The Death Of Language (Figuratively)

Tying in with what I was talking about in my last post, I have yet again been dumbfounded by the opinion of the collective writing community.

This time, someone was questioning the (excessive) use of metaphors and similes in a book they were reading. A sample was presented, and the ravenous maw jumped in and tore into the use of figurative language.

I gather from their statements that these people believe that a writer is nothing more than a journalist, there to report the facts of the story, while injecting nothing beyond the most bare bones of a narrative. No voice, no color, no wordplay. The story and nothing else.

It pains me a bit to call myself a writer when I read that sort of thing. I truly cannot understand the point of writing if my job is to be as invisible as possible, to blend into the story to the point where it’s impossible to tell that I, and not someone else, wrote the work. I’ve struggled with finding the energy and the passion to pick a project and get writing again, and when I see what my peers think of writing, whatever tatters I have collected slip through my hands.

If this is where we’re headed, I don’t know if it’s somewhere I want to go.