If you hope to drag your reader
through the entire length of your story
from beginning to end, without their interest waning or lagging
it would be well advised for you to use some inventive language.
Try and put your words together in a way
that they have not necessarily been put together before.
Try to avoid clichés.
Try to avoid saying things...
Try to avoid using phrases
that every other writer that you've ever read has used.
There are ways of constantly making your language
more adventurous, more surprising.
I think that is a big element of it.
It's the element of surprise.
That, as the readers are going along
they will suddenly have their attention captured
by a surprising image, a startling use of words.
One of the ways that you can achieve this
is by the principle of juxtaposition.
If you put two words together
that seem, perhaps initially, to be dissonant or discordant
and not really to fit together.
Then that will be a technique
by which you can, occasionally
create a kind of beautiful disfigurement
as in the phrase "beautiful disfigurement".
There are people who use language wonderfully inventively
to great effect.
I can remember my friend, the writer Steve Aylett.
His prose is generally hilarious
is completely hallucinatory.
He puts words together and phrases and concepts
in a way that I have never seen anybody else do.
It's extraordinary. It makes...
Whatever he is writing about
is guaranteed to be an enthralling piece of text.
Or, if you're...
I mean, Steve is a very modern, present-day writer.
I.e. he's not dead.
Whereas writers of the past, who are dead
would include people like, say, H. P. Lovecraft.
Now, H. P. Lovecraft has got a reputation
as being a very old-fashioned writer
who hated modernism in any form.
He loathed Gertrude Stein.
He wrote a very funny parody of T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland
called Waste Paper
which showed that he at least understood modernist poetry
even though he affected to despise it.
But I think that H. P. Lovecraft was probably a closet modernist.
One of the things that he's most often criticised for
is his ridiculous, overblown use of adjectives.
Generally talking about a creature
which he will eventually describe as
indescribable.
My friend, the writer Michael Moorcock
has called H. P. Lovecraft
"that master
of over-describing the indescribable."
Which... I can see what Mike means
but I don't think that
that's entirely the truth of the matter.
Looking at Lovecraft, I can see
that he was actually using language
in a very determined way.
He would overload descriptive adjectives
upon some of his creatures, some of his creations
so that it would make it impossible for the reader
to put together a clear mental picture.
His first mention of his most famous monster
the Great Cthulhu
he spends a lot of time telling you three things
that Cthulhu doesn't quite look like.
In his other story, The Dunwich Horror
he has one of his loathsome, subhuman
creatures, who goes by the name of Wilbur Whateley.
When he is finally destroyed
in an incident involving dogs in a library
he describes the dying body of Wilbur Whateley
by looking at different parts of it and describing them.
He describes one part as covered in thick hair.
Another part is bubbling with tentacles.
There are eyes in the hips.
Basically, he is giving you so many conflicting textures
that you cannot possibly put these together
into one single image.
It's a way of alienating the reader.
It's a way of estranging the reader
and making the reader feel that something is wrong.
These are some of the ways that you can use language effectively
in unusual ways
which will greatly spice up anything that you are writing.
There are certainly extremes
that sometimes writers have gone to
to achieve these effects.
One of my favourite movements in literature
and this has perhaps got limited application
but I still feel that it's very important
is the Oulipo movement.
Now, Oulipo is a contraction, I believe, of the French term
Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle.
An open potential literature.
What this is, in effect, is
setting restraints upon what you can write
that are meant to force you into new creative decisions.
The most famous piece of Oulipo is a novel by Benjamin Perec
which is written entirely without the letter E.
So he only chooses words that don't have E in them.
Now, you think how difficult it would be
to complete a single sentence
without the most used letter in the language.
Taking this further, I saw a very, very slim book
by somebody called Christian Bök, B-O-umlaut-K.
And it was called Eunoia.
Now, "eunoia" is an interesting word in itself.
It's the etymological opposite of "paranoia"
so it means "beautiful thinking".
It's also the shortest word in the English language
to contain all of the vowels.
And what Christian Bök does in this work
is each chapter
which, he has decided, has to contain a journey by water
a meal, a sexual debauch
and various other elements, in each chapter.
Each chapter, he can only use one vowel.
I believe he has an extra chapter for the letter Y
because that's almost a vowel.
But this is...
As a feat of writing
it is breath-taking.
Now, obviously, this is not going to be something
that you're going to be called upon to do at any point
but it is something that I would advise you
to perhaps play with occasionally
if you get the time
because it can stretch your talents
into directions that you would not have thought of on your own.
It will create new possibilities of language
that you can enrich all of your prose with.
This will be a benefit to anything that you are writing.
And as a final indication of what you can do
with, say, even extremist Oulipo techniques
people have used Oulipo techniques to compose music.
They have used them to create works of art
and they have even used them for specific kinds of writing.
There are, I believe, people who write police procedural novels
according to Oulipo tactics.
And this movement is referred to as the Oulipopo.
So... Yeah, not for everybody
but if you want to give your writing
some real, exotic spice
I suggest that you perhaps
take a couple of idle hours
to play around with some of those ideas
and see where it takes you.