PowerPoint and the dreaded listicle (familiar from clickbait K-holes like Thought Catalog) have given the list a bad name. But lists can be highly effective, turning prose into poetry by giving a passage an almost liturgical cadence or rummaging in the overstuffed drawers of your, or your character’s, mind. Old Testament authors work the list…
Beware self-consciously clever verbs of attribution. In a widely quoted list of “10 Rules of Writing,” Elmore Leonard thundered against the use of any attributive verb other than “said” and got positively apoplectic at the use of adverbial modifiers (e.g., “he admonished gravely”). Admired by critics and readers of westerns and crime novels alike, Leonard…
Edward St. Aubyn, author of the Patrick Melrose novels (on which the Showtime miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch was based), writes impeccable prose, as pared down and drily funny as Evelyn Waugh at his best, but heart-piercingly poignant in a way that Waugh rarely (never?) is. That‘s because St. Aubyn spins his fiction, equal parts black…