What Is Received Text?
When I first heard the term “received text,” its meaning
wasn’t immediately clear. I thought back to my Catholic elementary school
lessons, and veritable old Moses grabbing a pair of stone tablets out of the
sky. Received text—good? Important? Kinda heavy?
In fact, “received text” isn’t a
good thing. It is a form of cliché, received from the nebulous lingo of lazy
writing, stereotypes, aphorisms, business jargon, and slang re-digested
back into soundbites and advertising copy. It’s our lingua franca, for
better or worse: useful enough when it supplies you with easy
rejoinders while stuck in an awkward conversation, but unhelpful when you
are striving for nuance and originality in your fiction.
Most of us can identify a cliché:
fast as lightning. A penny saved is a penny earned. You can’t make a silk purse
out of a sow’s ear. (Actually, that one amuses me.) But the English language is
full of humdrum, often nonsensical phrases that suck the life out of prose: a
home-cooked meal, humble abode, gone downhill in recent years, soon learned, at
present, stunning beachfront, fast friends, terrible mistake, flirted
shamelessly, rotating cast, newly minted, perfect opportunity, let loose…
etc. Any of these can be funny if you use them in full awareness of their
unoriginality, and delight your reader with them in an unexpected, even absurd
context: in short, if you reclaim the element of surprise.
Because that’s what good writing is. Surprising.
Interesting. Creative. If you show up at a restaurant expecting artful
food from the kitchen, but get a bowl of pablum, why stay to
finish the meal? Clichés are mush. If, however, the food looks okay, and has
some flavor but reminds you of every meal you’ve ever eaten at Olive Garden,
then you’ll probably finish it but never be back. Received text ultimately has
the same effect on a reader; and frankly, though I'm loath to waste
money on a mediocre meal, I would prefer the loss to having
wasted ten or fifteen hours of the weekend on a mediocre novel.
Fiction is the place to be bold and brave. To tell
your truth, no matter how weird it sounds. Recognizing lifeless imagery is
half of the task, but the other half—fixing it—is
addressed outside of the page, too. To live a writer’s life doesn’t mean
wearing peacoats, drinking yourself past the fear of a blank page, or needing
to move to a villa in Italy before you can pen a magnum opus.
It does, however, mean keeping a notebook. It means
noticing what you think and feel. It means taking your eyes off the damn
ball once in a while, and noticing the details that are always around
you every single second of the day. It begins with growing once again
familiar with your vast capacity for originality, and taking
the risk of writing it down. We're all born with these abilities. We grow
up and learn to be dull. And then, when we make a commitment to improving our
writing craft, we get to relearn our creativity, and cheerfully experiment
with it in the lines of a manuscript.
Examples
It is impossible for this single blog post to expunge
received text from your writing once and for all. The best I can do is
illuminate the first few lamps along the road. So: I've had fun
draining the life out of six of my recent, favorite lines in
fiction. I used word choices and phrases that I often see as an
editor (the underlined parts). The information is the same, but the writing is
bland, vague, and off-the-cuff. After each one, you'll see the much-better
original.
1. She had an unmemorable face and bleach-blonde hair,
and I was thinking to myself that if I were in her boyfriend's
shoes I wouldn't want to touch her with a ten-foot pole.
"She is peroxided and greasy, with the flat, stunted
features of generations of malnutrition, and privately I am thinking that if I
were her boyfriend I would be relieved to trade her even for a hairy cellmate
named Razor." (From In the Woods,
by Tana French)
2.Rosie's mom was always a bundle of nerves.
She was rich and had the luxury of holding a grudge and unchallenged
stereotypes. Her fridge held nothing but condiments and old bread.
Charlie didn't know what she ate, and once suggested to Rosie that maybe
she was a vampire, but she didn't think it was funny.
"Rosie's mother was a high strung bundle of barely
thought-through prejudices, worries, and feuds. She lived in a magnificent flat
in Wimple Street with nothing in the enormous fridge but bottles of vitaminized
water and rye crackers. . . . Fat Charlie thought it highly likely that Rosie's
mum went out at night in bat form to suck the blood from sleeping innocents. He
had mentioned this theory to Rosie once, but she had failed to see the humor in
it." (From Anansi
Boys, by Neil Gaiman)
3. Dench was a shifty-eyed hippy.
"This was the grifter in Dench, something violent in
the name of freedom . . ." (From "Wings,"
by Lorrie Moore)
4. That was so typical. WASPy people
will make a fuss about a lost kitten, but we Dominicans, we
believe in tough love.
"That's white people for you. They lose a cat and it's
an all-points bulletin, but we Dominicans, we lose a daughter and we might not
even cancel our appointment at the salon." (From The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but Junot Díaz)
5. He looked surprised, and she could see realization
dawning in his eyes. He was naive and coddled, and she wished
he would toughen up.
"He looked at her in surprise and his eyes changed
slowly, like land growing lighter after a cloud passes. He was naive, and it
infuriated her the way he still possessed the luxury of disappointment."
(From Be
Safe I Love You, by Cara Hoffman)
6. She laughed in the face of sadness.
"She seemed to be the only one who could laugh out of
sadness, a sadness that made the laughter deeper and louder still, like the
echo of a scream from the bottom of a well." (From The
Farming of Bones, by Edwidge Danticat)
Sarah Cypher, Editor at The Threepenny Editor
sarah@threepennyeditor.com
Feel free to share a few of your own stinkers with
me on Twitter (@threepenny).
Read more about Project 2015--making this year your
breakthrough year—here.
