We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 109
WINTER 2007
REVIEWS
Non Fiction
Danielle Wood
The Little Red Writing Book – Mark Tredinnick
UNSW Press, 2006Before I pick a fight with Mark Tredinnick’s The Little Red Writing Book, I want to declare how much I loved reading it. Like Tredinnick, I care for the English language. I can get pleasurably worked up about a misplaced apostrophe, just as I can get deliriously excited about a perfectly placed comma. I blame genetics: my great-aunt carries a thick Texta in her handbag for the purpose of removing the superfluous ‘d’s from her grocer’s ‘advocadoes’.
Tredinnick says he wrote his red-jacketed soldier of a stylebook out of frustration with pedestrian prose and bureaucratic babble. He calls The Little Red Writing Book ‘a short cry – a yelp – for grace’, and at the end of some of his chapters, I wanted to stand up and applaud him.
Tredinnick usefully sets out the relationship between writing and speaking: ‘Writing that’s any good sounds like someone talking well,’ as well as the connections between writing and thinking: ‘Good, sustained critical thinking underlies good, clear writing: you could almost say that good writing is critical thinking. It is critical thinking resolved and put down on paper - elegantly.’
Sections of The Little Red Writing Book were written while Tredinnick held residencies in Tasmanian national parks (part of the winnings from his Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize), and he returns often to the metaphor of good writing as a diverse and complex ecosystem, requiring for its health sentences that are ‘long and short, complex and simple’. His field guide to sentence types is excellent.
He is wonderful on verbs and excellent at outing the ‘false gods of grammar’. For example, that one should never (gleefully) split an infinitive, start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’, or end a sentence with a preposition.
A particularly memorable chapter is ‘Grace’, which begins with an elegy to a 1930s Lord Elgin wristwatch. To Tredinnick, this watch represents tradition, style, old-fashioned grace and civility: the things he says characterise good writing in English.
In front of my creative writing students, I wear my pedantry as something a bit daggy and old-fashioned, but daggy and old-fashioned in a good way, like a fondness for knitting, or owning a Nigella Lawson faux-1950s lemon squeezer. Tredinnick’s, on the other hand, is the James Bond school of pedantry: elegant and enviably cool.
But he’s not too cool to make some lofty claims. We need good writing, he says, not only for artistic reasons, but for political ones: ‘In these times, more than ever, we need a little depth and care, generosity and poise... We need, in other words, to rediscover the syntax of civility and the diction of democracy.’ That was one of my applause moments.
But now to the fight. Which has, to be truthful, been going on in my own mind for some time, quite independent of The Little Red Writing Book.
It’s a fight in which the part of me that wholeheartedly endorses Tredinnick’s thesis is hectored by another part of me: the part that suspects there’s actually something a little undemocratic, a touch conservative, a tad limiting, about stating with such certainty what is – and what is not – good writing. Especially when talking about creative writing, as Tredinnick is for at least part of the time.
There is a brief chapter in The Little Red Writing Book titled ‘On Strangeness’ – listing Virginia Woolf and Tim Winton (among others) as distinctive voices – but this is not a book about experimenting with new forms of writing. It is a book about writing within a tradition. And it seems to me that Tredinnick’s Orwellian, Strunk-and-Whiteian approach – clean and cool and stylish and well-mannered as it is – really talks to only one kind of writer in English. Or the writer in only one kind of English.
What about writing whose power is not in its civility but in its shocking rudeness? Not in its refinement, but in its rawness? Not in its orderliness, but in its chaos? What about those forms of astonishing writing that we cannot yet even imagine? The English language will change - is changing - and what is ‘timeless’ right now will not be so forever.
How can we give rules to the aspiring creative writers who need them, without constraining the talent of those who don’t? I don’t know, but The Little Red Writing Book didn’t bring me any closer to an answer.
Ultimately there is something mysterious about what makes for ‘good writing’, and this will never be pinned down in any stylebook. I suppose we must simply hope that all those who are talented enough to break every rule and ignore all advice know who they are and are courageous enough to do it.
DANIELLE WOOD is the author of two books, The Alphabet of Light and Dark and Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales for Girls. She lectures in creative writing at the University of Tasmania.
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