Thoughts about being literary

It's been awhile since I workshopped anything at zoetrope. I go through these phases where I can't bear to read ninety percent of work out there. I hate to review someone's work when I can't say something helpful and saying sorry I couldn't get past your opening sentence is probably not useful and is certainly hurtful.

But yesterday I read a few stories and found two I could say something about and then I had enough submissions so that I could submit a new short story. I put up Pyrexia, Unknown Etiology, an InfernoKrusher story I wrote last year. It's something I almost didn't write because I had just written a story about being newly dead and didn't feel I should write two newly dead stories right in a row but A. was extremely helpful and told me to write it. I did and it was rather different than I imagined and I love it. So anyway, I got my first review last night. It's not bad but I didn't really agree with much of what my reviewer had to say and I vehemently disagreed with this:

I would continue to work on your command of the language; you have a good basic structure here, and I would try to give it a more literary sound. For example, the paragraph where you describe pouring beer on the ground as an offering to God is excellent: clever and appropriate (you might want to use the word "libation" there, too). I'd endeavor to find more places where you can use language like that.

This is what I wrote back to him and I believe this with every tiny bit of me:

Thanks for reviewing my story, Pyrexia, Unknown Etiology.

I appreciate your advice but when you suggest trying to sound more literary I can't agree. The purpose of writing is to communicate. The purpose of storytelling is to communicate, entertain, educate and share with the audience. Share feelings, insights, mores, etc.

When we focus on using "literary words" instead of telling the story in the voice of that particular story we lose clarity and create distance from our audience.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden says that story is a force of nature. With that in mind, we don't want to do anything to slow down that force. We want to have a cat five hurricane when it comes to our writing.