Travel Writing that Lives up to its Subject

When I bought a travel guide for our trip to Yellowstone, I was looking for clear and useful information. I didn't expect to find sentences that would evoke the same kind of awe I felt gazing at hundreds of bison scattered across a vast valley in the Wyoming sunset.

Brian Kevin, author of Fodor's Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks (2009), surprised me with the beauty and elegance of his language:

"A bull elk strides like a general across the lawn of the former cavalry barracks, his bugle call echoing the reveille that once proclaimed sunrise and sunset at Fort Yellowstone. His harem grazes silently among stately stone buildings, where the ghosts of soldiers and settlers mingle with wide-eyed park visitors and rangers directing traffic. " With his lovely imagery, strong verbs, and sound effects, he captures perfectly the intersection of nature at its most majestic with humans who sometimes threaten to overrun it.

If you've visited the hot springs at Mammoth, you'll appreciate his description of the landscape as "somewhere between an ice palace and an ashtray."

Don't let a little poetry keep you from looking for Kevin's guide books--this one was the most useful of the half dozen we carried. And the photos by Jeff Vanuga are gorgeous.

The Eloquence of Toni Morrison

Reading Toni Morrison's Beloved is like trying to make your way through a maze. Just when you think you see the way out, you're staring at impenetrable hedge again, feeling puzzled, even maddened. Morrison jumps around in time, offers incomplete tidbits of a scene or memory she'll return to later, and eschews logic for poetry. But her truths are essential, her stories haunting, and her sentences often worth holding up to the light.

Here’s how Morrison describes Stamp Paid, a former slave who worked for the Underground Railroad:

"...sneaking was his job—his life; though always for a clear and holy purpose. Before the War all he did was sneak: runaways into hidden places, secret information to public places. Underneath his legal vegetables were the contraband humans that he ferried across the river. Even the pigs he worked in the spring served his purposes. Whole families lived on the bones and guts he distributed to them. He wrote letters and read to them the ones they received. He knew who had dropsy and who needed stovewood; which children had a gift and which needed correction. He knew the secrets of the Ohio River and its banks; empty houses and full; the best dancers, the worst speakers, those with beautiful voices and those who could not carry a tune."

I love the cadence of this passage, established by its many pairs of words joined by and: wrote and read; empty and full; best and worst. Morrison varies the syntax of the pairs, using adjectives ("empty houses and full"--love that unconventional placement of the second adjective); clauses ("who had dropsy and who needed stovewood"); and modified nouns ("contraband humans" under "legal vegetables"). The many opposites echo the escaped slaves' vision of the world as having only two kinds of people, "whitepeople" and "blackpeople." Only one race was human.

Heroic Storytelling

Last month I was asked to lead a workshop on style in children's writing. It had been awhile since I wrote for children or read their books, so I assigned myself time in libraries and bookstores pulling kids' books off the shelves and scanning their pages at random for beautiful writing. Immersed in the magical world of kidlit, I felt like the ten-year-old I used to be, the one who read ten books a week during the lazy, unscheduled summers of childhood.

One of the books I plucked off the shelf simply because of its lovely title was Snowbone, a heroic fantasy by British writer and storyteller Cat Weatherill. Her energetic writing demonstrates the power of simple but vivid verbs to bring a story to life so well that modifiers become unnecessary. Here's an example describing a fire that has broken out on the deck of a pirate ship:

"It spat and clawed like a flaming tomcat. It pounced on the shattered crates. Mauled the decking. Snapped the bones of the ship. It hissed and growled. Whipped an angry, fiery tail till the hold fizzed with sparks. Then it crept forward on its belly and started licking at the remaining crates."

Harnessing the Power of Names

In fiction, well-chosen names can hook the reader's interest, telegraph information, and set a tone--all in a capitalized word or two. No one names her people and places with more skill and humor than J.K.Rowling. Her hero and his allies are ordinary people with ordinary names: Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger. (Yes, Hermione’s a complicated name, at least for American readers, but then Hermione’s a complicated girl!)

Contrast the names of the hopelessly incompetent: Cornelius Fudge, as effective at fighting evil as a piece of soft candy. Dudley, Petunia, and Vernon Dursley--I don't know why certain words just sound stupid, but Dursley is surely one of them! They live in Little Whinging (that's a soft g, from whinge, Britspeak for complain).  Nearly Headless Nick, who couldn't even manage to lose his entire head.

Rowling often uses names to suggest evil or danger, sometimes deliberating misleading us to create suspense.  Lord Voldemort, The Name That Must Not Be Said,  means "flight of death" in French, though you don't have to know French to recognize the suggestion of death. Severus Snape of Slytherin positively hisses. The Dementors threaten insanity. Draco Malfoy's name, with its hard consonants and its every syllable accented, sounds like the curses he hurls, while his flunkies, Crabbe and Goyle, are merely pests. Bellatrix is a beautiful but diabolical woman (“bella” can mean “beautiful” or “warlike”—or in this case, both) who is always threatening “trix”). Lupin's name suggests "lupus," Latin for wolf.

Suspended Sentences

If you were an English major, you've probably heard of loose and periodic sentences. If you were an English major like me, you could never remember which was which, and many sentences seemed to be neither--or both. So I was glad to come across the concept of sentence suspensiveness (say that fast five times!) in a series of lectures on CD by Brooks Landon. (Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft. Available at many libraries.)

Landon suggests throwing out the loose/periodic dichotomy and looking instead at where a sentence falls on the spectrum of suspensiveness. A sentence is suspensive to one degree or another if it delays the main clause--the core of the sentence--until the middle or end of the sentence. To cite a familiar example: "Over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go." Or a better one by Rick Bragg: "In a graveyard where rows of crosses lean left and right, where one-inch-thin headstones bow to the earth or tilt toward the sky and misspelled missives to the dead are inked onto rotted plywood markers, Cleveland Cobb spent a long time making sure he got the flowers just right."  Bragg's a good enough writer to trust that we'll stay with him on this ride, enjoying the view he sketches so vividly while we wait to see where we're going.

Great Comparisons

Coming across an original simile or metaphor is one of the small joys of reading. Here are a few from Sarah Blake's The Postmistress:

"Like a stone tossed into a flock of birds, talk startled swiftly into flight whenever the new postmaster was mentioned."

"Large and handsome...in a good silk dress, Mrs. Cripps stood like a striped tent without an occasion...."

"The gulls rose up suddenly off the pylons on the pier, the swift beating of their wings like hands shuffling cards."

"Up ahead of her, six white cottages the size of playhouses lined up like girls regarding the gentleman caller come at last to the dance."

"The boys and their talk made her feel still more invisible, like a balloon at the end of a longer and longer string, held by no one. Floating off."

"Every afternoon, he turned around and walked back out as quietly as he had come in, with the exhaustion of a man who hurled himself against the wall of each passing day, and would do so again and again, until the wall broke."

No comment needed, other than the wish that such gems not go unnoticed by readers, and that we writers take the time to replace the cliches that slip so easily into our work with original language like Blake's.

I'll be posting a review of this book shortly on my other blog, Book Talk.

The Haunting Art of Cormac McCarthy

I was going to write about humor on this perfect spring day, but I can't find my Dave Barry books. So I reached at random into my Great Sentences folder and pulled out the opening of The Road, about as far from humor as it's possible to get. Even when what's being described is the lifeless, lightless world that remains after an unspecified apocalypse, McCarthy's prose is worth studying. Its stark imagery, no-nonsense sentence structure and punctuation, and subtle sound effects evoke the setting so vividly that I shudder every time I read it. But I keep reading. The novel opens with this riveting passage:

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkenss and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the days of it and the years without cease."

Hooking the Reader

I enjoyed Robert Goolrick's A Reliable Wife a couple months ago, and I remember being struck with the power of the opening scene, which hooked me and reeled me in to a story that continued to be addictive. When I look back at it now, I see that it's much like McCann's opening  (Feb. 10, "Look! Up in the Sky!") and also that it's uneven. See what you think:

"It was bitter cold, the air electric with all that had not happened yet. The world stood stock still, four o'clock dead on. Nothing moved anywhere, not a body, not a bird; for a split second there was only silence, there was only stillness. Figures stood frozen in the frozen land, men, women, and children.

"If you had been there you would not have noticed. You would not have noticed your own stillness in this thin slice of time. But, if you had been there and you had, in some unfathomable way, recorded the stillness, taken a negative of it as the glass plate receives the light, to be developed later, you would have known, when the thought, the recollection was finally developed, that this was the moment it began. The clock ticked. The hour struck. Everything moved again. The train was late."

The Arrangement of Words

Free-sampling first chapters is one of the joys of owning a Kindle. I no longer jot down titles suggested by friends or reviewers--I just pick up my little machine and instantly download the sample. It's a great way to find out, without investing a cent, if a book grabs you, and it's also a portal to great sentences, since writers know that to get published they have to leave prospective agents in a state of shock and awe in just a few paragraphs.

I've just sampled the openings of two novels by Irish writer John Banville, who has indeed  left me in awe. As one reviewer asked, can this man write a single sentence that isn't beautiful? I love his openings:

"They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide."  - The Sea

"Of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works." - The Infinities

The Rhythm of Prose

Here's the opening sentence of Raphael Sabatini's Scaramouche: "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

There's nothing overtly unusual about this sentence. Its words are short and ordinary. Its sentence structure is clear and uncomplicated. What makes it so catchy?

What grabs our attention here, I think, is the music underlying the words. Read the sentence aloud and tap your foot or finger as you feel the beat. To me it sounds like this:

He was BORN with a GIFT of LAUGHter // and a SENSE that the WORLD was MAD.

Glints in the Sand

Reading Phyllis Theroux's The Journal Keeper feels like strolling along a beach, my breath slowing as I take in the horizon, my skin warmed by the sun. Every once in awhile something glistens in the sand ahead or pricks my bare foot. I stop to look more closely and find a shell or a stone whose beauty I'd almost missed. I  slide it into my pocket to take home for closer examination.

"What I continually fail to note," she writes, "...is the heart-breaking, light-filled brilliance of the world I swim through like an unappreciative fish every day. Let the record show that I am grateful." 

Looking at these sentences under my desk lamp, I see--no, I hear-- that it's not just the reminder to see the beauty around us that captures my attention. It's the repeated vowel sounds--assonance again--humming their melody under the words: filled and brilliance; swim, unappreciative and fish. Who knew that the syllable prec could ever rhyme with fish?

A Manifesto (or maybe an Anti-Manifesto) on Style

In "A Reader's Advice to Writers," Salon's Laura Miller advises novelists to concentrate more on good old-fashioned story-telling and less on style: "Remember that nobody agrees on what a beautiful prose style is and most readers either can't recognize `good writing' or don't value it that much....I've seen as many books ruined by too much emphasis on style as by too little....whether you write lush or (please!) transparent prose, keep in mind that in most cases, style is largely a technical matter appreciated by specialists. You probably don't go to movies to see the lighting and photography, and most readers don't come to books in search of breathtaking sentences."

While I agree with most of Miller's pragmatic advice, I find her comments on style to be simplistic and cavalier. Are there really only two kinds of style, lush (= bad) and transparent (= good)? How about a style that achieves elegance and clarity without sounding like every other book out there? A style with a little poetry, some music, a few original figures of speech, words and sentences put together in a way you've never heard before? A style that carries and supports the story but that is itself worthy of note and recognizable as belonging to one particular writer--that's what I want to read and write.

Game, Set, Match

You don't have to be a tennis fan to appreciate David Foster Wallace's description of a memorable moment in the sport. Pay attention to your own reactions as you read the passage.

"It’s the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does

The Power of a Period

Here's a teenage girl musing on her resemblance to her mother, with whom she has an ambivalent relationship:

"[She] would turn out to be a woman of unobjectionable looks (trim enough, tall enough, with brown hair like her mother’s and brown eyes like her mother’s and pale, freckled skin. Like her mother’s)."

from Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Note the three repetitions of "like her mother's" and their punctuation. The first two are integral parts of the sentence; there's nothing about them to draw much attention. It's the third one, set off as a separate sentence, that illuminates the narrator's feelings toward her mother. Can't you just hear the teenage gnashing of teeth as she's forced to admit that in still another way, she's like her mother? Had the third phrase not broken the pattern, we would not sense the narrator's dismay. One little stylistic choice has conveyed the deeper truth.

The Music of Words

"The corpse without hands lay in the bottom of a small sailing dinghy drifting just within sight of the Suffolk coast. It was the body of a middle-aged man, a dapper little cadaver, its shroud a dark pin-striped suit which fitted the narrow body as elegantly in death as it had in life. The hand-made shoes still gleamed except for some scruffing of the toe caps, the silk tie was knotted under the prominent Adam’s apple. He had dressed with careful orthodoxy for the town, this hapless voyager; not for this lonely sea; nor for this death.

(Unnatural Causes - P.D.James)

Another great opening scene, this one by the British writer who uses murder mysteries to explore the depth and range of human emotion. The description is simple, precise, and elegant.

Look! Up in the sky!

"Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke -- stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper."

(Opening of Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, with thanks to Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute for drawing this passage to my attention.)

The first sentence draws us in, quiets us with the word "hushed," makes us pause over the unanswered questions, the mysterious "him." Then the focus sharpens. Those street names, each a separate sentence, tell us exactly where we are. Like the sentences, we move jerkily forward toward the still-unclear focus of attention. Naming things--not just any street but West Street--is one of the best ways to bring a scene to life.

"A silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful" grabs us with personification and oxymoron; we're not sure yet what to feel. In the next few sentences, words pile up like gawkers joining the throng, until we all freeze with the possibilities, thrown at us in three deliberately separate fragments. And after "Or a jumper," that terrible, inviting white space.

I don't need to read further--though I surely will--to know that we're in the hands of a master of words, of punctuation, even of space, itself a tool of writing.

In case you haven't figured it out, the figure at the top of the World Trade Center is Philippe Petit, who in 1974 walked a tightrope strung between the towers.

Great Heart

Eyes closed, I sat in my reading chair lost in the world of J.R.R.Tolkien's The Return of the King, audio version. Frodo and Sam trudged desperately up the Mountain of Doom, the weight of the ring growing ever heavier. All seemed lost. Then, amid images of pain and terror, came one simple sentence: "Great heart will not be denied." I took a deep breath with Frodo, and we climbed on.

Why is this small sentence the only one I can recite from the thousands in the trilogy? Why did it move me to tears and hope, not just for Frodo and Sam but for us all? Its power lies in its starkness, its brevity, the directness with which it lifts us up out of the muck and makes us go on. The short, ordinary words aim at us like battle spears. The consonance of the final t's in great, heart, and not and the double-d of denied cement the promise of the sentence. In six short words, the fate of the world has turned.

If you doubt the power of short, ordinary words, consider one way an amateur writer might have captured the moment: "Having courage and working passionately toward your goals will be rewarded." It's just not the same.