Great Writers Make It Look So Easy

My friend John Bruns is a retired engineer who is only now finding his true calling as a writer. It’s a joy to witness his excitement and exuberance as he creates an ever-expanding cast of characters for the novel he is writing. John has a way of tossing words onto a page without apparent effort, and then using them to produce sentences both understated and brilliant. I love his opening passage:

“Into the warren of cubicles at the Pasadena Messenger, into the monkey house of telephones and keyboards and aggravated people wanders Cap Riley, who has worked there seven years but still seems a little lost. He matches his cubicle, or perhaps his cubicle matches him: disheveled, coffee-stained, a step or two slower than the prevailing pace of things. A round, bearded man, he is twenty pounds overweight, going gray, eyes mild and heavy-lidded behind steel-rimmed glasses. Cap's cubicle is also overweight….”

John’s writing style never shouts; it maintains the same even, temperate tone as his voice does. So it’s easy to miss the things he does to make his sentences more interesting. Inverting normal word order, for one. Instead of the usual who-what-where opener, John starts with a pile of prep phrases that tell us quickly where we are and what it’s like there. Into the middle of the scene, and the sentence, comes our non-hero, Cap Riley. The placement of the verb “wanders” before the subject tells us that Cap is reluctant to enter even before we read that he’s “lost.”

In the second sentence, John evokes a smile by using a type of repetition the Greeks called a chiasmus:  echoing a phrase with its opposite: "He matches his cubicle, or perhaps his cubicle matches him." The descriptors that follow go from a single word, “disheveled,” to two to a dozen, a pattern that gets our attention and moves us forward. The third sentence opens with an appositive phrase, “a round, bearded man,” rather then the less interesting “he is” that many writers would have started with.

John’s varied sentence structure provides the scaffolding for the words he uses to draw the picture of Cap Riley and his office. Every word contributes to the effect. I can find a “say-nothing” word to cut in almost every sentence I read (except possibly my own, not for lack of need), but in this paragraph I find none. It’s a deceptively ordinary piece of writing that turns out to be perfect.

Was the writing as easy as he makes it look? Not exactly, says John. "I revise a lot, but a lot of it is unconscious. As you learn to write, you hear the music."

John Grisham: Style and Substance

Ray Wilkerson, a student in one of my "In Search of" classes, sent this sentence from John Grisham's latest novel, The Confession:

"Sunday.  What had been probable on Thursday, even likelier on Friday, and virtually certain on Saturday became the numbing truth during the night, so that on Sunday morning the country awoke to the sensational reality that an innocent man had been executed."

Ray's comment: "Grisham is known for his simplicity in writing style and his storytelling abilities. These two sentences are vintage Grisham. The first one-word sentence, 'Sunday,' tells the reader exactly what point in time it is. There is no ambiguity. The next sentence simply, thoroughly and powerfully brings the reader all the way through the events of the past three days, from speculation to absolute.  All of the different clashes of storylines and characters have culminated and collided at this point with this result - an innocent young man was executed for a crime he had not committed."

Thanks, Ray, for such a good example of a straightforward style that delivers its content so effectively.

He says potato, I say potahto

My husband, reading an article in Men's Journal about trekking across Greenland, asked what I thought of  these sentences:
"There is undeniable poetry in the violent and chaotic expression of nature's forces. The drift galloping over the ice resonates of Valkyries from a wild avant-garde ballet. Backlit by the sun's low rays, the sheet of liquid smoke glows like a cloudscape time-lapse photograph. And what could be seen as a frigid and threatening environment turns into an ethereal dance: delicate, evocative, and graceful."

Individual phrases caught my ear. I liked the liquid smoke image, I told him, and the word cloudscape, and the ethereal dance. Maybe not the Valkyries. What did he think? "I lost the story in the words," he said. "I wanted to know what happened to the trekkers, and all that description got in my way."

When I looked closely at the passage, I had to agree that it was overdone. The landscape is a ballet, a photograph, and, again, a dance. Modifiers trip over each other: "cloudscape time-lapse photograph" is hard enough to say (too many accented syllables),  harder to process quickly since words that are usually nouns turn out to be used here as adjectives. And the word "resonate" should, in my humble opinion, be retired; it must be exhausted from overuse. Editing this passage would bring out its beauty. As St. Exupery said, "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

But the bigger point I want to make here is the widely varying preferences of readers. What strikes me as poetic, worth a second read, strikes Ray as obfuscation. Most people read for only content; they want to know what happens next, period. Some, like Ray, will occasionally appreciate a well crafted sentence, but it's not what they need or look for. For a few, like me, a memorable style (of which there are innumerable types, not just poetic, of course) is the sine qua non of the books we call great. You say potato, I say potahto. Aren't we lucky to have books for every kind of taste?

"The English Language Knocking Your Socks Off"

“Agatha Christie mysteries we read for their plots, Sherlock Holmes stories we return to for their gaslight and hansom-cab coziness, but the very best writers we love for the sound of their sentences, the shiver of pleasure delivered by unexpected words and astonishing turns of phrase, by the way their language makes us feel glad to be alive. You don't pick up James Joyce's "Ulysses" because you want to learn about the events in Dublin on June 16, 1904; you don't read Hunter S. Thompson because you want to find out about the nightlife in Las Vegas. What Joyce and Thompson offer is simply the glorious experience of the English language knocking your socks off.”


Michael Dirda, "A master from Mississippi," The Washington Post, 12/23/10