Poetic Fashion
by Wendy Shaw, Oracle of Narrative Style

     This season, you are the mysterious figure retreating into the gloom.  Fabrics shimmer and melt; silhouettes billow and slouch.  And color?  If black is an exclamation point, gray is a question mark.  And it is everywhere.  From mist to dark smoke, gray conceals and beckons.  Dresses are layered with chiffon trailing past the hem, trenches drape, and trousers (still skinny) are topped by enigmatic filmy jackets.  At times you want to be known, and at other times you want to be discovered.

Your clothing is the first sphere beyond your body over which you have influence and through which you can tell your story.  Your clothing is the atmosphere in which you surround yourself, the timbre of your most intimate space.  Sometimes it announces you to the world, the story of who you are, and where you’ve been.  But your attire can, if you choose, be the question.

---

 

Degenerate Prose

Writing isn't therapy. If it is, don't let anyone read it.

 The dictionary is generous with the word degenerate, offering scads of meanings. But for our purposes two will suffice to explain this column — to decline from a standard of normalcy and to allow two degrees of freedom on either side. 

Don't Waste My Time

Here's what's getting my panties in a bunch of late: loose writers. Writers who use up five words to do the work of two, and trying to make me feel  stupid while wasting my time, which could be spent playing Space Invaders online.

Loose writers believe that if they tell me the sky was "blue," I may not be able to picture it.  So they add that the sky was "clear and blue." Or they think that if they tell me a home was "destroyed," I may picture a few scorch marks so they write, "completely destroyed" so I'm no confused.

And, of course, there are all those "thats."

Compare:
I'm thinking that I should go jogging.
I'm thinking I should go jogging.

I know it seems a small thing — one little that. But one novel can include thousands of extra thats, which wastes 20 minutes, in which time I could play three games of Space Invaders.

Let's look at some of the more subtle variations of loose writing in actual published books. Details have been changed to protect these authors' identities.

"The bedroom door was half open, revealing several different shades of blue..."

Several? Different? Shades? (Note the plural form.) Would "several shades" tell us anything less? Would "different shades?" What about "revealing shades or orange?"

Two loose words in a in a twelve-word sentence, that's 8 percent slop.

Another

"After about three seconds, I wasn't even trying..."

About three? Three is a precise number of seconds. I know because I can kill three invading aliens in three seconds. A writer could possibly get away with “about four seconds,” because for some reason even numbers feel less precise, as do multiples of five.

Looseness like this nurtures a subtle distrust of the author.

This lack of precision could be a humorous writing tool. For example, "After about approximately 7.5 seconds...." Here the lack of precision is exaggerated enough to make it funny.

Another common loose writing syndrome is naming the direct object, when it's obvious.

"This illness is a theft, a horror, and too close to a rhythm of my own experience for me to be able to cope with it."

Let's ignore the "own" for now (whenever you say "my" we assume the "own.") Instead let's focus on the "with it." Would you fail to understand this sentence, "The illness is a theft, a horror, and too close to a rhythm of my own experience for me to be able to cope."

For that matter, do we need the "to be able"?  "The illness is a theft, a horror, and too close to the rhythm of my experience for me to cope." Nothing lost and one more dead space invader.

Not all loose writing is bad. Here are two instances when it’s wonderful.

1. To show cluttered minds, blow-hardedness, fear, indecision, and so forth.

2.  To keep a rhythm or chatty voice.

3.  To be funny.

BTW, irregardless is not a word, "use" will always work instead of "utilize" in all instances and save me .15 seconds for .057 alien kills.

Assignment:  1. Edit any graffiti you come across.  Send a photo of an edited graffiti for the next issue of The Red Office. 2. Force yourself to trim a third of the words from a page.  Such drastic cutting will make you aware of your loose tendencies. 

 

---

Cheap Wine Review

 We have our first-ever boxed-wine review. If you've been paying attention, you've seen that the boxed wine selection has exploded in recent months. We have, of course, conscientiously been trying them all.

And the winner is ...Delicato both their Shiraz and Merlot. Not only is this a great house wine, but at least in our neck of the woods it comes down to $3.50 a bottle.

Delicato, a $13.95 Shiraz and Merlot from California — “Buck the Stigma. Embrace the Box.”

“A light nose without being watery, fitting with all things boxed — box stores, fox in a box, you could probably even drink it while watching boxing. Frankly, we doubt the box actually contains the equivalent of four bottles. The box confuses all of us who've studied the geometry of volume. No doubt it's a quantum thing. ” — Mark 

Seduction rating: generous friend

Buying tip: When serving boxed wine, transfer to a fabulous decanter and add a wine necklace, like these kitsch ones. Or, better yet, take one of your necklaces with lots of flash and wrap it around the bottle. Hide the box.