I have been reading RobertKaplan's good Mediterranean Winter and came upon this good advice given him by Patrick Leigh Fermor, the still- living greatest travel writer of the Twentieth Century (and if he completes the third volume of his trilogy before he dies, an early contender for the title in the Twenty- first).
Fermor's advice, which he claimed he was given by Evelyn Waugh, was that good writing requires "euphony, clarity, and concision".
The first is particularly hard in a culture that no longer recites poetry. Read your drafts aloud!
In her other blog, The Merry Scribbler, PrairieMary has some good things to say about the "architectonics" of writing-- and it is NOT pretentious. I may have more on this later.
1 comment:
I'm glad you've got "Mediterranean Winter"! I just devoured it when I got it last year. I'm convinced it's Kaplan's best so far. In that book he led me to John Julius Norwich's "Kingdom of the Sun" which you ought to read if you haven't yet. Astonishing cultural cross-pollination in the 12th century kingdom of Norman Sicily: Romanesque churches incorporating Byzantine Greek mosaics with the Lord's Prayer carved in bas-relief in Arabic on the wall. Too much!
I just bought Fermor's "A Time of Gifts" and "Between the Woods and the Water" and am half through the first. You can certainly see Fermor's influence on Kaplan's style.
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