sherry Thomas is a debut author whose book has me salivating. Ever since I read the excerpt posted on her website, I’ve been dying to know both what happens next and what came before. Her writing–or at least, what I’ve seen of it–is clear and evocative. It hits me right in the solar plexus.

She posted on her blog about beauty in writing. Part of this reminded me, shockingly, of something I’ve never quite been able to forget.

One of the most vivid memories I have is of Ekaterina Gordeeva & Sergei Grinkov’s 1988 skating program. I was 11 at the time, and the performance still blazes in my memory. It was so vivid that I remembered the names to this date–and I’m the girl who never remembers anyone’s name.

I adore beautiful things. I love beautiful prose. Janine mentioned people who write brilliantly, and I love every single one of those authors. I especially second the Julie Anne Long mention.

I sincerely doubt there are many authors who think, “well, today I shall pen some truly dreadful prose.” I also doubt there are many writers who even think, “well, my writing sucks but at least I get sold. Why mess with success?” I suspect that everyone thinks they are an excellent writer. The real problem, I think, is that the admonition to “write beautifully” is too often taken as an admonition to write painfully unnatural prose.
It would be impolitic of me to call out offending authors, but I think we’ve all read them. The truly abysmal writing that I see (not just in genre romance) may well result from people attempting to write beautifully and failing. These are the books where the author consistently uses “brilliant orbs” instead of “eyes” and where overblown description haunts every paragraph. These are the books where dull, lifeless description plods on interminably while you wait impatiently for the story to start again.

In both figure skating and prose, true beauty appears effortless to the observer. It’s only the amateurs who think that panting and blowing, showing the world how hard they’ve labored over a sentence, shows real beauty. This is not to say that artists don’t labor; the five-minute program we see is the culmination of years and years of practice and conditioning. To the observer, it seems as natural and unstudied as a bird’s flight.

In Legalese, I wrote what I thought was an absolutely brilliant, evocative sentence. “His perpetually sweaty palm trailed a streak of slime down her cheek, like a snail crossing a garden path.” Both my critique partners read it and commented something along these lines: “Ewww!” Which was precisely the reaction I was looking for. So why did I delete the line? Because they both commented on it. They didn’t say it, but the line pulled them out of the story. It made them pay attention to the writing. It panted and puffed, shouting for attention. And so away it went.

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