Lexical variety

Donna Tartt in conversation with her editor, Michael Pietsch.

For me — showing a half-finished manuscript is tricky. Just as a bird will get spooked and abandon her eggs if some outside party comes around and makes too much noise or pokes around the nest too intrusively — well, that’s what it’s like for me if I show work too early and I get a lot of editorial suggestions at the wrong time. Even if you need, and want, a second opinion, it can be dangerous to have people telling you what they think you ought to add, or cut, before you’ve even finished telling your story. One loses heart; one loses energy and interest. Or at least I do.

And on style:

I’m not saying that the writer’s voice is always the highest standard; only that a lot of writers who are fine stylists and whose work I love wouldn’t make it past a contemporary copy editor armed with the Chicago Manual, including some of the greatest writers and stylists of the 19th and 20th century. It’s not as if we’re the French, with the Academy, striving to keep the language pure — fine to correct honest mistakes, but quite apart from questions of punctuation and grammar — of using punctuation and grammar for cadence — English is such a powerful and widely spoken language precisely because it’s so flexible, and capacious: a catchall hybrid that absorbs and incorporates everything it comes into contact with. Lexical variety, eccentric constructions and punctuation, variant spellings, archaisms, the ability to pile clause on clause, the effortless incorporation of words from other languages: flexibility, and inclusiveness, is what makes English great; and diversity is what keeps it healthy and growing, exuberantly regenerating itself with rich new forms and usages. Shakespearean words, foreign words, slang and dialect and made-up phrases from kids on the street corner: English has room for them all. And writers — not just literary writers, but popular writers as well — breathe air into English and keep it lively by making it their own, not by adhering to some style manual that gets handed out to college Freshmen in a composition class. There’s your philippic, I guess.