kids are incapable of reading complex and writing needs to be simplified for them

Um..then how are they supposed to learn to read complex writing if they're not exposed to it? With the books they read for school, are they not exposed to it anyway and that can carry over to their ability to read it for pleasure? That idea just doesn't make sense to me.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I don't think long sentences are necessarily a problem. The writers whose prose I admire--Elizabeth Wein, Megan Whalen Turner, for example--write complex sentences that are still sharp and clear.

Sometimes I think sentences could be trimmed of cliche phrases to be tighter, but these are all subjective things, of course.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I was reading Nesbit at much younger than 14. And Dickens.

[shadesong.livejournal.com]

My thirteen-year-old votes for lush and complex!

[tltrent.livejournal.com]

I've been wondering this myself, esp. after m_stiefvater posted about slow reads and fast reads, highlighting my books as slow reads b/c the language is obviously meant to be savored. Well. Yes. But that made me worry that because my book isn't a particularly "fast" read that perhaps its readership is narrower than I'd hoped, hence the slow sales, etc. Maybe I *am* asking too much of young adults w/the language and not enough w/the subject matter.

Every time I do a library or school visit, I poll them on what they're reading and most often I get 12 or 13 yr. olds reading Laurell K. Hamilton and Stephen King. Which makes me wonder if they handle situations better than language?

Which also doesn't really answer your question. :P

[intertext.livejournal.com]

I think it's important to consider your audience, but never "write down" to them. After all, if you do one of those "readability" analyses on Beatrix Potter, she scores at about a 1st year University level. I am constantly struggling with students who whine that some of the great essay writing I give them is "wordy." Please keep on writing the kind of sentences that express what you want to say the way you want to say it, and maybe some young person will grow up able to read - and write - something other than short choppy sentences with "easy" words.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

Write how *you* write is what this reader advises.

I had no problem with long sentences when I was a child. Like dichroic, I read E. Nesbit when I was very young.

Books with short, choppy sentences generally have a very different character than those with longer, more complex sentence structure. If your protagonist is anti-intellectual and barely literate, then of course you're going to have a more choppy style, at least with dialog.

The short and choppy approach reads to me as "breathless." I like it on some things and really hate it on others.

[guinwhyte.livejournal.com]

My friend's daughter's main comment on both books was a hearty demand of "When's the next one coming out??????" So I'd say she had no problem with the longer sentences. :)

[anghara.livejournal.com]

Spring 2009. Sorry, can't do anything to hurry that one up [grin]

But the third book... I think it's actually the best story in the trilogy. I will be waiting to hear your daughter's reaction to the whole series once she gets a chance to read it in its entirety.

[guinwhyte.livejournal.com]

Like me, the girl will just have to be patient for the next one. :) I've been named her "book chooser" now because I've turned her on to good stuff. (I'm thinking along with Hines' Goblin trilogy I might give her Hidden Qneen/Changer of Days, since summer is coming up.)

Like you and others have said here, I started reading "adult" books quite early -- partly because the YA just wasn't there at the time, and what was there was, frankly, was not of interest. (I didn't *want* to read about cheerleaders and popular boys. Those weren't people I could relate to.) When I was trying to think of books to start Kiddo on, her mom and I discussed what *we* were reading at her age (she's 15 now), topic-wise, and some of the "adult" issues that we either glazed right over or were introduced to by reading grown-up stuff, and that it hadn't damaged us. I'm far less concerned about sentence length and vocabulary than I am about some of the subject matter that can come up, but I think she's pretty capable of coping with most things. (As far as I'm concerned, looking up a word or two while I'm reading is not a bad thing -- I still do it. As long as it's not every third word, which frustrates me.)

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

My opinion: Some YA readers can handle such prose, others can't. I don't know which is more common.