Friday, August 12, 2011
Cross out Beezus!
I just saw two three four new YA novels indulging employing annoying pervasive strike-throughs to indicate a narrator's dithering second thoughts or transparently self-buffing lies strategic rearrangements of the truth. I think this might be 2012's dead girl OCD selectively mute protagonist of choice. It's kind of like when everyone gets the same toy for Christmas an interesting new post-modern narrative choice that reveals the self-centeredness reflexivity of the typing writing process.
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14 comments:
Falling out of my Aeron chair with laughter. Bravo.
Careful, GA, those things sit high!
Thank you for this!
I blame--uh, credit?--Wintergirls for this. It's a powerful book, still, but I disliked the typography as a substitute for emotion.
This refers to what book, rather books?
Not mine, dear, designed for a person who is 4' 11".
Dkm, prefer to let the reviews reveal all.
Uh-oh...there's a crossed-out word in my new novel ms. Little did I know that was already totally over! :)
Oh AF, as that guy on the last thread wrote, "Once, yes, once for a lark /
Twice, though, loses the spark . . ."
ROTFL!
Maybe the authors accidentally sent in their manuscripts with the "track changes" option left on.
I felt the technique worked in Wintergirls as it showed the duality of the thinking and the dueling inner voices that was part of the disease of anorexia.
If it's just a hip new thing that doesn't serve a purpose, then I am not so enamored.
There's almost no technique or style choice that I am unilaterally against.
We could blame it on the Governor of Delaware, who used it to great effect in his letter to M.T. Anderson a couple of years ago:
http://library.blogs.delaware.gov/2009/09/15/a-big-thank-you-from-governor-jack-markell/
My voracious 11 year old reader was excited to read Shatter Me, which employs a liberal quantity of strike throughs. The tag lines and cover had her salivating but she hated the technique. I tried to get her to talk about why the author might have done it or what didn't work about it but she couldn't verbalize anything but disgust, but that she verbalized forcefully.
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