As always, your posts leave me with lots to think about and the sense that I've only scratched the surface on the whole business of writing prose. "Scuffed prose" is a concept I will be playing with for a long while. And am going to track down a copy of "Bad Writing."
I do hope it's clear that scuffed writing is still extremely polished. So polished in fact that the only way forward might be the 'two steps back' of scuffedness, as with Shakespeare deliberately mangling the grammar of his soliloquies in 'Hamlet'.
Alexis Wright's 'Praiseworthy' nails it with slightly 'awkward' vocabulary and deliberate cliche:
Once upon a fine time for some people in the world, but not so plenteous, nor perfect for others, there lived a culture dreamer obsessing about the era. He was no great dreamer, no greater than the rest of the juggernauts in his heartbroken, storm-country people’s humanity. They knew just as much as he did about surviving on a daily basis, and about how to make sacrifices of themselves in all the cataclysmic times generated by the mangy dogs who had stolen their traditional land. These people, after the generations of dealing with the land-thief criminals like many others around the world, had turned themselves, not into a tangled web of despair, but into some of the best fighters of all times. They used pure guts for improving life, and said they were in it for the long run. Theirs was a sovereign world view – the main view acceptable to their governing ancestors, a law grown through belief in its own endlessness, and through re-setting the survival barometer from millennia a couple of hundred years ago, by evolving a new gauge – something like a moth’s sonar, for only hearing what it wanted to hear. But, to be frank, the facet worked like a shield, for seeing what they wanted to see of the world, or to shut the whole thing out forever. And for deciding whether they wanted to speak at all, for sometimes, this world never spoke for years, then when it did, spoke wreckage words – like a piece of heaven heavy with intent, firing on all cylinders from the sky.
As always, your posts leave me with lots to think about and the sense that I've only scratched the surface on the whole business of writing prose. "Scuffed prose" is a concept I will be playing with for a long while. And am going to track down a copy of "Bad Writing."
Bad Writing certainly looks intriguing.
I do hope it's clear that scuffed writing is still extremely polished. So polished in fact that the only way forward might be the 'two steps back' of scuffedness, as with Shakespeare deliberately mangling the grammar of his soliloquies in 'Hamlet'.
Alexis Wright's 'Praiseworthy' nails it with slightly 'awkward' vocabulary and deliberate cliche:
Once upon a fine time for some people in the world, but not so plenteous, nor perfect for others, there lived a culture dreamer obsessing about the era. He was no great dreamer, no greater than the rest of the juggernauts in his heartbroken, storm-country people’s humanity. They knew just as much as he did about surviving on a daily basis, and about how to make sacrifices of themselves in all the cataclysmic times generated by the mangy dogs who had stolen their traditional land. These people, after the generations of dealing with the land-thief criminals like many others around the world, had turned themselves, not into a tangled web of despair, but into some of the best fighters of all times. They used pure guts for improving life, and said they were in it for the long run. Theirs was a sovereign world view – the main view acceptable to their governing ancestors, a law grown through belief in its own endlessness, and through re-setting the survival barometer from millennia a couple of hundred years ago, by evolving a new gauge – something like a moth’s sonar, for only hearing what it wanted to hear. But, to be frank, the facet worked like a shield, for seeing what they wanted to see of the world, or to shut the whole thing out forever. And for deciding whether they wanted to speak at all, for sometimes, this world never spoke for years, then when it did, spoke wreckage words – like a piece of heaven heavy with intent, firing on all cylinders from the sky.
https://auraist.substack.com/p/the-most-beautifully-scuffed-prose