Writing Well: Read Writing

Writing Well ~ A Short Guide ~ References ~ Listen to You

As a reader, you have the luxury of enjoying good writing without thinking about it. Have you ever gone back to re-read a book you liked, and discovered typos, misspellings, and even missing words? I'm reading C. J. Cherryh's Wells of Shiuan for at least the fourth time, and I found a typo on the first page. Now that's good writing! Seriously. Cherryh had me hooked so quickly, those first three times, that I was already reading past the linguistic details on the first page!

That's how we read most of the time, when we read for fun. It's a bit like dancing. When we are doing it for pleasure, we aren't usually thinking about it. But any disciplined expert will tell you, whether her expertise is ballet, swimming, cabinetmaking or cooking, that her expertise was built by paying attention to the details of how. The successful hunter is paying attention. Writing is no different.

Here are four ways to approach the details of other people's writing attentively:

1. Look closely at any writing. Pick a published paragraph at random, and examine it for structure, word choice, and the other decisions the writer made. Good writer, bad or indifferent, he chose to write this, this way.
2. Look at the details of a favorite writer's work, especially those places you like.
3. Analyse the bad writing you read.
4. Read yourself slowly. The writer we are the most familiar with is the one we need to look at the most closely — ourself. Because we know what we meant and we know how it comes out, we are constantly reading ourself inattentively and too fast. Develop strategies to slow yourself down and focus.

What Is It? All Reading Was Written

Are you paying attention or just listening? Am I following my own advice as I write it? Anything you read is a candidate for scrutiny. You can read for technique anywhere: the newspaper, ad copy, the mediocre (but published, remember) novel you aren't enjoying much, your favorite author hitting her marks. All reading got written, the question is "How?"

When you look at a billboard, think about getting its message across quickly. Think about what its message is. An ad that screams "We're Ralston Purina" is different from one that begs you to help stray dogs. I passed a billboard for three weeks while I was driving to work. It showed a fireman holding a baby. Below the picture were the words, "When the saints came marching in." I never managed to determine who placed the ad. Frankly, "Who placed it" was beside the point. The advertisers were not selling themselves; they were selling an idea, an ethic — giving without desire for gain. Not identifying themselves was part of the message.

Count words, circle hard ones. When you are reading the newspaper, count the words in the sentences. Circle words you don't know or aren't sure about. Box words you don't think the average ten-year-old would know. Compare the results on the Sports page with the results on the Op-Ed page and the front page. What will you learn? For starters, you will see how professional communicators vary their language for different audiences.

Rewrite what you read. Find the subject and verb. Are they close together, or separated by a sagging, swaying bridge of modifiers? Are the main subject and verb poised at the beginning of the sentence, mingling anonymously in the middle of the sentence, or trailing along at the end, German-style? How far do you have to read to get the point of the sentence? Could it be better? Can you lower the word count?

For example, here's a sentence taken at random from a review of Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noel Thomas & Mark Turner: "The book stretches and exercises the mind, forcing better writing as a consequence." This is the final sentence in a positive review, and it bothers me. Here's why. First is the bad choice of the word "force." You can't "force" a consequence, because consequences are by definition natural results. You can force a "result": consequences just happen. Although "stretch" and "exercise" are both words we feel good about, "forcing" and "consequences" are pushy and negative. They make the book sound mean. I don't care to deal with people who want to "force" me to do anything, not even "for my own good." Says you, I think. That last clause, "forcing better writing," is strangely almost passive. "Better writing happens"? How about an agent, somebody doing the writing? I would have written, "This book stretches and exercises your mind, and you will write better."

Actually, I would have repeated the title, avoiding "the/this book" altogether. The review is selling the book. So keep the title in the foreground. I might have written "will stretch" to run parallel to "will write," but I don't think so. I like the active present, as if I just looked up from reading the book. Lots of choices. What would you have written?

Why Like It? Looking Closely at Your Love

Yesterday I was in a warehouse of a used book store and stumbled upon a peculiar book, a lagniappe for the QPB edition of The Lord of the Rings. It contained a half dozen essays and some "study questions." I spotted Ursula Le Guin in the table of contents, a four-page essay called "The Glaring Eye," read it on the spot and bought the book. Le Guin is one of those subtle masters who make things look easy. But when I read the last sentence of her essay, tears of recognition were running down my face. I felt pretty silly, standing in a dusty bookstore, wiping my eyes. How did she do that?

I have some ideas about how she did it, but they won't mean much unless you've read the essay. The point is, when something "works," you can gain from figuring out how. Don't just let your favorite writers tuck blankets of pleasure around your brain. How did she do that? Being loved does not mean being spared close looking.

Here are two sentences from the beginning of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, a novel about writing: "What had she been thinking of as the car sailed off the bridge, then hung suspended in the afternoon sunlight, glinting like a dragonfly for that one instant before the plummet? Of Alex, of Richard, of bad faith, of our father and his wreckage; of God, perhaps, and her fatal, triangular bargain."

The narrator's sister has committed suicide, and these two sentences give us, first, a crisp, bright picture of the moment, sharp and surreal as a photograph, and then a list of "things to think about" that means nothing to us yet but will all, as the novel draws to its conclusion, be very much things to think about. Look at the trajectory of that first sentence. It begins in real time, with the car "sailing off the bridge." Then the movie stops and the car hangs in the sunlight like a dragonfly. Dragonflies, like helicopters, can hover immobile in the air. But no, it was not the long pause of the glinting dragonfly; it was just one instant and like the car, the sentence ends with an inevitable plummet. Margaret Atwood may be the best living writer of English. This sentence doesn't prove that, of course, but it's true.

Another, from James Lee Burke's Burning Angel: "In the dream the air was breathless, like steam caught under a glass bell, an autumnal yellow moon dissected with a single strip of black cloud overhead, and then I saw a long wood ship with furled masts being pulled up the bayou by Negroes who stumbled along the banks through the reeds and mud, their bodies rippling with sweat in the firelight."

I had to dig a bit for a "dream" sentence (to contrast to Doss, below), but otherwise it's just picked at random. Let's look at it. First off, it is tangible from the first clause — the steam, the yellow moon, the scalpel of cloud. It is distressing if not ominous, a scene we know means something bad. It ends with a reference to firelight not mentioned before, and that reference in effect carooms us back into the description, like a banked cue ball, making us see it again illuminated in red and shadows. Very impressive, and a graphic demonstration that a well-built sentence, like a well-made bridge, can sustain considerable length. Notice that Burke and Atwood both consider the powerful position of "the last word," but what they do with that power is quite opposite. Atwood concludes her sentence with the obvious and undeniable; Burke concludes his by adding an element that almost literally reflects back into the scene we just read.

The Burke is weak in spots, if we look closely. The "breathless" air sounds ominous, all right, but what exactly is "breathless air"? Does he mean air you can't breathe? And delaying "overhead" is clumsy. He means, "overhead, an autumnal yellow moon..." but we end up with the cloud overhead rather than the moon. "Wood" should be "wooden," I think, and there's no reason to drop the "en." You don't furl masts, you furl sails below masts. That's just wrong. On the other hand, the rhyme "dream/stream" illustrates precisely what I like about Burke, the bright birds in somber trees. Burke is a favorite writer of mine, and I think it's time to read Burning Angel again. I forgive him most of his lapses. But looking closely is a good thing.

When Real Writing Sucks

The same critical tools, which amount to nothing more complicated than looking carefully, can be applied to bad writing, and with the same result: not dissection but recognition. The trouble with bad writing is that if it's identifably — inarguably — bad, then chances are there are so many things wrong with it you can't find a place to begin. A bit like cleaning out a neglected garage. But never mind. Like the garage, the best beginning is to start anywhere. Here, for instance, are a few sentences by a writer I consider hopeless, James Doss: "Though the atmosphere is charged with an eerie anticipation of catastrophe, never has experience been so physically authentic, so concretely real. The single exception is Time, who slips past, stealing precious minutes and heartbeats and memories — the old thief moves far more swiftly here."

This is "overwriting" with some fat on its bones. Somebody is dreaming on the first page of a novel, their thesaurus fallen over their nose. What a nightmare! Could "anticipation of catastrophe" be anything but "eerie"? What is "authentic experience" and what are the alternatives to "physically authentic"? Is it possible for experience to be "real" in some sense other than "concretely"?

What exactly is Time an exception to? I don't even know where to start guessing. And are "minutes, heartbeats, and memories" in any sense parallel, much less stealable? And what is he slipping past? Does Doss mean "moves along" rather than "slips past"? Where is the "here" where Time moves "more swiftly" (and more swiftly than what)? Time doesn't "steal" minutes, it is minutes. It doesn't "steal" heartbeats, if heartbeats can be stolen at all. Would a "stolen" heartbeat be used first, skipped entirely, or removed from availability for future use? In other words, are they "stolen" before, during, or after use? Dinged if I know. And "memories" stumps me. Time steals memories? "The old thief" takes your memories and makes off with them? Takes them where? When something is stolen, it goes from one place to another. That doesn't apply to minutes, heartbeats, or memories, all of which get erased, used up, not stolen. But Doss wants a thief, so he never thinks about this.

Am I nitpicking? Maybe. Reading Doss is like listening to nails on a blackboard for me, so I'm a bit prejudiced. But compare this overwrought twaddle with Burke's evocation of a dream in Burning Angel. Which one would you want more of? What would Atwood's narrator think of this windy, however eerie, anticipation? Both Atwood and Burke, in quite different ways, manage to do what Doss is fumbling to accomplish; they communicate a sense of foreboding, tragedy, and mystery, and they fill us with anticipation for what's coming.

Keep in mind that most of our literary preferences are subjective and controversial. That is to say, you may, like me, loathe Hemingway and for good reason, but somewhere someone equally qualified and articulate about their tastes is praising him as I type. A case in point is the variety of opinion in The QPB Companion to The Lord of the Rings. The essays include critic Edmund Wilson's notorious pan of Tolkien's "long-winded volumes of balderdash" and a brief note by scholar Harold Bloom, who asks of Tolkien's style, "What justifies the heavy King James influence?" and then adds rather snidely, "I am reminded of the Book of Mormon."

Wilson was a particular type of literary critic of a particular American era, and his disdain is nicely balanced by the respect accorded Tolkien's work by C. S. Lewis and W. H. Auden, Wilson's contemporaries. Tolkien is not for every taste; neither is Shakespeare or pecan pie.

Le Guin answers Bloom's silly question elsewhere, in an essay (included in The Language of the Night) on using archaic styles in fantasy fiction and in another essay that offers a close analysis of one passage from LotR. Her answer, in a word, is that you have to do it well. In "The Glaring Eye" she refers to "the rocking horse gait" of Tolkien's prose, but to explain that it is "precisely what makes the huge book readable to a child." I would have left the last three words off. If Harold Bloom can't hear the difference between Tolkien's mastery of King James' English and Joseph Smith's tone-deaf mimicry, he should consider retirement. But that's just my opinion.

Slow Down and Smell the Gerunds

No matter how developed your writing skill, chances are you are not your own best editor. The problem is simple enough. You know what you meant (theoretically, anyway). You know what you meant to write. When you read yourself, an impatient voice in the background is nagging, "Yeah, yeah, next sentence please!"

I can't even spot my typos, half the time. I type much too fast, and I have memorized some bad riffs, like "teh" instead of "the," "Los Angels" for "Los Angeles," and "breat" for "breast" (Don't ask). So how hard is that, to spot "teh"? It's not even a word! Well, pretty dang hard, actually, unless someone else typed it. Then there it is. Zut alors!

When we read, we handle unconscious corrections to slip past typos and glitches. A superb copy editor (I was married to one) can't do this; she read the newspaper spotting typos. We edit as we go, without even knowing it, as long as we are confident that we know what the writer meant. And who, gentle reader, do we know better than ourselves? If we left out a word when we wrote it, we know what it was and we see it, right there on the page, in imagined black and blank white.

The key to reading yourself carefully? Slow down. Editing and speed reading don't mix. Here are some tactics that will slow you down to editing speed:

• Read aloud, if you can get away with it. Most of us read aloud slower than we read silently.
• Pause at the end of each sentence. Enforce the pause, if you have to, by some artificial means, like taking a moment to underline the sentence after you read it or placing a bean in a jar.
• When you proofread, read backwards. Seriously. You are trying to see if you misspelled anything, so word order is irrelevant. Worse, it's an irritating distraction. If you read forwards, no matter how careful you are you will slip and get sucked into the text.

Focus, attend, watch. It's no different from learning to drive. Book learning and instruction become memorized slogans: ("Look left/right/left at the intersection.") At first we have to think each motion through — give it gas, release the brake, look back, look left — and "walk through" each step. Then, after a while, it all becomes "body knowledge." We can walk and chew gum because neither one requires thinking about it. Unless we skip that boring period of paying attention during our apprenticeship. Move slowly through the katas of writing, and then with confidence comes freedom.