Lyrical writing requires self-discipline

Hello folks, and thank each of you for being one of the select few who are subscribing to and sustaining this newsletter.

So when I was breaking in to publishing, there was a big trend/fad/bolus of received wisdom that the Way To Write was to write “transparent prose,” and exclusively in limited third person omniscient. As you can probably imagine, as somebody who likes to play with point of view and voice, and who has a thorny relationship with the idea that there are Rules in Art that you Have To Follow or your Art will be Bad Art and probably unsalable… this didn’t exactly sit well with me.

Ahem.

Well screw it, I like lyrical writing. I like poetry. I like imagistic, sonorous, poetic prose. I like the work of Tolkien and McKillip and my contemporary Amal El-Mohtar. I like what my dear friend, the late Jay Lake, used to refer to as the rococo excrescences of the unabashed style monkey.