BLOVIATION
THE DANGERS OF EXAGGERATION AND BLOVIATION IN WRITING NOVELS.
bloviate [ bloh-vee-eyt
verb (used without object), blo·vi·at·ed, blo·vi·at·ing.
to speak pompously.
blo·vi·ate | \ ˈblō-vē-ˌāt \
bloviated; bloviating
intransitive verb
: to speak or write verbosely and windily -pundits bloviating on the radio
DONALD TRUMP
BLOVIATOR-IN-CHIEF
The Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, once told an aspiring poet, ‘You’ve managed to squeeze more lofty words into three short poems than most poets manage in a lifetime: ‘Fatherland,’ ‘truth,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘justice’: such words don’t come cheap. Real blood flows in them, which can’t be counterfeited with ink.’
What an amazingly incisive phrase….counterfeited with ink….to describe what so many writers, beginning and more experienced, fail to understand. Less so, of course with poetry whose potency is defined by its concision, but certainly the case with some fiction, narrative non-fiction (especially self-help books), and political speeches. And advertising copy is the culprit-in-chief.
The literary disease of bloviation is difficult to cure, and often made worse by standing too close to a politician or advertising person. In political discourse, bloviation is simply talking pompously about the government’s successes or achievements…..for instance, describing the opening of a new highway in these terms……“Not since the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid of Giza, has there been such a monumental civil engineering achievement as the creation of this road.”
Trump’s stupidity made his bloviation even more ridiculous
When we were living through the four years of the obscenity of Donald Trump’s presidency, a leaking row boat floating on a sea of hyperbole, exaggeration, embroidery of imaginary ability from the world’s leading bloviator, we began to get used to his amplifications. And while novelists can’t cause the harm that Trump manifested by his excessive aggrandizement, what can happen is that readers will turn against the writer and refuse to continue with the book. Pomposity in writing reflects on the writer, and readers will view the author of the book as a pompous ass.
In literature, especially fiction, bloviation occurs when a writer uses unnecessary adjectives and adverbs to expand a thought or an action. Here are some examples:
Of all the carpenters who worked on the project, only Jason stood out as a true craftsman. No man in the history of architecture who worked with the ecstatic throbbing orgasmic beauty of wood, not even Jesus, had ever created an architrave as intricately detailed as his.
Millie’s mother let it be known that her daughter’s genius at doing math sums in her head made her without exception the best student that the school had ever taught.
Of course, if the character about whom you were writing was created by you, the writer, as a bloviator, a fictional Donald Trump, then such exaggerations would be a function of the personality and so true to character development. But if you’re writing about a hero or heroine, then let the exploits speak for themselves, without elevation in your prose. Be sparing in your use of adjectives and adverbs. Readers like to create an image in their minds, rather than have one thrust upon them by the writer, by such adverbs as “quickly”, or “loudly” or “dangerously.”
One way to offend readers by exaggeration and bloviation of a man’s love for a woman, is: “Armed with wealth and potency, Richard knew he wouldn’t have to break into a sweat to win her affections. Yes, she was extraordinarily beautiful and her face had graced the covers of millions of international magazines, but the fortune he’d been left by the death of his grandfather guaranteed him any woman he wanted, any time and any place. Was there a sexier prospect walking the Earth than Richard?”
But compare that with the opening of Shakespeare’s immortal 18th Sonnet, in which love speaks volumes by restraint….
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate….
One of the reasons beginning writers exaggerate and over-describe, is that they don’t trust their reader’s imagination. They assume that they need to create every image for a reader, or the scene they’re creating won’t be understood. So a sky isn’t just blue, it’s “Azure, with touches of cerulean, and in parts there was a cobalt colour to it, which as the sun sank, turned to a luminous indigo.”
A good, strong, judicious edit will knock out much of the bloviation and exaggeration from a beginning writer’s manuscript, but it’s amazing how unimpressed publishers and editors will become after the fourth page of an over-written manuscript. From the many publishers I’ve spoken to about this, it’s obvious that a significant number of manuscripts which were rejected, would have made it through if the works had been shorter, terser, and less prone to having been overwritten.
THE POET, ROBERT BROWNING
Robert Browning, the great British poet wrote, in his 1855 poem, Andrea del Sarto
I know his name, no matter - so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged
Wise words….less is more. The more terse and concentrated your writing; the less you exaggerate and bloviate, the fewer adverbs and adjectives which give a sense of hyperbole to dilute the impact of your nouns and verbs…..the better.
Less is definitely more.
