H.P. Lovecraft is remembered as a brilliant fantasist, a creator of a completely unique universe of horror. Heâs also remembered, unfortunately, as a bigot. But the author whose headâto the chagrin of someâprovided the model for the World Fantasy Award is not often remembered as a particularly good writer. Or rather, I should say, a particularly good stylist. His writing can sound stiflingly archaic, overstuffed with Victorianisms. âHis prose, âwrites Scott Malthouse, âcan be turgid and adjectives suffocating,â and âhis characters tend to be as thin as the paper theyâre printed on.â
Writers love him, Malthouse argues, because he was such an original âworld builder,” not because he was a fine artist. Elizabeth Bear at Tor echoes the sentiment, writing that Lovecraft’s work is “criticized for its style, for its purpleness and density and failures of structure,â yet still evokes such a potent response that âthe Lovecraftian universe must be considered a collaborative effort at this point,â since so many writers have furthered his âappealingly bleakâ vision. You can download a good part of his collected works in ebook and audiobook formats here.
So perhaps he isnât such a bad writer after all? In any case, heâs certainly a very distinctive one whose style, like Joseph Conradâs, say, or even William Faulknerâs, endears readers precisely for its feverish excesses. Lovecraft himself was very self-conscious about his craft and took writing very seriouslyâenough to have published a lengthy, highly detailed essay called âLiterary Compositionâ which tackles in several paragraphs a host of issues the writer must contend with: grammar, âreading,â vocabulary, âelemental phrases,â description, narration, âfictional narration,â âunity, mass, coherence,â and âforms of composition.â We wonât recite the whole of his advice hereâyou can read the whole thing for yourself. But to give you some of the flavor of Lovecraftâs pedagogy, we bring you his list of twenty âtypes of mistakesâ young writers make.
See his complete list below.
- Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos.
- Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep.
- Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved
- Ambiguous use of pronouns.
- Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like âbetween you and I,â or âLet we who are loyal, act promptly.â
- Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs.
- Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as âhe was graduated from college,â or vice versa, as âhe ingratiated with the tyrant.â
- Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as âhe was graduated from college,â or vice versa, as âhe ingratiated with the tyrant.â
- Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as âIf I was he, I should do otherwiseâ, or âHe said the earth wasâ
- The split infinitive, as âto calmly â
- The erroneous perfect infinitive, as âLast week I expected to have metâ
- False verb-forms, as âI pled with him.â
- Use of like for as, as âI strive to write like Pope wrote.â
- Misuse of prepositions, as âThe gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,â or âThe gold was divided between the five men.â
- The superfluous conjunction, as âI wish for you to do this.â
- Use of words in wrong senses, as âThe book greatly intrigued meâ, âLeave me take thisâ, âHe was obsessed with the ideaâ, or âHe is a meticulousâ
- Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as âa strange phenomenaâ, or âtwo stratas of cloudsâ.
- Use of false or unauthorised words, as burglarise or supremest.
- Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness.
- Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its.
Most of this is solid, common sense writing advice. Some of it isnât. As with all things Lovecraft, you would be wise to use your discretion. A full read of Lovecraftâs treatise on composition will give you some sense of how to begin writing your own Lovecraft pastiche. For even more of his advice on the writing of fictionâparticularly, as he called it, âweird fiction,â see his list of five tips for horror writing, which we featured in October.
Related Content:
H.P. Lovecraft Gives Five Tips for Writing a Horror Story, or Any Piece of âWeird Fictionâ
H.P. Lovecraftâs Classic Horror Stories Free Online: Download Audio Books, eBooks & More
Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Documentary)
Stephen Kingâs Top 20 Rules for Writers
Writing Tips by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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H.P. Lovecraft Highlights the 20 âTypes of Mistakesâ Young Writers Make
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