Subtitled “Word craft for fast times”, this book by Roy Peter Clark is a gem. It’s a very different book from Short-Form Creative Writing: A Writer's Guide And Anthology, both in content and style, but covers similar ground. What I especially like about it is the following:
The sheer range of ideas for “short” writing. I tend to think of short writing as falling into particular categories, like a 6 word memoir or a 280 character tweet, or a 500 word blog post. But, as Clark demonstrates, there is so much more to it than that.
Following on from the preceding point, there are surprises. For example, there’s a chapter on very hard and soft words. Another one is about texting and other kinds of abbreviation. Clark prefers not to use text and slang abbreviations, but at least he gives them a fair hearing, unlike this hysterical diatribe by John Humphreys:
“It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago.
They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.”
In fact, as an aside, texting seems to have caused a kind of mass hysteria amongst certain segments of the population in England, especially in the realm of education. I wrote about this in 2010 in C? I Tld U So, Didn't I? TxtN Isn't So Bad Aftr Ll, Unl Ur /:-). Nothing’s changed: just look at the English Programme of Study. It was written and imposed in 2014, but you would never know from reading it that there is such a thing as the internet, let alone texting. But I digress.
The chapters are short, which is fitting, of course, given the title of the book.
It’s a great “dipping into” book, which is just the thing for busy writers — although I do recommend reading it through as well.
There are some good references. I discovered an American journalist called Stephanie Hayes by reading the book. Her tweets always make me smile, and I enjoy her newsletter too.
It’s very readable, which I think is always a plus in a book about writing!
I like the fact that each chapter ends with some exercises, although they are called Grace Notes. This seems to be a musical term, so I confess to not understanding its use here.
I’ve learnt much from reading this book, and have no hesitation in recommending it.
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