I’m thinking about entering Slate’s contest: Can you write like Sarah Palin? I’m always going on about how badly my writing is going, but I don’t know if I can write this badly:
“As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on.”
and
“I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier.”
–from Going Rogue, Sarah Palin’s ghost writer
This is so unbelievably poorly written, I don’t know where to start. If I brought this to a writer’s workshop, my fellow writers would say something like, “What a great use of diction to characterize your narrator as a naive, high school girl filled with silly romantic notions and bad poetry.”
The flowery, incomprehensible nonsense I’ve quoted above reminds me of the bad poetry written by Emmeline Grangerford in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d
And did young Stephen sicken,
And did young Stephen die?
And did the sad hearts thicken,
And did the mourners cry?
No; such was not the fate of
Young Stephen Dowling Bots;
Though sad hearts round him thickened,
‘Twas not from sickness’ shots.
No whooping-cough did rack his frame,
Nor measles drear, with spots;
Not these impaired the sacred name
Of Stephen Dowling Bots.
Despised love struck not with woe
That head of curly knots,
Nor stomach troubles laid him low,
Young Stephen Dowling Bots.
O no. Then list with tearful eye,
Whilst I his fate do tell.
His soul did from this cold world fly,
By falling down a well.
They got him out and emptied him;
Alas it was too late;
His spirit was gone for to sport aloft
In the realms of the good and great.
My boyfriend made some great edits to the Palin lines:
“I walked happily through the forest.”
and
“It smelled of Autumn.”
What a huge improvement. These edits remind me of some advice Chekhov gave novelist Maxim Gorky:
“It is intelligible when I write, ‘The man sat down on the grass’; it is intelligible because it is clear and does not impede the reader’s attention. Conversely, I will be unintelligible and tax the reader’s brain if I write: ‘The tall, narrow-chested man of average build, who had a short, red beard, sat down on the green grass, already trampled by passersby; sat down noiselessly, timidly, and fearfully glancing around him.’ One’s brain cannot grasp this at once, yet fiction must be grasped at once, on the spot.” –p 37, The Making of a Story, Alice LaPlante, Norton 2007
After all, Palin’s memoir is fiction, isn’t it?
