Attention:

My Piece of Crap Grammar Paper Written in an Hour! Go Forth and Get me that Slacker's Grade!!!
(Seriously, I can do so much better than this, I just want to get this freaking class over with)

The Great Grammar Debate


Hunter S. Thompson was one of the most unpredictable, dramatic and funny men of his time. Those qualities carry on through his writing. Thompson’s style is akin to a commuter train crash, one sympathizes with the passengers and is in horror by the event but, cannot help but be stunned and wowed by the calamity of it all. Thompson’s writing has an element of danger to it. Thus, I chose Hunter S. Thompson’s first novel, The Rum Diary, to examine further. The Rum Diary chronicles his days as a free-lance journalist in Puerto Rico in the 1950s. I will be juxtaposing his novel with a short story I wrote titled Nocturnal Emissions, a twisted depiction of the college life style.
The first major difference I noticed was sentence length. Thompson slowly draws the majority of his sentences out like a bow then he fires a fury of words in shorter, starker sentences. He does this consistently throughout The Rum Diary. Thompson balances Hemmingway’s directness with Fitzgerald’s beautiful descriptions. One sentence in particular is a whopping 162 words long and describes a mile long walk through the streets of San Juan. The sentence acts as a timeline, listing each tiny discovery as if Thompson wants us to illustrate the scene for him with slides. Thompson is using long drawn out sentences to give the reader a feeling of a casual and leisurely environment. How else can anybody describe Puerto Rico? One can almost imagine Thompson sitting at his typewriter slowly writing out his words with a cigar in his mouth and a bottle of warm rum sitting beside him on his desk with the ocean breeze coming in through a curtained window. If he wanted to speed things up a bit, he would have used shorter sentences that are more frantic and emotionally jabbing. But, Thompson takes his time.
On the other hand, when I wrote my story I wanted to play with a very stark and quick rhythm in memory of Bukowski and inspired by Hemingway. Much of my story is dialogue, short and blunt phrases. The short sentences add to the confusion of the whole piece, the sentences never give you a second to catch up. The voice of my narrator is sarcastic and belittling. I didn’t want the reader to have much “fluff” as it were. I didn’t want to slow things down. I wanted to go at the reader like Muhammad Ali. Although my story breaks most grammatical rules, I get my point across. My story is not meant to be taken seriously however, Hunter’s novel is meant to be read with seriousness.
In every creative writing class I have ever taken, the use of strong verbs is always a topic of discussion and I never understood why until now. I’m beginning to wake up from my verb dark age into an age of verb enlightenment thanks to Thompson. Thompson packs his sentences with wild verbs like warped, barking, marveling, and zipping. Verbs are a very important part of his writing. The verbs he chooses add to the character of each sentence. He also uses verbs in nontraditional ways as well. Normally barking would refer to animal noises but he uses the word in relation to one person talking to another. A large amount of colorful verbs seems to add a bit of life to any writing.
Unfortunately, for me, in my writing I use rather dull and gray verbs for the most part. My attention to short and stark sentences limited my use of strong verbs and I believe some of my sentences seem boring because of it. The verbs I chose all coincide with the every day usage and meaning of the verb. I think it makes for an overall monotone affect. Perhaps in the future I will spend greater time constructing sentences with varied verbs to increase the energy of the writing.
The overall feel of Thompson’s novel and my short story are completely different. The style of Thompson and the style I chose for my short story are completely different. I always considered Thompson a great influence on my own writing but apparently, I don’t write like him, I just write in the spirit of him. It’s interesting but I always thought my writing was very similar to his. The feel of The Rum Diary is one of a relaxed vacation filled with innocent adventures and warm Puerto Rican rum. Hunter makes sure to reflect that in the structure of his writing. In Nocturnal Emissions, the feel is of confusion, annoyance, and hilarity. I’m not as skilled at writing as I would like to think but, much of the emotion does come through structurally even though it may be accidental. Finally, as Hunter would call it, the wisdom. To keep a reader interested, it is not always the content that counts; sentence structure and variation has a lot to do with keeping a reader reading.