Friday, March 16, 2018

Fluff or Self-Reference

I would like to respond to my own post:

http://privyfisherman.blogspot.com/2015/10/our-poor-way-of-writting.html

Specifically this:

    But no writer lives up to the standards that these theologians set up for us. These standards show how bad we are in explaining to our audience what we are trying to give them through our words. One is a good theologian, if he recognizes the limitations of us prose writers.

    I wrote the above in response from an article from Reformation21, a blog that is still on my list to the right, but I have not read it for a while. I remember being provoked to write the above in response to the demand to right well because our theology requires it. There is the idea that we should conform to certain standards, but there is also the idea of how we relate to our own standards. I would like to write about the latter, our own standards, rather than the former, other standards that we incorporate into our own ways of doing things.

    So I recognize that what I said about the above was written in defense of my own writing style, which varies from writer to writer. But what is style? Is a list of rules that writers should follow? Is it a Hemingway-esque way of keeping yourself under control by not talking about such rules? Such questions reveal the writer's influence on himself, which is covered in the Anxiety of Influence that Harold Bloom has promulgated throughout his books meant for the general public. And there is also the fact that I have left the misspelling of the word "writting" all these years. But 'style' is a way of speaking about how a particular writer writes.

    I would not like to describe 'styles of writing' but rather just show them to you, the reader. For example, if I was on a basketball court, and you asked me to describe, "How does one stargaze with a telescope during a starry night?", that would be an inappropriate question because I would be busy shooting the ball, maybe, and not be preoccupied rather by the Big Dipper, which would be off my radar at the time. So something like mechanics (grammar, spelling, and so on) is not 'style' because every writer has to obey those rules but they all follow them in different ways depending upon their skill-level.

   How you put together a sentence, which was the topic of a book that I have just read, depends upon your style as a writer. So when I bring up this topic, I feel that I am obligated as a writer to not just show you but to also tell you what that is. My style is that of the labyrinth process, which I have discussed before. I would like to say that I have no style and that I was influenced by no writers but that would be false. So the labyrinth method is writing something that references another work, like the above link to what I have wrote before. But I don't always follow that way because sometimes there are much better ways of writing than to reference someone else's work. But I cannot say that what I write is original with me.

  To conclude, the above paragraph about how theologians should recognize the limitations of writers is a disagreement between writing styles and not theology. I agree that prose should conform to certain standards but the way that they insist upon the correct way to write for Trinitarian-believers is not going to help you, if you decide to become a writer of sorts. It is helpful to suggest good mechanics but it is unhelpful to insist that my way of writing should be studied by all writers because of its conformity to the set style, which I am only aware of at a surface-level anyway.

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