A Stick Figure Mona Lisa

Sadie took a steadying breath and placed her right foot squarely onto the high-wire. She followed with her left a few more inches ahead.

Forget the people. Just breathe. Don't think of the sawdust blanketing the floor a staggering distance below you, or the net calling with outstretched arms.

Sweat beaded at her temples, but she told herself it was from the blaze of the spotlights. After all, she'd been trained for this. So what if she had trouble tying the laces of her sneakers as long as she had mastered the high-wire? Her heartbeat accelerated, her veins flooding with lava-hot adrenaline. Then why was she losing her nerve now?

Sadie knew her balance was wrong for the next step. She thrashed for a handhold, in spite of the fatal fact that only open air would greet her outstretched fingertips. Her body swayed to one side, and she caught a glimpse of the stripped canvas walls as she slipped into a free fall...

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If you've kept up with me for any length of time, you might have gathered I enjoy reading the classics, those that might be considered the complex works of Dickens, Brontë, Verne, Austen, and the like.

I'm also fond of poetry and its metered manner of flowing with descriptive phrases that excite the imagination. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is a particular favorite of mine. Check out Excelsior for starters. His work is lovely, and by far more deserving of acclaim than many of the well-known poets the public touts.)

There is beauty in the arrangement of words and in the careful selection of adjectives that blooms with the radiance of a freshly picked bouquet! And while I understand in fiction you cannot bore the reader with an overabundance of descriptions and flowery phrases, there needs to be a balance (just like in Sadie's situation!) between keeping the pace of the story while not altogether ditching eloquence for directness.

I can't recall how I found it, but some years ago, I stumbled across The Hemingway Editor, and for a while, I utilized the free version by running my writing through the webpage app. It was visually appealing, highlighting certain issues with purples, blues, reds, and oranges. And being a goal-driven personality, I enjoyed reworking the sentences until the page was colorless and flaw-free.

That is, their idea of flawless, or rather their interpretation of Ernest Hemingway's style.

I haven't had any acquaintance with Hemingway's writing, other than reading a sample of a beginning chapter. But apparently, he was king of getting straight to the point by cutting out details with clipped sentences.

And I quickly realized that was the drive of the Hemingway Editor as well. Anything over a single subject-verb sentence shifts to orange, meaning hard to read, and then form a compound sentence, add a prepositional phrase, and ohhh... now, you are in the red! Who can comprehend such a complex sentence???

If you want to make the Hemingway Editor happy, write single, clipped sentences. Whoops. Let me rephrase that: do you want to make it happy? Write single sentences. Write clipped sentences.

And then there is always the irksome admonition of using simpler words. And I don't mean in place of those such as pulchritudinous, which is oddly enough defined as “beautiful”, but ones as commonplace as utilize. Are you kidding me?

I fear for the inexperienced writer using this app because it also marks passive voice (he was sat on by the cat as opposed to the cat sat on him) and adverbs as being wrong. If adhered to completely, the app would beat into your head that you should never use them, when sometimes these elements are necessary and a more active, assertive language is not called for. What if you intentionally wanted a character in your fiction to sound wishy-washy? He or she wouldn't be if you are bowing to every wish of the Editor.

I ran through some published works just to see what it thought of them.

Here is the celebrated A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens:

And Sir Knight of the Splendid Way by W. E. Cule - a great story with beautifully poetic language.

Drum roll!

Last of all... An excerpt from The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway himself!

It's laughable! Look at all that red! Not even the writing of their namesake passes the test!

The Hemingway Editor lays down these iron rules without any explanation of why you might want to use them sparingly. If a young writer blindly followed these instructions, their writing would be skewed into the app's own cookie-cutter form, robbing them of their unique writing voice.

See Dick run. See Jane skip. Makes me wonder if the creators of this Editor ever matured to a higher level of reading than the Dick and Jane primers.

This is a concern of mine with many of the assistant AI writing editors. With human editors, there are individual personalities, shaped by a myriad of life experiences, who are supplying the advice. But if every writer follows the instruction of a single programmed opinion, what will that look like in the mass production of writing out there?

My experience with the Hemingway Editor showed that this was definitely not the style I wished to pursue in my own writing. Sorry, Mr. Hemingway, but I prefer a little more gilt on those literary edges. So does Sadie.

The only problem is that this has become the dominating aim of our modern culture of quick comprehension and easy reading. Authors are so committed to keeping readers glued to the pages that a fast-paced rhythm must be maintained, much like the pace of an action film. Whether or not these authors are using the Hemingway Editor, I've noticed a shift in recent fiction where visual descriptions are passed over for what I would consider the bare bones of a character's actions. Or in one case, I've witnessed a well-known author describe the scene setting in clipped, jolting sentences, almost like a movie script, which elicited unnecessary tension from a casual scene by doing so.

But is this enriching the reader, along with entertaining them? Or just gratifying their need for instant pleasure?

As I mentioned in my last post, reading and comprehension skills are at a drastic low in schools and colleges, yet instead of striving to improve the latest generation, we are all falling into line and essentially dumbing down our material for their deteriorating intellect.

We as mentors and teachers are failing!

I don't mean we need to fall back to the Austenesque way of writing, but I believe we've allowed some of the beauty of the writing craft to slip through our fingers by our craving for fast entertainment.

Writing is an art, and art should never be rushed. Otherwise, we might be in danger of reducing the Mona Lisa to a stick figure!

What do you think? Have you noticed a change in recent years in the books you've read? Do you like it?

~Alissa