C. J. Cherryh's prose style
Rachel Brown
old threads and at that point I hadn't read much Cherryh, so here goes
again.
The discussion of what is and isn't a good prose style set me thinking.
It's easy to agree that, say, Jane Yolen and Raphael Carter have excellent
prose styles in the "clear and straightforward" modes, or that Gene Wolfe
excels at "ornate," and Patricia McKillip and Steven Brust do both
beautifully.
But what about C. J. Cherryh? There's a broad consensus that she's an
excellent writer. I agree.
She has one of the weirdest prose styles I've ever encountered. At first I
thought she was one of those writers whose sense of story, place, and
character sucks you in despite incredibly awkward, choppy writing. Now
I've actually gotten to like it. But it's very strange. She uses grammar
so oddly that if I didn't know better, I'd guess that her first language
was something with an entirely different grammatical structure.
Her language reads as _alien_. I think she does it on purpose. But I'd
like some help figuring out _how_ she's doing it. She uses sentence
fragments and lots of commas and odd dash placement, I know that. But I
think there's something syntactically weird as well, and I can't figure out
what it is.
Rachel
Mary Kay Kare
<r.ph...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
> But what about C. J. Cherryh? There's a broad consensus that she's an
> excellent writer. I agree.
>
> She has one of the weirdest prose styles I've ever encountered. At first I
> thought she was one of those writers whose sense of story, place, and
> character sucks you in despite incredibly awkward, choppy writing. Now
> I've actually gotten to like it. But it's very strange. She uses grammar
> so oddly that if I didn't know better, I'd guess that her first language
> was something with an entirely different grammatical structure.
Well, English is, in fact, her fist language, but she is a linguist and so
is familiar with a variety of them. She taught classics before writing
full time so has a solid grounding in both Greek and Latin.
>
> Her language reads as _alien_. I think she does it on purpose. But I'd
> like some help figuring out _how_ she's doing it. She uses sentence
> fragments and lots of commas and odd dash placement, I know that. But I
> think there's something syntactically weird as well, and I can't figure out
> what it is.
She probably does do it on purpose, but I can't say I've ever noticed it
especially.
MKK
--
Stamp out tin toys!
Rimrunner
<r.ph...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
[characterizing Cherryh's prose]
>She has one of the weirdest prose styles I've ever encountered. At first I
>thought she was one of those writers whose sense of story, place, and
>character sucks you in despite incredibly awkward, choppy writing. Now
>I've actually gotten to like it. But it's very strange. She uses grammar
>so oddly that if I didn't know better, I'd guess that her first language
>was something with an entirely different grammatical structure.
I once met an editor who'd worked on one of her books (I forget whom, or
what publisher; I believe it was at ArisiaCon several years ago) who said
Cherryh's writing drove her crazy in her professional capacity, even
though as a fan she thought it was great. The terribly long sentences were
the major complaint, I think.
>Her language reads as _alien_. I think she does it on purpose. But I'd
>like some help figuring out _how_ she's doing it. She uses sentence
>fragments and lots of commas and odd dash placement, I know that. But I
>think there's something syntactically weird as well, and I can't figure out
>what it is.
It's very dense. There's a stream-of-consciousness thing going on, too,
which results in important details getting buried in a lot of
stuff--especially in the first Fortress book, with Tristen's POVs.
-g,
wish *i* could do internal monologues that well
--
Murder of Crows @ http://www.murderofcrows.net
MP3s @ http://www.mp3.com/MurderOfCrows
"I don't think much of our profession, but contrasted with respectability,
'tis comparatively honest." -- The Pirate King, "Pirates of Penzance"
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Brown <r.ph...@worldnet.att.net> asserted
<snip>
>But what about C. J. Cherryh? There's a broad consensus that she's an
>excellent writer. I agree.
>
>She has one of the weirdest prose styles I've ever encountered. At first I
>thought she was one of those writers whose sense of story, place, and
>character sucks you in despite incredibly awkward, choppy writing. Now
>I've actually gotten to like it. But it's very strange. She uses grammar
>so oddly that if I didn't know better, I'd guess that her first language
>was something with an entirely different grammatical structure.
>
>Her language reads as _alien_. I think she does it on purpose. But I'd
>like some help figuring out _how_ she's doing it. She uses sentence
>fragments and lots of commas and odd dash placement, I know that. But I
>think there's something syntactically weird as well, and I can't figure out
>what it is.
It always looks to me like she took the finished work and put it through
a filter that removes 30-40% of all words, with a distinct preference
for nouns and pronouns. 8>.
Alternatively she writes like I think .. sentence fragments, as you say,
and quite often some sort of 'stack' structure (where the conversation
bounces back and forth around some single point at issue, and then 'pops
the stack' and you find them talking about something that hasn't been
mentioned since way back up the start of the paragraph). She also has
some multi-threaded dialogue, where two or three conversations are
happening in parallel, and it's up to the reader to try to assemble
query and response pairs into some sort of order. Certainly gives a very
real impression of 'chaos and confusion'.
In addition, she seems to be a proponent of the 'chuck them in at the
deep end' school of explanations. Pretty bad in the AU/Chanur stories,
but it really blew my mind in _The Faded Sun_, which was probably the
first time I had encountered a writer who seemed to delight in confusing
the reader this way.
I like it, but I can't claim it is an easy read (even when you are used
to it).
--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Micole Sudberg
> But what about C. J. Cherryh? There's a broad consensus that she's an
> excellent writer. I agree.
>
> She has one of the weirdest prose styles I've ever encountered. At first I
> thought she was one of those writers whose sense of story, place, and
> character sucks you in despite incredibly awkward, choppy writing. Now
> I've actually gotten to like it. But it's very strange. She uses grammar
> so oddly that if I didn't know better, I'd guess that her first language
> was something with an entirely different grammatical structure.
>
> Her language reads as _alien_. I think she does it on purpose. But I'd
> like some help figuring out _how_ she's doing it. She uses sentence
> fragments and lots of commas and odd dash placement, I know that. But I
> think there's something syntactically weird as well, and I can't figure out
> what it is.
I tend to break Cherryh down into early Cherryh and late Cherryh prose
styles, with the dividing point being somewhere around THE PALADIN or
CYTEEN. The later Cherryh books seem *slangier* -- more rushed and
pellmell and casual, in some ways, with more of a sense of the chaotic
flow of thought. It's really in the later Cherryh books that you get the
extended internal monologues and the playing around with stream of
consciousness that GSV and Rimrunner mention downthread; the earlier
Cherryh, like the first three Morgaine books and DOWNBELOW STATION, are
more stately and deliberately archaic. I'm particularly fond of the
opening of GATE OF IVREL, where she starts off with a sort of saga-voice,
omniscient tale-teller, genealogies and all, before settling down to a
fairly intimate third-person pov for the rest of the book. In both
styles, though, there are a lot of similarites -- the syntatical weirdness
you mention, the refusal to ever describe anything whole. Physically
Cherryh's world is all glimpses and isolated sensation; you're lucky to
get one sentence tossed in somewhere, describing the general gist or broad
overview of anything. Except that someone will suddenly sit down and
explain what's been going on *politically* for the past three hundred
pages, generally when you've given up all hope of ever figuring it out for
yourself; but that's quite different.
--
Micole Iris Sudberg
e-mail: mic...@aya.yale.edu
John Andrew Fairhurst
ka...@sirius.com says...
> She probably does do it on purpose, but I can't say I've ever noticed it
> especially.
>
Try the Chanur books for some really weird sentence construction if
you've not read them yet...
--
John Fairhurst
In Association with Amazon worldwide:
http://www.johnsbooks.co.uk
John M. Gamble
>
>But what about C. J. Cherryh? There's a broad consensus that she's an
>excellent writer. I agree.
>
>She has one of the weirdest prose styles I've ever encountered. At first I
>thought she was one of those writers whose sense of story, place, and
>character sucks you in despite incredibly awkward, choppy writing. Now
>I've actually gotten to like it. But it's very strange. She uses grammar
>so oddly that if I didn't know better, I'd guess that her first language
>was something with an entirely different grammatical structure.
>
>Her language reads as _alien_. I think she does it on purpose. But I'd
>like some help figuring out _how_ she's doing it. She uses sentence
>fragments and lots of commas and odd dash placement, I know that. But I
>think there's something syntactically weird as well, and I can't figure out
>what it is.
>
>
She's always had an "abrupt" style, but it became more pronounced with
The Pride Of Chanur. The Hani speech-style was choppy, i presume by
authorial intent, and for some reason... it just stuck. At least it
seems that way to me. Combine that with the fact that Cherryh gives
nothing away in her stories - you really have to work at it to figure out
what she's up to, and combine *that* with the fact that most of her
stories involve someone getting tossed into a situation where their prior
experience is of almost no help... well, lyrical writing might not be
what's required there.
-john
February 28 1997: Last day libraries could order catalogue cards
from the Library of Congress.
Vlatko Juric-Kokic
>The Hani speech-style was choppy, i presume by
>authorial intent,
Well, it seems that Pyanfar and others had a conversation style fit
for a command bridge where there may be not enough time to converse at
length.
vlatko
--
New address for _Neither Fish Nor Fowl_
http://www.webart.hr/nrnm/eng/index.htm
Interviews: Jo Walton, David Langford, Ken Macleod
vlatko.ju...@zg.tel.hr
Stevie Gamble
Juric-Kokic <vlatko.ju...@zg.tel.hr> writes:
>On 2 Jan 2001 05:25:46 GMT, jga...@ripco.com (John M. Gamble) wrote:
>
>>The Hani speech-style was choppy, i presume by
>>authorial intent,
>
>Well, it seems that Pyanfar and others had a conversation style fit
>for a command bridge where there may be not enough time to converse at
>length.
Indeed, but I think that it also reflects the sheer length of time Pyanfar had
worked with her crew. That also gives the comparison with 'the first man in
space', who at first didn't pick up at all on the verbal shorthand...
--
Stevie Gamble
The right to be heard does not automatically include
the right to be taken seriously.
Hubert Humphrey, 1965
Andrew Plotkin
> In article <01c06c69$a12fbc80$ee06500c@default>,
> Rachel Brown <r.ph...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> [snip]
>>
>>But what about C. J. Cherryh? There's a broad consensus that she's an
>>excellent writer. I agree.
>>
>>She has one of the weirdest prose styles I've ever encountered. At first I
>>thought she was one of those writers whose sense of story, place, and
>>character sucks you in despite incredibly awkward, choppy writing. Now
>>I've actually gotten to like it. But it's very strange. She uses grammar
>>so oddly that if I didn't know better, I'd guess that her first language
>>was something with an entirely different grammatical structure.
>>
>>Her language reads as _alien_. I think she does it on purpose. But I'd
>>like some help figuring out _how_ she's doing it. She uses sentence
>>fragments and lots of commas and odd dash placement, I know that. But I
>>think there's something syntactically weird as well, and I can't figure out
>>what it is.
> She's always had an "abrupt" style, but it became more pronounced with
> The Pride Of Chanur. The Hani speech-style was choppy, i presume by
> authorial intent, and for some reason... it just stuck. At least it
> seems that way to me.
I hold up Cherryh as one of the most brilliant writers-of-prose in
sci-fi. Dunno; I may be weird. :)
She's been quoted here as saying that after she writes a book, if any
given scene isn't doing three different things at the same time, that
scene gets cut.
I secretly suspect that she applies the same rule to individual
*sentences*. Words get off easier; a word only has to be doing one
thing, as long as it's individually critical to the sentence,
paragraph, and scene... I don't think it's syntactically weird, except
in that the filler-words are gone, which leaves interesting words
holding up the structure of the sentence, every time. And if the
meaning can be conveyed without a verb, the verb gets cut too.
Ditto for punctuation. A period, dash, or paragraph-break is always in
there to keep the rhythm of the sentence just so.
I'd quote examples, but my books are at home.
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the
borogoves..."
GSV Three Minds in a Can
wonderful Vlatko Juric-Kokic <vlatko.ju...@zg.tel.hr> asserted
>On 2 Jan 2001 05:25:46 GMT, jga...@ripco.com (John M. Gamble) wrote:
>
>>The Hani speech-style was choppy, i presume by
>>authorial intent,
>
>Well, it seems that Pyanfar and others had a conversation style fit
>for a command bridge where there may be not enough time to converse at
>length.
Indeed .. however it seems that =all= the Chanur characters (cf
_Chanur's Legacy_) are almost =always= in a state of total chaos, and
have become completely unable to string a whole sentence together, even
with their feet up in the galley. 8>.
Kyri
> think there's something syntactically weird as well, and I can't
figure out
> what it is.
>
much as in her earlier works, is this:
(exaggerated a little for effect)
They ran through the chaos of endless dead woods with branches slapping
their faces and, God, owls hooting everywhere; and he did.
With "he" being someone mentioned in a previous sentence.
I'm not sure what the name for that grammatical error is (and it is an
error, although she's doing it on purpose and I don't mind it). It can
certainly get confusing.
--Kyri
Sent via Deja.com
http://www.deja.com/
Stevie Gamble
There's quite a bit of stuff on her web-site about grammar, the Chicago style
manual, copy editors, colons, semi or otherwise and sentence structure. In the
Panel Room:
http://www.cherryh.com/www/panel_room.htm
she comments that:
"Sometimes the c/e's attempt to simplify the sentence actually reverses the
meaning, so if you're left scratching your head in wonder at an apparent lapse
of logic, consider what would happen with the substitution of one word for
another, the insertion of a comma where the author never intended one, or the
division of a sentence in which one statement led to the other [the useful
function of a colon] into two no-longer-related parts."
This would seem to fit your example rather nicely:-)
Oh, and she updated the web-site on Boxing Day, and if you don't like Word
horror stories it's probably best not to look.
Lois Tilton
> She's been quoted here as saying that after she writes a book, if any
> given scene isn't doing three different things at the same time, that
> scene gets cut.
I'd say this leanness is true of her earlier books and even to an extent
the longer =Foreigner= series, but when it comes to the =Fortress= books
the prose seems greatly inflated and bloated with backfilling and general
maundering to no particular purpose at all in the later volumes. Now, I
rather like this story, but I see no good reason why it has to take up
quite so many volumes. I would have liked to see a lot more scenes cut in
the last couple of volumes.
--
LT
www.darkspawn.com
DARKSPAWN: the vampire fantasy
Vlatko Juric-Kokic
<G...@quik.freeuk.com> wrote:
>Bitstring <ma935t8u35va1vme1...@news.cis.dfn.de> from the
>wonderful Vlatko Juric-Kokic <vlatko.ju...@zg.tel.hr> asserted
>>On 2 Jan 2001 05:25:46 GMT, jga...@ripco.com (John M. Gamble) wrote:
>>
>>>The Hani speech-style was choppy, i presume by
>>>authorial intent,
>>
>>Well, it seems that Pyanfar and others had a conversation style fit
>>for a command bridge where there may be not enough time to converse at
>>length.
>
>Indeed .. however it seems that =all= the Chanur characters (cf
>_Chanur's Legacy_) are almost =always= in a state of total chaos,
And they are not? :-)
> and
>have become completely unable to string a whole sentence together, even
>with their feet up in the galley. 8>.
Habit is a terrible thing. :-)
Cyril N. Alberga
question and this looks like as good a one as any.
I'm finally reading the paperback edition of Precursor, and hit a spot
where it feels as if a line or two got dropped in the editing/printing.
In the U.S. DAW paperback, page 357 ends:
"He says there are pressure seals below and if we open them we will
have a fatal decompression, Jago-ji."
"One understands," Jago said.
and page 358 begins:
And seized her gun, and scrambled up the rungs as if stung.
"One damned well does," Banichi's voice said out of the dark below
them....
Now -- is this just an illustration of the atevi better-than-human
hearing? Why does Jago scramble UP? Probably I'm dense, but does
anyone else feel that something is missing beyond Cherryh's style?
Comments anyone?
Cyril N. Alberga
Stevie Gamble
I hope you don't mind me repeating a post I did a couple of weeks ago on this
sort of point with Cherryh; I don't have your editition, and my own copy is
buried somewhere- I'm still trying to get all of the XMas related stuff put
away- but I think it probably fits fairly well.
There's quite a bit of stuff on her web-site about grammar, the Chicago style
manual, copy editors, colons, semi or otherwise and sentence structure. In the
Panel Room:
http://www.cherryh.com/www/panel_room.htm
she comments that:
"Sometimes the c/e's attempt to simplify the sentence actually reverses the
meaning, so if you're left scratching your head in wonder at an apparent lapse
of logic, consider what would happen with the substitution of one word for
another, the insertion of a comma where the author never intended one, or the
division of a sentence in which one statement led to the other [the useful
function of a colon] into two no-longer-related parts."
--