When the words just won't come out of your mouth

"Metaphor conditions our interpretations of the stock market and, through advertising, it surreptitiously infiltrates our purchasing decisions." 

This sentence from James Geary's I is an Other, an exploration of metaphor, stopped me cold, but not because it was beautiful. The writing had been smooth until I got here, but suddenly I felt as if I'd stepped off a paved road into knee-deep mud. I looked back at the sentence to see why.

It wasn't that I had trouble understanding the meaning, but rather that the words, even when read silently, did not want to come out of my mouth. Too many long words? Too many s sounds? Three repetitions of the unlovely syllable "tions" followed by a "tious''? For all of the above, this sentence failed the read-aloud test for me--a test all good writing must pass. Every piece of writing has a unique voice, one we hear even when we're reading silently.

I'm happy to report that the clunky sentence wasn't typical of Geary's style, which is mostly clear and fluid and sometimes rises above the quotidian. Isn't that a great word?  "Metaphor," says Geary, "slips a pin into the quotidian." Here I like the contrast of short, simple words--no modifiers--with the four-syllable Latinate quotidian. The subtle assonance of the short-i sound (slips, into, quotidian) adds some music. The pin, as Geary explained in the previous sentence, stands for a prick of sensation. He goes on: "By mixing the foreign with the familiar, the marvelous with the mundane, metaphor makes the world sting and tingle." Three pairs of well-chosen words (foreign and familiar, marvelous and mundane, sting and tingle) use sound effects to make their point beautifully. All is forgiven.

How NOT to write a sentence

This spoof of the style of one of my least favorite political figures (go ahead, guess!) arrived on a birthday card:

"A birthday is a time, another notch in the road, another fork on the table to where you're progressing into some kind of state where a distant shore's advancin' and callin' you up higher, and mostly it's just all about staying the same while you change into even more of who you are! And cake and candles totally honor that, oh you betcha!"

For entertainment value, sometimes bad writing is the best writing!

Sentence Structure that Reinforces Meaning

If the upcoming "Jeopardy" match between humans and a computer named Watson is on your calendar, you might also enjoy Brian Christian’s article “Mind vs. Machine” in the March issue of The Atlantic. Here’s a sentence of his that’s not only thought-provoking but also a pleasure to read:


“The story of the 21st century will be, in part, the story of the drawing and redrawing of these battle lines, the story of Homo sapiens trying to stake a claim on shifting ground, flanked by beast and machine, pinned between meat and math.”

Christian’s theme is the competition between human and human-invented artificial intelligence, and his main tool, the pairing or repeating of words and sounds, echoes that theme:

• “the story of…, the story of”

• “drawing and redrawing”

• “beast and machine” (with assonance)

• “meat and math” (with alliteration)

• the final two parallel phrases, each a participle followed by a prep phrase with a compound object.

Christian’s skillful sentence construction eloquently reinforces his meaning without calling attention to itself. Bravo!

A beautiful style laughing at itself

If you read enough writing magazines and books, you'll quickly become sick of the terms "literary novel" and  "literary style." What exactly makes a writer's style literary? And if it's not literary, what is it?

I have my own tentative answer: we might call a style literary when it is as important to the writer (and maybe to the reader) as the content is; when it not only conveys the writer's meaning but is artful in itself; at its best, when it is so original that it constitutes the writer's signature.

Literary technique can, of course, be abused. The annual Bad Writing Contest (http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2010.htm) showcases writers who are skilled enough to turn "literary" writing on its ear (speaking of bad metaphors). My latest favorite writer, Joseph Caldwell, should be given the Grand Prize for his hilarious parody of "beautiful" writing in The Pig Did It, in which a pompous but lovelorn writing teacher (of course) has come to Ireland to grieve:

“His stretch of beach would be deserted. His solitude would be inviolate, his loneliness unobserved and unremarked except by the sea itself. There would, of course, be gulls, there would be curlews. He would hear their shrieks and watch the curve of their spread wings riding a current of air so rarefied that only a feather could find it. Perhaps there would be cormorants and, if he was lucky, a lone ship set against the horizon. There would be squalls and storms, crashing water, and thundering clouds. Lightning would crack the sky. Winds would lash the cliffs and—again, if he was lucky—rocks would be riven and great stones thrown into the sea. Then he, Aaron McCloud, would walk the shore unperturbed, his solitude, his loneliness, a proud and grieving dismissal of all that might intrude on his newly won sorrows.”

I won't enumerate the techniques used here except the one that creates the humor: the stretching of each image or sound effect just far enough that it screams--and we are screaming with laughter. That Caldwell is a master of literary writing is apparent even while we're laughing at his joke. I'll read one of his serious novels next.

For more on The Pig Did It, including another great passage, go to: http://bookwomanjanreviews.blogspot.com/2011/01/pig-did-it-by-joseph-caldwell.html

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?