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."