Tag Archives: Historical

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

14201In any media there’s always a battle between artistry and functionality.

There are writers who are artists at their craft, who fashion words and sentences into things of beauty, and others who just use them to convey a message, for whom the story is paramount and things like proper grammar and sentence structure are merely tools. There’s probably an entire scale between each end of the paradigm and you could fit your favorite writers along it, comparing those whose words are just functional against those who take pains to ensure every word is ‘perfect’. Comparing those with the most engaging and mind boggling plots but who can barely string a straight sentence with those artisans whose story boils down to no more than a contemporary update of Romeo and Juliet. Continue reading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell