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."

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.