So I've started reading a collection of Clark Ashton Smith pastiche, and have come up with a maxim:
People who try to write like Clark Ashton Smith
Don't.
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John D. Rateliff
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6 comments:
He's not the only one.
"I have never seen any imitation Dunsany that consisted of anything beyond a lot of elaborate made-up names, some vague descriptions of gorgeous cities and unmentionable dooms, and a great many sentences beginning with 'And.'" - Ursula K. Le Guin
LOL... both the original post and this comment have made me laugh. But I would love further elaboration re: CAS. Myself, I would rather writers emulate CAS than HPL, I think he was a much, much better author (and I do enjoy HPL's work).
Hi David.
Yes, Le Guin's classic piece showed that she Got It.
On rare occasions a writer can recreate the style of another with more or less success (Kuttner's "The Misguided Halo" is a classic example, as is the affectionate pastiche of Peter Cannon's "The Rummy Affair of Young Charlie"). More often the mannerisms can be imitated but not whatever spark makes the original worth reading in the first place: we get a lot of this with Lovecraft and Howard and (god knows) Holmes. Sometimes we get neither the original author's style nor an effective substitute for it. That's the case with the stories I'm currently reading.
--John R.
Dear Paul W.
Further elaboration: I was trying to convey that Smith was a brilliant stylist, a far better writer that Lovecraft or Howard on a sentence by sentence basis. But what Smith does is difficult, and often unappreciated (cf. Darrell Schweitzer's for having a bigger vocabulary than his pulp peers). To take another example: I was recently looking through a rewritten version of Hodgson's THE NIGHT LAND that translates the book from Hodgson's original dialect (which he invented for the sole purpose of writing this book in it) into modern American English. The present day author also cuts the text by about half. That's not even pastiche. I'm not even sure what to call it.
By comparison, the collection of stories set in Averoigne is relatively benign.
But whatever it is I think we're better off with Smith himself.
--John R.
Paul:
Sometimes I write a complete coherent sentence. Then other times I've already hit the Publish Comment button when I notice something like this:
"(cf. Darrell Schweitzer's for having a bigger vocabulary than his pulp peers)"
--a sentence that wd be improved by a verb:
"(cf. Darrell Schweitzer's attack on Smith for having a bigger vocabulary than his pulp peers)"
--and, I might add, Schweitzer himself.
Thank you! I never trust myself as a judge of style - my own writing gets savaged in peer review enough that I sometimes wonder if I can write at all! I certainly am not certain I can point to elements that comprised CAS's style. But I have felt his tales are distinctive without being repetitive. And I liked that he seemed to understand and use the full range of human experience, including romance which HPL ignored and REH treated like the very young man that he was.
It's fascinating that some have attacked CAS re: vocabulary, I never get the sense that he tried to show it off, unlike HPL who I believe at his worst mistook vocabulary for learning (as did, IMO, Gygax, but that's a very different kettle of fish).
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