/lit/ - Literature

>>22235470

The part I feel you're missing out on is the thing that separates a bad book today from a good book from one hundred years ago - it is not merely a writer's job to take "everyday language" and make it "fresh and meaningful," it's to take any language - any language at all - then make it fresh and meaningful!

There's a reason that people incessantly quote snippets and taglines of H.P. Lovecraft's works. All that "eternal lying never dies, stranger aeons aaaahhh help me niggerman" even though he was deploying language that was considered second-hand with age within his own time. Somehow 86 years or so after his death readers still find his writing uniquely gripping and writers find it frustratingly difficult to imitate.

The problem is that when a writer unintentionally "sounds archaic," it is usually an indemnity on the fact that their language has no meaning. "Curses and balderdash you swineson villain!" said the hero, is not the damning epithet now that it might have been in say, uh, pre-Colonial France? Or worse it's grey prose that has no freshness at all. It simply goes on and on and on and not once does it threaten to raise the reader's pulse past the resting point or inspire an emotion greater than flatulence.

When a writer intentionally tries to "sound archaic" they are cutting out for themselves a massive block of work. They have to take well-worn roads of past-travelled literary adventures and make them fresh again. I read a lot of detective fiction, I like it a lot, but this is the constant war that writers in that field must wage. Debts are owed to story tellers like Dashiell Hammet and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of such a size and shape that writers have to work overtime just to avoid accidentally borrowing entire books worth of material before they get started.