Things to keep in mind:
The secret of gabble.
I’m being overly harsh, I know. But I do feel that New Prolixity, as a school of writing, is a dangerous trap for the weaker writer, exacerbated by the fact that writing on a computer is much more facile, just practically speaking, than (say) writing on a page of paper with a pen. The words just come tumbling out, and there they are on the screen: they even look, thanks to the wonders of word processing, like a finished page of a printed novel! Should we revise? Nah.
James E Miller has speculated that the Jamesian “late style” was a consequence of the master moving from writing with a pen to dictating to a typist, something he started doing with What Maisie Knew in 1897. And so his circumlocutionary anti-rhodomontades spooled out, and so the rat-tatting efficiency of his mechanic amanuensis pinned them easily to the page. The easier it became to empage the words, the more orotund and elaborate and lengthy the sentences grew. I wonder if that’s true.
—posted 396 days ago
