Verlyn Klinkenborg

  • b9467627432has quotedlast year
    You were being taught to write as part of a transaction that had
    Almost nothing to do with real communication,
  • b9467627432has quotedlast year
    You were also learning to distrust the reader and yourself.
  • b9467627432has quotedlast year
    And to use passive constructions, which absolve everyone of responsibility.
    What’s a metaphor in the prose you were taught to write?
    A stage prop, a paraphrase, a clarification, at best,
    Nearly always cumbersome, bordering on cliché,
    Almost always timid, rarely serious, usually self-conscious,
  • b9467627432has quotedlast year
    A true metaphor is a swift and violent twisting of language,
    A renaming of the already named.
    It’s meant to expire in a sudden flash of light
    And to reveal—in that burst of illumination—
    A correspondence that must be literally accurate.
  • b9467627432has quotedlast year
    You may notice, as you write, that sentences often volunteer a shape of their own
    And supply their own words as if they anticipated your thinking.
    Those sentences are nearly always unacceptable,
    Dull and unvarying, yielding only a small number of possible structures
    And only the most predictable phrases, the inevitable clichés.
    A cliché is dead matter.
    It causes gangrene in the prose around it, and sooner or later it eats your brain.
    You can’t fix a cliché by using it ironically.
  • b9467627432has quotedlast year
    A cliché isn’t just a familiar, overused saying.
    It’s the debris of someone else’s thinking,
    Any group of words that seem to cluster together “naturally”
    And enlist in your sentence.
    The only thing to do with a cliché is send it to the sports page
    Or the speechwriters, where it will live forever.
  • b9467627432has quotedlast year
    When the work is really complete, the writer knows how each sentence got that way,
    What choices were made.
  • b9467627432has quotedlast year
    I mean a pale and nameless unease,
    As if a poorly constructed sentence could make you slightly homesick.
  • b9467627432has quotedlast year
    The malaise given off by an awkwardness in the syntax.
    You won’t be able to name the feeling a syntactical problem causes.
    It doesn’t have a name.
  • b9467627432has quotedlast year
    Where do they come from?
    What line of work are they in?
    Who’s likely to use them?
    And in what context?
    This will remind you that every word carries a social freight.
fb2epub
Drag & drop your files (not more than 5 at once)