Hemingway and Bulwer-Lytton

It’s one of the most entrenched rules of 20th and 21st-century writing: The fewer words you use, the better. Terse prose is good prose, so common wisdom goes; stripping words out of a sentence inherently improves it, while adding words inherently worsens it.

This rule goes back 100 years to Strunk’s original 1918 Elements of Style. Omitting extra words and passive voice are two of Strunk’s key rules:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.

Strunk’s influence on modern writing cannot be overstated. Even as linguistic prescriptivism as a whole goes out of fashion, Strunk remains easily the most popular style guide for today’s writers, who generally adhere strictly to his ruleset with little to no criticism. Even writers who have never read Strunk follow his rules without realizing it.

Two writers stand as guideposts to the Strunkian school of thought: Ernest Hemingway and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Hemingway, with his superlatively terse prose, is the Platonic ideal of good writing; Bulwer-Lytton, with his long, florid sentences, is a literary pariah, the exemplar of bad writing. The Hemingway App is a program that purports to improve your writing by stripping out adverbs and breaking up any sentence that ventures much past the 15-word mark; the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is a satirical contest to produce the worst writing imaginable. Neither of these is particularly controversial.

But here’s the thing: I like Bulwer-Lytton. I don’t like Hemingway.

I inhaled The Last Days of Pompeii, every blind flower girl, every doomed lover, every Christian fed to lions. I’m at best grudgingly respectful of Hemingway. And I’m hardly alone. Bulwer-Lytton was a bestselling author in his day, after all, whereas Hemingway is mostly known as that guy everyone has to read in high school and hates. Why is the gold standard of good writing an author hardly anyone voluntarily reads?

This is not to just turn that order upside down and proclaim Bulwer-Lytton the best prose stylist of all time. But it seems snobbish to declare that his writing is bad according to a universally objective standard and all those 19th-century readers who thought they enjoyed his books were wrong and only mistakenly believed that because Strunk hadn’t yet proclaimed the Gospel of Terse Prose to them. Point is, I liked the Bad Author more than the Good Author, so if you want to write a book I will enjoy, you should probably write more like the former and less like the latter.

Strunk still has things to teach us. But he also taught generations of writers to always use male pronouns instead of gender-neutral ones. Not all of his rules are worth following, and not all of them are as absolute as he makes them out to be. They are one set of guidelines appropriate for one style of writing which is the dominant style today because of social conventions and the influence of famous authors, not because it’s innately superior.

And check out The Last Days of Pompeii. It’s more entertaining than you might expect.