Words Fail Me Part 1

Words Fail Me.

What Everyone Who Writes Should Know About Writing.

Patricia T. O'Conner.

Acknowledgments.

It occurs to me that this book has no advice about how to write acknowledgments. Hey, what better place to remedy the oversight?

Authors write acknowledgments to acknowledge their debts, of course, to thank the people who helped in some way. Ideally, your tone should be gracious but not queenly, grateful but not groveling. Humble dignity is what you should aim for. Acknowledgments also enable you to shamelessly drop names without seeming immodest. In this way, you let the reader know that while you, the author, did the real work, a great many important people stopped whatever they were doing to give you a hand. (You may not be bosom buddies with them all, but who's to know?) The impressive bunch that helped with this book includes Laurie a.s.seo, Ann Beattie, Alida Becker, Andre Bernard, D. J. R. Bruckner, Jo Ellyn Clarey, Charles Doherty, Hugh Downs, David Feldman, Margalit Fox, Rob Franciosi, Samuel G. Freedman, Elizabeth Frenchman, Ken Gordon, Robert R. Harris, Jennifer Hartig, Dimitra Karras, Panayota Karras, Allen Kellerman, Craig Kellerman, David Kelly, Mitchel Levitas, Eden Ross Lipson, Rose McAllister, Charles McGrath, Kate Murphy, Deborah Nye, Lamont Olson, Jeanne Pinder, David Rampe, Tad Richards, Tim Sacco, Robert Schulmann, Michael Sniffen, Yves Tourre, Gloria Gardiner Urban, Bruce Washburn, Elizabeth Weis, and Marilynn K. Yee. I'm also grateful to my sister, Kathy Richard, and to Larry and Pamela Kellerman for their support and encouragement.

I owe special thanks to my extraordinary editor, Jane Isay, who asked me to write this book and whose uncanny vision kept it on track. Dan Green, my agent, knows much more about writing than I, and his advice was invaluable. Herbert Mitgang, Marilyn Stasio, and Peter Keepnews were tireless and inexhaustible sources whose literary sleuthing made my job easier. John Allen Paulos, G.o.d's gift to the numerically insecure, offered advice on the chapter about mathematics. And once again, Anna Jardine proved that a good copy editor is a pearl beyond price.

My husband, Stewart Kellerman, was virtually a coauthor. He got me out of more jams than I can count, and his wisdom shows on every page. Finally, I owe a bottomless debt to Beverly J. Newman, who was never too busy to take two little girls to the library. Thanks, Mom.

Introduction.

Two days into my first newspaper job and itching to see my name in print, I picked up a ringing phone and took the call that I thought would launch a glittering career.

The man on the other end said he had a dog so intelligent that it took its meals seated at the table with the rest of the family. Not only did this dog have its own chair and its own place setting, but it refrained from eating until grace was said, then waited to be excused from the table. Would I be interested in doing a story?

Would I! I rushed up to the hard-boiled city editor, visions of a page-one byline dancing in my head. "Mr. Murphy," I said, "I have somebody on the phone with a great human-interest story."

"It's Murphy!" he said, spitting cigar smoke. (In those days, ashtrays were standard office equipment.) "What've you got?"

I told him my great story.

Silence.

"It even wears a bib," I added.

Murphy rolled his cigar to the other side of his mouth. "No dog stories," he said. "I hate dog stories. If we run a story today about a dog that dines at the table, we'll have to run one tomorrow about a dog that dances Swan Lake"

"But what do I tell the guy on the phone?"

"That's your problem. Now get me some news!"

It was my first on-the-job lesson. The lesson wasn't "No dog stories," though. It was "Write for Murphy."

Many years and many jobs and many bosses later, I still try to write for Murphy. Not the real Murphy, long buried now, but whoever is going to read what I write. And no matter how many people I'm writing for, I try to talk to one reader at a time.

I owe many of the tips in this book to the editors and writers I've worked with since that first job at the Waterloo Courier in Iowa more than twenty-five years ago. Some of these folks have been hard to ignore. One of my bosses liked to blow up paper bags and pop them just to make sure everybody was awake. Another was able to balance a spoon on the end of his nose while reciting the first few lines of Milton's Paradise Lost. Another had to be roused from bed every morning by a copyboy whose job it was to make sure the boss got to work. Nothing about these people was prosaic, least of all their prose. They were the ones in the balcony; if I could please them, the rest of the audience would take care of itself.

Contrary to popular opinion, there's no mystery to writing well. It's a skill that just about anyone can learn, more craft than art. When words fail us, as they often do, the reasons are usually simple. So are the solutions. They can be as easy as breaking a sentence in two or moving a word somewhere else. The term "writing" covers a lot of ground. But whether your work ends up in a history professor's e-mail, a marketing report, a community newsletter, or a best-selling novel, the pitfalls are the same. Words Fail Me is about techniques for making poor writing presentable and good writing even better. Think of it as a user's manual for words.

And words, written words, are getting a workout these days, in case you haven't noticed. Suddenly we're a nation of writers. By putting a keyboard in every lap, it seems, the computer has changed the way we communicate, virtually overnight. If we think of writing as conversation, everybody seems to be talking at once.

Who isn't wired? Teenagers no longer spend their evenings yakking on the phone. They send gossipy e-mail or instant messages, hang out in chat rooms, and write. Executives who once dictated letters now click on Reply and write. College students can trade notes in newsgroups, question their professors, and turn in a.s.signments without leaving their dorms. Gardeners, golfers, military brats, parents for and against spanking, aspiring actors, quilters, gym teachers, plastic surgeons, dog trainers, arthritis sufferers, geologists, and pizza deliverers are meeting on the Internet and swapping news, giving advice, scolding, kibitzing, and kvetching-all in writing.

Lousy writing. If the good news from cybers.p.a.ce is that we're writing more, the bad news is that most of us aren't very good at it. Our words don't do justice to our ideas.

Computers haven't made us bad writers. We write badly because we don't know how. For many years, our schools have done a rotten job of teaching writing. Asking students to write without showing them how is like expecting them to drive before they've had a lesson. Still, it's never too late to improve. With practice, anyone who wants can write. Think of ballroom dancing: there's no shame in not knowing how, but there's no reason you can't learn. Sure, not everyone can be Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers, but who wants to run backward down a flight of stairs, anyway (especially in high heels)?

Good writing is conspicuous by its absence. Even if you can't describe what it is, you know it when you don't see it, when what you're reading is tedious or blah or hard to follow. Good writing is writing that works. It makes sense. It's both comfy and elegant. It says just enough and no more. It has manners, not mannerisms. Good writing has all the right words-and not too many of them-in all the right places.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? Often it is. Merely adding or subtracting a single word can do wonders for a crummy sentence. Yet some writing is harder to fix; an idea may be missing, or stuck in the wrong place. There may be problems with logic, with tone, with rhythm. These problems, too, have solutions. Words fail all of us at one time or another. That's to be expected. If something comes too easily, it's probably not your best work.

You'll make mistakes, naturally. Who doesn't? Just as you don't expect perfection in everything you read, neither does the person you're writing for. No one has ever written anything perfect, although some have come mighty close. If you write honestly and do your best, most readers will give you the benefit of the doubt.

A final thought, for those of you with literary ambitions. Your favorite writers, and mine too, aren't without their faults. Trollope is fond of lengthy digressions, but we relish his Ba.r.s.ets.h.i.+re novels nonetheless. Antonia Fraser's terrific history The Wives of Henry VIII is fascinating, but it has too d.a.m.n many dashes. Melville's masterpiece, Moby-d.i.c.k, introduces interesting characters, only to drop them. I love rereading Wuthering Heights, though Emily Bronte's plot is ridiculously improbable. A writer can have faults and still be wonderful, because the best writing goes beyond simple mastery of language. Its power lies elsewhere-in one's understanding of the human heart and the ways of the world, in one's capacity for making moral judgments, in knowing a thing or two about life, in telling a great story.

So, I can hear you asking, if we aspire to greatness, why bother with the nuts and bolts? Well, the best writers may not follow every rule every time, but they follow most of them most of the time. And even if you're a Tolstoy or a Balzac, a Thurber or a McPhee, it doesn't hurt to learn the rules before you break them.

PART 1.

Pull Yourself Together.

1. Is Your Egg Ready to Hatch?

KNOW THE SUBJECT.

Let's face it. Some subjects are harder to explain than others. A pipe organ is more complicated than a kazoo (even I can play Bach on the kazoo). No subject, though, is so complicated that it can't be explained in clear English. If you can't explain something to another person, maybe-just maybe-you don't quite understand it yourself.

Anything worth writing about is worth explaining. But you can't make something clear to someone else if it isn't clear to you. Before you write about a subject, make sure you know it inside and out. If there are questions in your mind, don't skip them or cover them up. Do your best to find the answers. Then, if questions remain, you can always be honest and say so; the reader will forgive you.

Whenever there's something wrong with your writing, suspect that there's something wrong with your thinking. Perhaps your writing is unclear because your ideas are unclear. Think, read, learn some more. When your egg is ready to hatch, it'll hatch. In the meantime, sit on it a bit longer.

The old admonition to"write what you know"is a cliche, but it's still good advice. No matter how vivid and fertile your imagination, you'll write best what you know best. Dr. Spock patted thousands of babies' bottoms, and generations of parents have turned to his venerable book on child care. Ben Hogan was the king of the swing, and his book on the fundamentals of golf has been a cla.s.sic for years.

Speaking of cla.s.sics, Melville and Conrad spent years at sea, and you can almost smell the salt air in their writing. In his rough-and-tumble youth, d.i.c.kens worked in a blacking factory, lived in the poorhouse, and clerked and ran errands in law offices and courts. Not surprisingly, his most lifelike characters aren't from high society. They're street people, beggars, thieves and spongers, laborers, petty clerks, and of course lawyers.

You may have noticed that in Jane Austen's novels, ladies are always present. What did the men say among themselves over their port when the women had withdrawn? Austen never took part in exclusively male conversation, so there is none in her novels. What's unfamiliar is kept offstage.

Not all of us have the luxury of writing only about what we know. A college student who's asked to write a paper on Kierkegaard can't very well decline and say he'd rather write about the Spice Girls. An ad executive with a fabulous wine cellar isn't likely to turn down the Bud account just because she thinks beer is decla.s.se. If you have to write about something unfamiliar, learn about it. Once you know the subject, you're ready to write.

You're probably wondering about those exceptions to the rule-writers who convincingly describe things they couldn't have seen with their own eyes. Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire is vivid and convincing, even though she's never met one of the undead (at least, I hope she hasn't). She modeled the vampire Lestat after her blond husband, and set much of the atmospheric tale in her native New Orleans. Her writing comes alive because she's borrowed from what she knows in order to create a fictional world that's as real as the real thing.

Don't let the exceptions mislead you, though. An author who invents a world she hasn't seen, a reality she hasn't known, must be h.e.l.lishly good to be believable. Most of us aren't h.e.l.lishly good. We must know whereof we speak.

2. "The Party to Whom I Am Speaking"

KNOW THE AUDIENCE.

A piece of writing requires at least two people: one to write it and one to read it. Who's going to read yours? It's important to ask, because people who don't know their readers or who forget about them aren't very good writers. You'll save yourself all kinds of trouble by learning this lesson early.

All writers, remember, are readers first. You'll read a lot more than you'll ever write. Let the reader in you influence the writer in you. Put yourself in the reader's place, then write what you'd like to read.

If the very idea of writing strikes fear into your soul, or if you freeze up when you start to write, you may have a problem imagining your reader. Fear of writing is often fear of the reader, especially one you don't know. And no wonder. Nothing is more daunting than an audience of strangers. Break the ice and get acquainted.

Similarly, if your writing is unfocused, your reader may be out of focus, too. When you can't see the target, you don't know where to aim. Sharpen your focus and bring the reader into the picture. Clarifying your audience will clarify your thinking and your writing.

All writing has an intended audience, even the telephone book (it may be monotonous, short on verbs, and heavy on numbers and proper nouns, but it sure knows its readers!). Your audience probably won't be as wide as your area code, but it could be almost anyone-your landlord, a garden club, the parole board, Internet jocks, a college admissions director, fiction readers, the editorial-page editor, the Supreme Court. Someone is always on the receiving end, but who? It's a big world out there, and before you write you have to narrow it down. Once you've identified your audience, everything you do-every decision you make about vocabulary, tone, sentence structure, imagery, humor, and the rest-should be done with this target, your reader, in mind.

Draw a mental picture of your reader and carry it with you as you write. Stop working now and then, and, like Lily Tomlin's telephone operator, ask, "Is this the party to whom I am speaking?"

Of course, you might have a different audience every time you write; where writing is concerned, one size does not fit all. As much as possible, try to antic.i.p.ate your reader's needs, sophistication, likes and dislikes, attention span, mood, tastes, and sense of humor. In our personal relations.h.i.+ps, this kind of discretion is called tact; in writing, it's called knowing your audience.

Here's how it works. Say you're writing a brochure for an investment firm, giving financial advice to the newly widowed. You'll want to sound serious but not gloomy, honest and direct but not intrusive. A wisecrack about the River Styx would not be appropriate. If you were advising college students, on the other hand, humor might be in order. Your tone and choice of words would be very different.

For better or for worse, audience is everything, no matter what you write. Unfortunately, some audiences seem to require bad writing: dullness (the phone book), pretentious language (an academic paper), hype (advertising copy). Take the academic paper, for example. Ask yourself who will be reading, then aim at that target. It may be that you hate pompous words like syncretism and etiology, and would rather use plain words like joining and cause. But since the professor or dissertation committee or scholarly journal expects gobbledygook and would reject anything else, you hold your nose and write "syncretism" and "etiology." If they want stuffy, give them stuffy. Once you're tenured or you're running the place, you can be yourself. (There's more on the pretentiousness problem in chapter 6.) A fiction writer, too, should always imagine the people who'll be reading. I once saw a read-aloud children's book intended for preschoolers; each left-hand page had a picture and each right-hand page was packed with text, nicely written but impossibly long. The writer should have imagined the audience: a kid squirming in somebody's lap. While the grown-up drones on about the enchanted forest, the audience is clamoring to see the next picture.

You can't always hold the audience in your lap, even mentally. Unless you're writing to just one person, the audience will be made up of individuals, no two exactly alike. Still, they'll have certain things in common. Determine what those things are and keep them in mind as you write. You'll be surprised how much clearer your thinking and your writing will be. You may even make readers feel you're talking to each one alone.

While you're drawing your mental picture, remember that the readers are on your side (a.s.suming you're not chewing them out). They want you to succeed. Why wouldn't they? When they read something, they want it to be good. Put mental smiles on their mental faces. You're not adversaries, after all. You're in this together, because you want to write something good and they want to read something good. Even someone who disagrees with what you say can enjoy reading it.

It's essential to imagine a friendly reader, because fear of your audience leads to serious problems. Writer's block is one of them, and so is first-person phobia; we'll get to them later. The fearful writer pictures the audience as a panel of Olympic judges, all holding up cards with 3's and 4's instead of 10's. But aside from editors, English teachers, and book critics, readers usually aren't sitting in judgment. They'll stay with you if you give them a nice move now and then-not every one has to be a triple axel.

Even though your mental picture of a friendly reader won't always be accurate, pretend it is. If you dislike the jerk you're writing for, don't show it. And don't imagine a reader lying in wait, ready to pounce on every little mistake, or your writing will sound defensive and fearful. Write as though you were addressing someone whose opinion you value, even if the reader is a boneheaded bureaucrat who wants to put a sewage treatment plant on your street, or a stingy insurance company that won't pay for your tummy tuck, or a neighbor who insists his boa constrictor loves children (as appetizers, maybe).

But be yourself as much as possible. If you're the serious type, be serious. Don't fake a breezy style or nudge readers with "Get it?" phrases. a.s.sume they'll get it. Otherwise your writing will sound forced and artificial.

Don't talk down to a reader, either. Imagine he's intelligent, even if you know for a fact that he has a mind like a slotted spoon. It doesn't matter if the person who's going to read your paper is a cretin (or if, in the case of that children's book, the intended audience is three years old). Write as though you were addressing intelligent people you understand and respect. Don't patronize them, but don't talk over their heads. If something needs explaining, explain it.

Get to know your audience-use your imagination-because it's easier to give your best to someone you know and like. Think of your reader as a familiar presence, someone you can talk to. Your att.i.tude will come through in your writing.

3. Get with the Program.

THE ORGANIZED WRITER.

This chapter is about organization. Yes, it's grunt work. And no, you may not skip to chapter 4. It doesn't matter how sloppy or tidy you are in real life. Even people whose closets look like Martha Stewart's can turn out writing that's a mess.

Unfortunately, organizing your mind isn't as simple as organizing your closet. You can't go to Home Depot or Hold Everything and buy the shelving and compartments and cubbyholes that will tidy your material and put it to work for you. Besides, when you put a closet in order, you throw things away. You never, ever throw away an idea.

Do I hear grumbling? Well, resign yourself to this part of the process. It's not the part where you roll right along, humming a merry tune as the words tumble over one another in their eagerness to get on the page. Writers seldom shout, "Boy, this outline is really cookin'!" (Not that I recommend outlines, as you'll see.) What's more, the effort that goes into organization is largely invisible. You'll never hear a reader say, "My, this [essay/letter/novel/report] is beautifully organized." The job may be a pain in the b.u.t.t, but it's thankless, too.

Now for the good news. Once you're organized, the rest becomes easier. No bogging down in the Great Grimpen Mire, that swampy wasteland pitted with the bones of lost writers whose last words were "Where am I?" You'll have a map. How do you get one?

First, you need something to organize: ideas, material, sc.r.a.ps of expertise, recipes, prognostications, anecdotes, scurrilous gossip, anything that might be relevant to what you want to write. And you get this stuff by h.o.a.rding it, by faithfully making notes and squirreling them away.

Let's say you're planning a magazine article about biker gangs. You could save a newspaper clipping about a turf war in Los Angeles, the nickname of a h.e.l.l's Angel you want to interview, or a tattoo ad from a biker magazine. Or perhaps you're writing a memo to your marketing manager about m.u.f.fler sales in Toledo. You might jot down the boss's latest joke about Midas, or cut out an article from Car & Driver about auto emissions standards in Ohio.

Keeping a Stash.

An idea in your head is merely an idle notion. But an idea written down, that's the beginning of something! Stripped down to its briefs, a piece of writing is nothing more than a handful of ideas, put into words and arranged to do a job. We all get ideas-try not thinking in the shower. The trick is to write them down.

How many inspirations have you gotten in the middle of the night, ideas that stole into your mind in the wee hours, only to steal away again by morning? "Great idea," you mumbled as you smugly went back to sleep, confident you'd remember that certain something, just what you needed for the writing project at hand. It might have been a snappy ending for the interoffice newsletter, a perfect first line for a poem to your beloved, a brilliant murder plot (fictional, we hope), or a dynamite punch line for the speech you promised to give at the chili supper.

Next time, write it down!

A writer with good material is one who never lets a useful nugget slip away. You can be sure that for every book you've read and loved, there once existed a pile of notes. Emily Bronte paused while cooking, ironing, or kneading dough to make notes for Wuthering Heights. Balzac was never without a notebook. Anatole France recorded his nighttime thoughts on pieces of paper that he let pile up under his bed. When that elusive phrase you've been seeking finally comes to mind, write it down. Do this without fail, no matter how inconvenient it is to stop what you're doing and write. (No! Don't take your hands off the wheel!Just do it as soon as you can.) A tidbit doesn't have to be earth-shaking to be worth saving. It only has to be useful. It can be something that gives you a smile, a twinge, a pang, a s.h.i.+ver, a few goose b.u.mps. It might be a word that grabs you because of its sound or the images it evokes, or because it's your true love's favorite expression. It could be a name, a sc.r.a.p of conversation, a magazine article, or simply a gesture, mannerism, or stray remark. If there's any chance you could use it in the memo or paper you're planning, save it. And when you make a note-this is important-add beside it a word or two explaining why you wrote it. Your note might look like this: " symbiosis-boss's favorite word." Or "schmooze-add to job description." Without a little reminder, you'll forget why you made the note. I recently came across a long-forgotten note of mine that said only "Mahler." This must have meant something once, but I can't remember what.

Make note-taking a habit. Carry with you a small notebook, a folded piece of paper, or a few file cards, and something to write with. This goes for the bedside table, too; add a little keychain flashlight. Stick with one system. If you're comfortable with file cards, stay with file cards, even if some well-meaning person gives you a gorgeous, expensive leather-bound journal. And keep the cards in the same spot, so that reaching for them becomes automatic.