"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

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.