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Or, my contractions, let me show you them.
So I sent off an article to a major law review, a tad over 30,000 words (including footnotes). The draft they returned to me added nearly 5000 (essentially all in the footnotes). I think word limits for law reviews are cool, but they ought to be imposed on the editors as well; swapping professorial bloat for student editor bloat is no victory. I tried to edit out the repetitive additions, caved on the merely boring ones, and balked at the ones ideologically contrary to my own strongly held views.
And of course they took out the contractions. Because why have style when you could have … Teal’c-like gravitas, I guess? Except that something written in a relatively casual style sounds worse – or, at best, comic – with the spotty formalization that comes from writing out all the contractions.
Other stuff:
On appropriation in popular music: A Paler Shade of White: How Indie Rock Lost Its Soul
Michael Gruber, The Book of Air and Shadows:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
geekturnedvamp sent this thriller to me because one of the protagonists is an intellectual property lawyer (and mostly got the law right, with a few bobbles; nothing like the travesties usually perpetrated against my poor field) – the other is a young guy who wants to be a filmmaker. Also, there’s a woman, explicitly analogized several times to Brigid O’Shaugnessey in The Maltese Falcon. They all get caught up in the discovery of old letters that not only reveal details of the life of the otherwise little-documented Wm. Shakespeare (worth millions), but also suggest the existence of a heretofore unknown play, in the hand of the Bard himself (worth hundreds of millions). Gruber has what I think of as the Harlan Coben rule down pat: your characters should have numerous useful connections both in the demimonde and in high society, each proving useful according to their station. And so it is, with a research librarian mother, Shakespeare expert best friend, mobbed-up father, Catholic priest and thug brother (same guy; longish story), and famous model sister. I liked the story and the writing was not graceless, but the wheels got wobbly near the end, when Gruber began to substitute very explicit statements about the rules of screenwriting, expressed conveniently by his screenwriter character, for actually writing an individualized narrative. The IP lawyer, though not a very nice person, does get in some good commentary on the enterprise of fiction, including the idea that a modern person would remember a conversation in such detail as to be able to recount it for a narrative told in first person past. Despite the slightly whimpery ending, I would definitely read other books by Gruber.
So I sent off an article to a major law review, a tad over 30,000 words (including footnotes). The draft they returned to me added nearly 5000 (essentially all in the footnotes). I think word limits for law reviews are cool, but they ought to be imposed on the editors as well; swapping professorial bloat for student editor bloat is no victory. I tried to edit out the repetitive additions, caved on the merely boring ones, and balked at the ones ideologically contrary to my own strongly held views.
And of course they took out the contractions. Because why have style when you could have … Teal’c-like gravitas, I guess? Except that something written in a relatively casual style sounds worse – or, at best, comic – with the spotty formalization that comes from writing out all the contractions.
Other stuff:
On appropriation in popular music: A Paler Shade of White: How Indie Rock Lost Its Soul
Michael Gruber, The Book of Air and Shadows:
geekturnedvamp sent this thriller to me because one of the protagonists is an intellectual property lawyer (and mostly got the law right, with a few bobbles; nothing like the travesties usually perpetrated against my poor field) – the other is a young guy who wants to be a filmmaker. Also, there’s a woman, explicitly analogized several times to Brigid O’Shaugnessey in The Maltese Falcon. They all get caught up in the discovery of old letters that not only reveal details of the life of the otherwise little-documented Wm. Shakespeare (worth millions), but also suggest the existence of a heretofore unknown play, in the hand of the Bard himself (worth hundreds of millions). Gruber has what I think of as the Harlan Coben rule down pat: your characters should have numerous useful connections both in the demimonde and in high society, each proving useful according to their station. And so it is, with a research librarian mother, Shakespeare expert best friend, mobbed-up father, Catholic priest and thug brother (same guy; longish story), and famous model sister. I liked the story and the writing was not graceless, but the wheels got wobbly near the end, when Gruber began to substitute very explicit statements about the rules of screenwriting, expressed conveniently by his screenwriter character, for actually writing an individualized narrative. The IP lawyer, though not a very nice person, does get in some good commentary on the enterprise of fiction, including the idea that a modern person would remember a conversation in such detail as to be able to recount it for a narrative told in first person past. Despite the slightly whimpery ending, I would definitely read other books by Gruber.Tags: