slaves, tell me about 50 Shades of Grey

which is interesting!

My heart is in my mouth. It's chewy and tastes of offal. I feel faint.

i once worked with a freelancer at a weekly paper, and one day her piece came in and contained the phrase, "... those Broadway shows you know and ardor."
it was doubly in need of changing because

(1) ardor is a noun, and you were clearly looking for a substitute verb for "love" only she looked under the nominal definition carelessly and
(2) you can't replace one word in a cliche and expect it to sound good. it will not sound good, it will sound double bad

so it was a complicated problem, more than just word police OR my personal style preference

you = she in (1) oops pardon my bad editing there

I blame the current state of creative writing curricula, and how teachers in general have learned to coach students on writing.

Show, don't tell. Use no adjectives. Use only plain language. Frustrated MFA grads have complained that they were still having this advise pounded into their heads late in their programs.

These are useful maxims for beginners. They reign in a lot of bad writing, but they are over-taught and they are not the end-all and be-all of rhetoric and style.

Exactly -- that's what I mean, it's a part of language that comes and goes with the tides and most people aren't aware that their tide isn't the only one

i always find the anti-adjective campaign weird (there's one now!). it's adverbs that need to be stamped out most of the time.

Also, as is made clear in the article above, some people have extreme ideas of what counts as flowery.

it's the precise combination of everything that leaves us with a bad taste in our mouths, which is a matter of style and sociolinguistic implications as much as word abuse

I just read a whole book on this topic:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517Mbej3AuL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

that's another lesson that people were taught, and comes and goes with the tides. there is nothing wrong with adverbs if you are not overusing them, or using them as sloppy shorthand for something else. re: "modifier phobia" http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3453

well yeah there's nothing wrong with anything. but i see adverbs attached like lampreys to drained and dead sentences way more often than i see adjectives.

(lampreys used here rather than leeches to tiptoe round the ghost of strunk and white)

still, is it the adverb's fault that the sentence is weak? fix the sentence, then see if the adverb is useful or not. kinda depends on what you're writing too.

still waiting to see someone stick up for I need to expend some of this excess, enervating energy.

sure. just, if you're trying to teach a green writer some helpful strategies for figuring out why their sentences don't work, "check for occurrences of the word 'massively'" is a pretty good one. the problem starts when people imagine it's productive to be a fundamentalist about this. just like all the other problems. xp

DJP - You haven't ever felt crazy manic and like you needed to run around? The sentiment is real even if the sentence is totally overwritten imo. (How was that?)

i'll stick up for that djp (and for "i need his proximity") if you stick up for the writer's down-to-earth, common-sensical suspicion of the grossly hoity-toity adjective "interminable"

anyway the worst one is "his jubilation has metamorphosed into concern"

I keep thinking of Stephanie Meyers and her obsession with 'chagrin', which always leads me back to The Princess Bride "You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."

I just like the idea of someone getting all incensed about the style of this book as a thinly veiled cultural criticism of the people who like it. That's way more interesting than the bad sentences themselves. I see bad sentences ALL THE TIME.

I think DJP is missing the point a little: some of the sentences pointed out in the article don't work. But the article as a whole fails because they're attacking, basically, any word that comes from a Romantic origin and replacing them with a Germanic equivalent = this is not how editing works, this is not how editing should work. 'Excess, enervating energy' is bad not because enervating is a complex word, it's bad for the reason that most of the writing in 50 Shades is bad, it has no consistency in tone. 'Enervating energy' may be a concept that jars you for a second, but it could actually work in a better piece of prose; 'excess, enervating energy', however, uses childlike alliteration to make you read the words quickly, so you're stuck with the sentence doing two things at once: it elides *and* it jars. It makes it confusing to read, so you assume that the writer is using the word incorrectly. She may well be doing so, but it doesn't mean that the word use is necessarily incorrect.

DJP - You haven't ever felt crazy manic and like you needed to run around? The sentiment is real even if the sentence is totally overwritten imo. (How was that?)

That was terrible! You concede the point that the sentence is overwritten! Furthermore, because "enervate" is most commonly used to indicate a lack of energy, using it in a context where the character is describing a need to get rid of a surfeit of energy is obfuscatory to authorial intent! And I say that as someone not at all averse to less common/fancier/longer/whatever-you-want-to-call-them words when the precision the sentiment being expressed demands them.

DLH: If "I need his proximity" is indicative of Alexandria's go-to phraseology, I begin to understand why Christian wanted so desperately to smack her with a belt.

I've never been very good at arguing. Or editorializing, for that matter.

emil.y that is a lovely piece of technical discourse analysis

uses childlike alliteration

It was the Anglo-Saxons who loved alliteration

Enervating energy is contradictory and makes the prose look pretentious. Pretentious in the sense of pretending to something, perhaps flowery, erudite prose, and failing to make any basic sense.

I think enervate means the opposite of what she thinks it means.

But if we were to substitute invigorating, it would still be redundant. "This excess energy makes me full of energy."

If she meant enervate, then maybe she is saying that excess energy actually has the effect of depleting energy. Which is a lot to pack into a few words, and maybe interesting, but still awkward in that sentence.

i think emil.y's right that "enervating energy" could be used successfully, as paradoxical reference to the way that being wound up can feel like a kind of exhaustion, although it's dangerous, and the alliteration (or whatever you call alliteration when it keeps going for multiple syllables) is always going to create a hurdle of goofiness. "exhausting" might be the better adjective, since it's still dissonant without being flat-out contradictory; i dunno. another weird thing here is that "enervating"'s been stuffed into the middle of the mild cliche "excess energy" like an attempt at disguise. and that nothing about the book's prose in general inspires confidence that the writer knows the phrase is a paradox.

mistaking enervate for it's opposite is a very common mistake.

its

(just being a pill, ignore me pls)

nah, I throw in unnecessary apostrophes all the time. I understand the difference, and I deserve to be called out on it

going on a Vivarin bender while cramming for finals in college = "enervating energy"

drinking 2 pots of coffee after 2 days of no sleep = enervating energy

prednisone = enervating energy

lol

butts

IMO, what the author of this article is suggesting is that these words are being used to bring a veneer of sophistication to some stupid bullshit

― that is a weird thing to bring up over lean cuisine (DJP), Friday, June 1, 2012 5:14 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, this is OTM. "Epistle" is a terrible word to use in that sentence, not because readers can't understand it - it's because it makes the whole sentence sound like 20 pounds of shit stuffed in a five pound bag. The reason why this reads like a junior high schooler plumping up her essays with fancy thesaurus words is because the rest of the sentences can't support those words.

Sure, many of them are technically correct, but editing fiction is about more than making sure everything is technically correct. You want the writing to be tonally consistent, too. Reading an "epistle" instead of an "email" is not even remotely tonally consistent. It's jarring as hell.

Another 50 Shades Domestic Violence PSA. Now with added author breakdown.

This romance author, Jennifer Armintrout, has been live-blogging her chapter-by-chapter read of Fifty Shades and I won't read the book but I'm having so much fun w her blog about it! But shit just got a little real in this entry.

Great post!

From the comments:

For example, from Entertainment Weekly 's 4 page (allowing for photos) April 6, 2012 cover story, the last column has this:

"Not everyone is charmed by the sex in Fifty either. Some believe Ana and Christian have an abusive relationship that misrepresents BDSM sex play. "He tells her when to eat, he stalks her and goes into jealous rages every time she's talking to her male friends. I'm like, that has nothing to do with BDSM. That's just a good old-fashioned abusive, controlling boyfriend," says sexologist Jill McDevitt, owner of the feminist sex shop Feminique Boutique in West Chester, Pa.

That's it. One small paragraph in a 4 page article. And slanted to look like it's just the opinion of "feminists"---and who likes them, right?

Way x-post to La Lechera:
Are you sure they didn't mean to write "adore" and spellcheck accidentally zapped it to "ardor?"

Eh, it was totally in character for her to do that. Either way, it needed to be changed and she was always pissed at me for taking some of the "pizzazz" out of her writing. I worked there before the digital revolution was fully underway, or I would have more examples. She was our queen of doggerel, and I appreciated her writing for its entertainment value in that regard.

xxpost carl: huge outloud laughs with 20 pounds of shit stuffed in a 5 pound bag

I look forward to your next fanfic

Lechera, this one's for you: Romance Story Plot Generator

haha

Science Fiction: This story takes place at a portal to another solar system. In it, a loudmouthed fire fighter is introduced to an athletic merchant. What starts as detachment soon turns into obsessive love - all thanks to treason.

Oh that is wonderful.

Fantasy: In this story, an elementalist with a chemical dependency falls in love with a confident demonologist. Yet, how can a vicious demonologist tear them apart?

Science Fiction: In this story, a nostalgic secret agent falls madly in love with a shuttlecraft pilot who has an obsessive attraction to a particular alien species - all thanks to the taking of a test.

this is disconcertingly close to the plot of Ender's Game

In this story, an innocent treasure-hunter is in love with a fence whose body was infected by an alien seeking to reproduce - all thanks to a birth. It seems a pleasant surprise will bring them even closer together.

would read tbh

So, I am really ashamed to admit this, but in 2009 I dabbled in the Twilight fandom. Just a tad. Poked around. Yeah, I liked the stupid Twilight books. Today, my sister asked me if I ever heard of the fanfiction, "Master of the Universe" -

I said yeah. And then like, I found out about the whole best seller thing.

Back in 2009, "Master of the Universe" was HUGELY popular. People freaked out over it. The author had a bunch of fans, enough that they had their own CONVENTION for her. I think I read a few chapters of this story--in fact, I have a copy in its original form if anyone wants to see it. Don't know why you would. If I recall there were a lot of obvious Britishisms and a sex scene which involved the male character ripping out a bloody tampon prior to fucking.

And also the title reminded me of He-Man.

Wait, didn't Ayn Rand already write this novel?