US Conventions Constrain Rest Of Human Writers

So yeah.

What do you guys think?

I for one find it distressing that, for example, when I publish a story at FF.net, US citizens comprise a bigger proportion of the readers than all of the other nations combined. In this very site, most of the media we discuss has been produced in either the USA or Japan. Most tropers are young US-citizen nerds. And I myself find that their cultural standards have started to get to my head; I've assimilated many of their taboos, which I used to be rather indifferent to. Same for some stylistic choices such as the tendency to use the active voice, or the reluctance to use adverbs.

So, what other "americanisms" have you noticed, and do they constrain your writing in unwanted ways?

edited 16th Dec '12 3:37:08 AM by TheHandle

What the hell are the Moral Guardians so paranoid about?

Even with all that censorship, kids are still going to learn the "bad stuff", anyway.

edited 16th Dec '12 3:37:17 AM by judasmartel

Er, maybe they fear that the kids will get brain damage?

Anyway, in this other article, some sacred cows are skewered.

edited 16th Dec '12 3:43:38 AM by TheHandle

My vote: screw 'em.

In NZ, two sixteen-year-olds having mutually consensual sex is "decriminalised".

The "age of consent" is nominally 18 but two 16-year-olds or two 17-year-olds going at it is not a criminal offence (if one is 16 and the other 17, however, the 17-year-old's potentially looking at statutory rape charges, no matter how consensual it was) and in one of my stories there are two 16-year-olds sexually involved with one another - I really don't give a rat's arse (note the non-US word use) about whether or not that's palatable to US audiences.

Similarly, my spelling is New Zealand Standard (which differs from both US and British English - more similar to British but we -ize and -ise some words differently) and if someone's going to "kick ass" in any of my books, it'll be because they are mimicking/quoting US television/movies - otherwise, they'll be booting people up the arse with a vengeance.

This article offers a better development on the problems with E o S

Is it the assumption that We All Live in America?

More like "We All Publish For An 'American' Audience (When We Write In English)", combined with "You Gotta Write In English (If You Want To Succeed In The World Scene)". One of the effects of that is that we call these United States of America "America", instead of using the word to refer to the whole New World. Another is that your writing has to be White & Strunk-compliant if you don't want your editors to fall upon you like the fist of an angry America-loving God. But since you mentionit, there's no way I'd ever miss a chance to post this clip:

The 16 to 18 thing is strictly California. People under 21 drink all the time. I mean, where is this person writing their characters? If they're writing them in Britain or wherever, then a kid under 21 drinking is expected.

This person is speaking bullshit. The problem is this genre known as YA and the attempted adult stranglehold on information to teenagers. Period.

Why do the posters here focus so much on that drinking age and sexual majority thing? That's also a problem US wrtiers have with each other, namely SoCalization. I'm more interested in things that are unique to the US, especially in terms of writing style, rather than simply the Eagleland Osmosis of some legal points.

Also, adding "period" at the end of a statement does not strengthen or ground the statement.

^I guess because they're stereotypical American things.

Well, it's not in Strunk and White, so it must be good, huh?

Or should I be more culturally sensitive and say full stop?

Give me an example of something that wants to be published that does not follow "American" grammatical rules.

You make sacrifices for the audience you want. This isn't exactly new, nor is it any form of oppression. If you want to write post-modern-noir-gorn-hockey-romance, you're in for a much more narrow audience, just as if you write for a french audience (although the french audience is probably a tad bigger). It sucks for the people who don't want to write US-styled stuff that the US is the majority, but it sucks for anyone who wants to write for the mainstream that wants to write something not encompassed by the mainstream.

I don't understand how some of these complaints are 'American' as opposed to simply how things work in the English language. I'd thought that active tense was always preferable over passive unless you're trying to specifically highlight the object as the recipient of some action, and that it's best not to overload on adverbs, and you shouldn't have lengthy ramblings that don't have relevance to the plot.

Maybe I'm just being an idiot American here but those things sound like what you do in revising, not any particular sort of Americanism.

Answering the question politely would have been a more productive response.

That wasn't uncivil! It was just a sociological observation! You're so used to your way being "the" way, you never even noticed that other places might prefer other styles or emphasize other things! That's privilege blindness, and it's not an insult, and I take offense at that thump! You're the one calling yourself an "idiot American", I never even insinuated such a thing!

EDIT: Well then how about you ask me to rephrase it politely rather than incorrectly thump me for rudeness? I was not being impolite in any way, shape, or form.

edited 16th Dec '12 10:44:49 AM by TheHandle

First of all, I don't think underage sex (even in detail) and drinking are really problems. As above posters said, both happen all the time in YA, and receive no more controversy than any other issue. Also, I don't think UK vs. US spellings would really be an issue as long as you add a disclaimer saying that British English is the language being used. That what one American edition did.

On the other hand, other aspects brought up, like cutting adverbs and such, I can't really comment on.

...Or I could go with Kotep's response, with whatever it got to do with the English language more than America.

edited 16th Dec '12 11:12:19 AM by chihuahua0

... I'm afraid I don't follow.

I've seen all the stuff mentioned in the quote in the first post in books that were published in the US, so I'm afraid I don't see the complaint that they're bars to publication as terribly valid. It sounds more like whoever wrote that block quotation is trying to come up with a way to write something to which no one will object. As far as the stylistic stuff, it depends on why you're writing. If you're writing for self-expression, then what do you care how others view your style, or if you're clear or fast paced, or whatever? If you're writing for an audience, though or specifically for publication, you have to take into account the things that audience (or at least your editor) is going to find annoying. And what's more, you have to develop a thicker skin to shrug off complaints that you don't find valid. If your main complaint boils down to "nobody/not enough people like my work, and I feel I have to compromise myself to make them like my work, and I don't want to do that but I really really want them to like my work" then I just don't know what to tell you.

Actual audiences aren't all that picky about it; it seems like it's mostly a problem with editors, writing workshops, and the "literati". I think many of them understand that, when S&W say "The greatest writers may ignore these rules" (paraphrased), it means "If you have not proven yourself as one of said greatest writers, you are not to be forgiven for breaking those rules." There are many storytelling conventions and forgotten tropes that are now forbidden by "W&S and Hemingway" followers, but which in fact make for perfectly entertaining, curious and interesting fiction. There's also the legitimate worry that all this insistence on brevity and simplistic grammar could result in either simplistic thinking, or over-compressed grammar. When I read William Gibson's Neuromancer, I find myself assaulted by brief, compact sentences that pack so much information it's unbrearable; information overload is the whole point, arguably, but I've found no shortage of people who believe this is how all good writing should be done, which I find rather frightening.

The masses, editors, and literati are always going to have an opinion on what constitutes good writing and what does not. They always have, and they always will. Great and/or important writers who ignore said opinions continue to arise.

In every creative writing class/ writing workshop I've ever participated in, there have always been folks who nitpicked my work over what I thought were the stupidest things ("More exclamation points" was one actually heard). If your writing is doing what you want it to do, and communicating what you want it to communicate, then I don't see how anyone else's opinion matters unless you want it to matter. I sympathize with an inability to find an editor who doesn't feel your work needs major stylistic overhauls, but that is the nature of the beast that is publishing.

Also, history, frequently coupled with academic attention, is ultimately the judge of what is and isn't "literature." That label really shouldn't be something you concern yourself with, unless you just have a driving need to make yourself crazy.

edited 16th Dec '12 1:49:11 PM by Robbery

chihuahua, why should there be a "disclaimer" saying the book was written in something other than US English?

We don't have disclaimers on books we get here saying "Excuse the spelling, it was written by an American" (or a Brit, given there are differences there as well).

Audiences aren't the problem.

Most people are intelligent enough to identify spelling differences and stylistic differences.

The problem seems to be editorial staff who are infected with the same mental illness prevalent in TV/Movie executives: the whole "Viewers Are Morons" mentality that dictates everything must comply to a formula aimed at the Lowest Common Denominator.

I'm bloody sure the average American who is interested in the genres in which I write possesses sufficient intelligence to spot both stylistic and spelling differences and identify them, just as the average Kiwi is intelligent enough to spot if a book is written in American or British English.

If the editors can't cope with that, then it's their mental issue, not anyone else's.

Personally, I'm used to ignoring "Grammar" suggestions flagged up by MS Word which are actually stylistic in nature rather than grammatical ("Passive Voice: Consider recasting the sentence to use Active Voice") - that's what you get using software written by a US company - and I just take it as a cue to pause and see if I actually wanted to highlight that the thing happened to the character (or that the character felt/believed it was "happening to them").

edited 16th Dec '12 1:39:31 PM by Wolf1066

If you've proven yourself to be a popular writer who can sell, it means you've earned the privilege to get away with bending or breaking those rules. People are more willing to let you get away with it because you've proven you know how to write things that people are interested in.

If you're a newbie who doesn't have a published work to their name, then yeah, of course the editors and publishers are going to be more concerned about following the rules since taking a gamble on a new writer or a new work from a moderately or barely successful writer is a big deal.

So unless you've proven you can bring in readers and money, you need to either deal with it, find a way to show why you should be allowed to bend or break the rules yourself, or write for people who aren't going to care about what rules you're following.

I can't remember where I read it - it may be Francis Wheen's 'A short history of Mumbo Jumbo' - where the writer comments on US reviews of the Nick Leeson book 'Rogue Trader'. Apparently its full of 'needless Britishisms' - how dare a book, written by a Brit, about a British bank, where the events happen in London. How very dare he.

I was interested in the comment in the article about US readers complaining the police in UK fiction not using guns. I wonder if part of the problem is that Columbines are beginning to believe their own mythology and trying to act like fiction. Following the shootings outside the Empire State Building earlier this year I was reading and interesting Blog commentary on gun ownership.

It noted that US police, even those in places like New York, rarely have to pull their gun, and it is quite possible, usual even, to spend your whole career without ever shooting anyone. The thrust of the blog was that often such events are seized upon as 'if the bystanders were armed...', but in this case all the deaths in the street were caused by misses by the two policemen, who should be far better trained than any random civvie.

Is it that people now expect real-life to be like fiction (the so called CSI effect), and that then feeds back with writers going "but it happens in real life!", creating a self re-inforcing circle. Thus US fiction is seen as 'real', and anything not conforming is 'wrong' (back to UK police with guns).

However http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19670686

Stephanie Meyer's detractors beg to differ.