Writing Tools (12 page)

The notion that new knowledge derives from old wisdom should liberate the writer from a scrupulous fear of snatching the words of others. The apt phrase then becomes not a temptation to steal — the apple in the Garden of Eden — but a tool to compose your way to the next level of invention.

David Brown riffs on familiar political slogans and ad lingo to offer this devastating critique of America's sheepish inefficiency, especially in times of crisis:

The sad truth is that despite its success as a sportswear slogan, "Just do it" isn't a terribly popular idea in real American life. We've become a society of rule-followers and permission-seekers. Despite our can-do self image, what we really want is to be told what to do. When the going gets tough, the tough get consent forms.

The writer transforms familiar language into a provocative and contrarian idea: that America is a"can't-do" society.

Let me offer an example from my own work. When I moved from New York to Alabama in 1974, I was struck by the generalized American speech patterns of local broadcast journalists. They did not sound like southerners. In fact, they had been trained to level their regional accents in the interest of compre-hensibility. This strategy struck me as more than odd; it seemed like a prejudice against southern speech, an illness, a form of self-loathing.

As I wrote on the topic, I reached a point where I needed to name this language syndrome. I remember sitting on a metal chair at a desk I had constructed out of an old wooden door. What name? What name? It was almost like praying. I thought of the word
disease,
and then remembered the nickname of a college teacher. We called him "The Disease" because his real name was Dr. Jurgalitis. I began to riff: Jurgalitis. Appendicitis. Bronchitis. I almost fell off my chair: Cronkitis!

The essay, now titled "Infectious Cronkitis," was published on the op-ed page of the
New York Times.
I received letters from Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, and other well-known broadcast journalists who had lived in the South. I was interviewed by Douglas Kiker for
The Today Show.
A couple of years later, I met the editor who had accepted the original column for the
Times.
He told me he liked the essay, but what sold him was the word "Cronkitis":

"A pun in two languages, no less."

"Two languages?" I wondered.

"Yeah, the word
krankheit
in German means 'disease.' Back in vaudeville, the slapstick doctors were called 'Dr. Krankheit.' "

Rifling on language will create wonderful effects you never intended. Which leads me to this additional strategy: always take credit for good writing you did not intend because you'll be getting plenty of criticism for bad writing you did not mean either.

WORKSHOP

1. In your reading, look for apt phrases, such as the description of plagiarism as "the unoriginal sin." With a friend, riff off these phrases and compare the results. Decide which one you like the best.

2. When you find what seems like a striking, original phrase, conduct a Google search on it. See if you can track its origin or influence.

3. Browse favorite books to find a passage you consider truly original. After reading it a number of times, freewrite in your notebook. Write a parody of what you have read, exaggerating the distinctive elements of style.

I had always found words like
rhythm
and
pace
too subjective, too tonal, to be useful to the writer until I learned how to vary, with a purpose, the lengths of my sentences. Long sentences — I sometimes call them
journey sentences
— create a flow that carries the reader down a stream of understanding, an effect that Don Fry calls "steady advance." A short sentence slams on the brakes.

The writer need not make long sentences elastic, or short ones stubby, to set a tempo for the reader. Consider this passage from
Seabiscuit,
Laura Hillenbrand's book about a famous racehorse:

As the train lurched into motion, Seabiscuit was suddenly agitated. He began circling around and around the car in distress. Unable to stop him, Smith dug up a copy of
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang
magazine and began reading aloud. Seabiscuit listened. The circling stopped. As Smith read on, the horse sank down into the bedding and slept. Smith drew up a stool and sat by him.

Let me try some word math. The seven sentences in this paragraph average 9.4 words, with this breakdown: 10,10,19,2,3,13, 9. The logo-rhythm becomes more interesting when we match

sentence length to content. In general, the longer the motion described, the longer the sentence, which is why "Seabiscuit listened" and "The circling stopped" require the fewest words.

The writer controls the pace for the reader, slow or fast or in between, and uses sentences of different lengths to create the music, the rhythm of the story. While these metaphors of sound and speed may seem vague to the aspiring writer, they are grounded in practical questions. How long is the sentence? Where are the period and the comma? How many periods appear in the paragraph?

Writers name three strategic reasons to slow the pace of a story:

1. To simplify the complex

2. To create suspense

3. To focus on the emotional truth

One
St. Petersburg Times
writer strives for comprehensibility in this unusual story about the city government budget:

Do you live in St. Petersburg? Want to help spend $548 million?

It's money you paid in taxes and fees to the government. You elected the City Council to office, and as your representatives, they're ready to listen to your ideas on how to spend it.

Mayor Rick Baker and his staff have figured out how
they'd
like to spend the money. At 7 p.m. Thursday, Baker will ask the City Council to agree with him. And council members will talk about their ideas.

You have the right to speak at the meeting, too. Each resident gets three minutes to tell the mayor and council members what he or she thinks

But why would you stand up?

Because how the city spends its money affects lots of things you care about.

Not every journalist admires this approach to government writing, but its author, Bryan Gilmer, gets credit for achieving what I call
radical clarity.
Gilmer eases the reader into this story with a sequence of short sentences and paragraphs. All the stopping points give the reader time and space to comprehend, yet there is enough variation to imitate the patterns of normal conversation.

Clarity is not the only reason to write short sentences. Let's look at suspense and emotional power, what some call the "Jesus wept" effect. To express Jesus's profound sadness at learning of the death of his friend Lazarus, the Gospel writer uses the shortest possible sentence. Two words. Subject and verb. "Jesus wept."

I learned the power of sentence length when I read a famous essay by Norman Mailer, "The Death of Benny Paret." Mailer has often written about boxing, and here he reports on the night Emile Griffith beat Benny Paret to death in the ring after Paret questioned Griffith's manhood. Mailer's account is riveting, placing us at ringside to witness the terrible event:

Paret got trapped in a corner. Trying to duck away, his left arm and his head became tangled on the wrong side of the top rope. Griffith was in like a cat ready to rip the life out of a huge boxed rat. He hit him eighteen right hands in a row, an act which took perhaps three or four seconds, Griffith making a pent-up whimpering sound all the while he attacked, the right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken through the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin.

Notice the rhythm Mailer achieves with three short sentences followed by a long one filled with similes of action and violence. As Paret's fate becomes clearer and clearer, Mailer's sentences get shorter and shorter:

The house doctor jumped into the ring. He knelt. He pried Paret's eyelid open. He looked at the eyeball staring out. He let the lid snap shut.... But they saved Paret long enough to take him to a hospital where he lingered for days. He was in a coma. He never came out of it. If he lived, he would have been a vegetable. His brain was smashed.

All that drama. All that raw emotional power. All those short sentences.

In his book
100 Ways to Improve Your Writing,
Gary Provost created this tour de force to demonstrate what happens when the writer experiments with sentences of different lengths:

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals — sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader's ear. Don't just write words. Write music.

WORKSHOP

1. Review your recent work and examine sentence length. Either by combining sentences or cutting them in half, establish a rhythm that better suits your tone and topic.

2. In reading your favorite authors, become more aware of sentence length. Mark short and long sentences you find effective.

3. Most writers think that a series of short sentences speeds up the reader, but I argue that they slow down the reader, that all those periods are stop signs. Discuss this effect with friends and see if you can reach a consensus.

4. Read some children's books, especially books for very young children, to see if you can gauge the effect on the reader of sentence length variation.

In a
New York Times
review, critic David Lipsky tears into an author for including in a 207-page book "more than 400 single-sentence paragraphs — a well-established distress signal, recognized by book readers and term-paper graders alike." But a distress signal for what? The answer is most likely confusion. The big parts of a story should fit together, but the small parts need some stickum as well. When the big parts fit, we call that good feeling
coherence;
when sentences connect, we call it
cohesion.

"The paragraph is essentially a unit of thought, not of length," argues British grammarian H. W. Fowler in
Modern English Usage,
the irreplaceable dictionary he compiled in 1926. Such a statement implies that all sentences in a paragraph should be about the same thing and move in a sequence. It also means that writers can break up long paragraphs into parts. They should not, however, paste together paragraphs that are short and disconnected.