Archives for June 2014

Modification Clarification

June 26, 2014 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

Take away the subject and verb of a sentence and you’re left mostly with modifiers of one sort or another. I’m not referring to the single-word adjectives and adverbs—they should, like pepper, be used sparingly—but to adverbial and adjectival phrases and clauses used to plug in additional description and clarification and/or alter the structure of your sentences so they read less like a Dick and Jane reader.

Like anything, these phrases and clauses can be overused, but the real problem is that they are easily misplaced within a sentence. The result is that what we intended to say isn’t said.

The primary violations come from unintentionally modifying the wrong nouns (adjectives) or verbs (adverbs). One example I like: “I read there was a big fire in yesterday’s paper.” If that was the intended sentence, the rest of the story might be about the house that burned down after the reader dropped his burning newspaper onto the carpet. Obviously, the speaker intended to say, “I read in yesterday’s newspaper there was a big fire.”

We don’t catch these misplaced modifiers because we have abused them for so long in our informal conversational communications that we fail to hear or see the misuse in print. Usually when something doesn’t sound or read right, it’s likely not right. But, for some reason, our eyes don’t catch what our ears have grown accustomed to not hearing, which makes misplaced modifiers a problem for self-editing writers who already face the challenges associated with trying to read and edit their own work with fresh eyes. Our observations of what has been written are obscured by our intentions behind what we think we wrote.

I don’t want this to read like some dedicated grammarian’s nit picking, but careless use of modifiers detracts from a writer’s clarity and can damage his or her credibility. An example of the impact that a misplaced modifier can have on a sentence is made clear by the following two sentences: “Only I love you.” – or – “I love only you.”

The problem is with the misplaced adverb only. There are a few other adverbs that can create similar confusion—almost, just, nearly. These are what I call double-agent adverbs because they can modify nouns as well as verbs. Take this sentence: “Thomas nearly ate the whole chicken.” The intent was to let us know that Thomas ate almost all the chicken, but what the sentence actually says is he ate none of it. He merely nearly ate.

Two more examples:

The committee meets only on Wednesdays.

The committee only meets on Wednesdays.

The first sentence tells us that the committee has but one weekly meeting, on Wednesdays. The second sentence tells us that the committee, when it gets together on Wednesdays, only meets and apparently takes no actions and makes no decisions. Both sentences are grammatically correct, but their meanings are considerably different. Once again, misplacement of the adverb is the culprit. The same thing can happen when you misplace an adverbial prepositional phrase. Which of the following two sentences states the likely intention of the writer and the reality of the scene?

The runners stood ignoring the crowd in their lanes.

The runners stood in their lanes ignoring the crowd.

There is a distinct difference between the crowd that apparently is blocking the runners by standing in their lanes and the runners who are focused on the race and thus not paying attention to the crowd.

The cure for this easily committable error is rather simple—attach your prepositional phrase directly to the word it modifies. The runners stood where? In their lanes. When you put a phrase at the end of your sentence, the crowd gets in the way of the runners and the intended clarity of the sentence. Note: This sort of injected “dis-clarity” frequently occurs when the offending phrase is plugged into the end of the sentence. That should be a red flag that tells you to conduct a clarity check.

Another danger for confusion arises from what I call “cross-eyed” modifiers—when the adverb is located between two clauses or phrases without clearly identifying which clause or phrase is intended to be modified. The modifier can look, and thus spray its modification in either direction. The example I like here is “The governor promised after her reelection she would not raise taxes.” So which is it? She promised that she would not raise taxes after she was elected or that after she was elected she promised not to raise taxes. The distinction might be important.

“Students who practice writing often will benefit.” Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t. But, “Students who often practice writing will benefit” makes the intent of the writer easily understood. These students always reap the benefits of practice. But notice that the second—correct—sentence doesn’t quite sound correct? The reason is that in conversation we have said things wrong for so long that wrong sounds right and right can sound wrong. We have glossed over our errors so often that we fail to catch them when we write or read them.

We’re not drawing lines here between absolutes of right and wrong. A cross-eyed modifier is merely unclear and creates unwanted confusion. When you write, you want to be both clear and correct.

Be aware, too, of the “man who wasn’t there” trap. It’s taken from the William Hughes Mearns (1875-1965) poem “Antigonish” (1899):

As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish, I wish he’d stay away.

The principal of the man who wasn’t there trap shows up in sentences like “Turning the key in the lock, Holmes quietly slipped into the room.” The subject of the verb “turning” has been dropped but we pick it up in the main sentence—Holmes. We could have written the sentence this way: “Holmes, turning the key in the lock, slipped into the room.” Either way is correct and the alternative structure allows us to interject variety. Keep in mind, however, that when you play with structure you need to keep an eye on clarity.

The corner we can paint ourselves into happens when a modifier, typically a participle or infinitive phrase, is left dangling because we’ve moved the word it actually modifies to another part of the sentence and end up in a puddle of muddle. A few examples:
Regretfully declining the dessert menu, the waiter brought us our bill.

After getting a new job, my commuting costs have doubled.

To recover from surgery, the doctor recommended bed rest.

When in doubt, make the actual subject—“waiter”, “commuting costs”, and “doctor”—into the subject of the modifier and see if it makes sense. (Modify the subject to assure agreement!) If the new sentence doesn’t make sense, fix it.

(The waiter), Regretfully declining the dessert menu, brought us our bill.

(My commuting costs), After getting a new job, have doubled.

(The doctor), To recover from surgery, recommended bed rest.

These fixes are usually fairly easy. It’s called rewriting! Don’t just move things around, but think about what you want to emphasize in your sentence and construct it accordingly.

After we regretfully declined the dessert menu, our waiter brought us our bill.

My commuting costs doubled after I got my new job. (Or flip it!)

The doctor recommend bed rest in order to recover from surgery. OR: After my surgery, the doctor recommended that I get plenty of bed rest.

There are two things at play that cause the confusion. The first is the consequence of an effort to be concise. Conciseness is good, clarity is better. Note also that the offending sentences often employ the participle form of the verb: declining, getting. Right behind my general rule to avoid use of the passive voice comes the directive to avoid the use of the participle verb phrase form.

Variety is the spice of life as well and writing and reading, so don’t avoid a potential problem by avoiding it. Write, edit and rewrite for clarity. Every writer needs to be dedicated to remove careless confusion from his or her diction. The neat thing about writing is that once you start to pay attention to a potential issue, it becomes an automatic response and you catch yourself spotting errors as you write rather than when you edit.

[Special Note: The challenge in writing about grammar is coming up with examples. I think authors likely “borrow” examples from others and tweak them to make them look like their own. That’s a sort of borderline plagiarism. I didn’t tweak my examples, instead, to borrow a phrase from the late U.S. Senator, linguist, and semanticist S. I. Hayakawa, I “stole them fair and square” from Mark Lester and Larry Beason. (The McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar and Usage, 2005) Thanks guys.]

Style

June 19, 2014 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

It’s easy to write about rules of writing, because they are, well, rules, mostly of grammar. Codified in textbooks, they direct us with detailed specifics and examples of what to do and not do. They are the compilation of consistencies that assure that others will understand what we have written. Style goes beyond that, is considerably more subjective, and its constituent parts more ephemeral. It resides on the other side of the boundary that separates grammar from what we call usage.

Usage is the application of the rules of writing. Good usage gives your writing consistency and credibility. Style is what gives it uniqueness. Style should not be confused with voice, however, which is a step or two beyond style and occurs when an author’s style becomes so unique you can identify him or her after reading but a few sentences or paragraphs.

Unfortunately, inexperienced writers sometimes try to mimic some famous writer’s voice, when they should be investing their time to develop their own style—how they write with clarity. Put another way, and using an analogy, the “style” section in a Sunday newspaper focuses primarily on hair, nails, and clothing. That is surface stuff—in literature, a book’s cover. Applied to writing, style goes much deeper—into the text. It constitutes the underlying individualized application of the rules of the written word.

Placed on a continuum, at the one end would be such descriptors as weak, disorganized, chaotic, muddled, unclear. At the other end, the descriptors become more positive, e.g., clear, ideal, superb. A definitive definition of what constitutes style is hard to find. One I like refers to it as “the way in which a literary work is written; the devices an author uses to express her thoughts and convey the subject matter.”

Style has a lot to do with clarity. Author Mathew Arnold describes style as having something to say and saying it as clearly as you can. Kurt Vonnegut didn’t define the term as such but stated its importance: Write with style, he said, if for no other reason then out of respect for your readers.

Reading something written with style, leaves you with a satisfied feeling, like the one you have at then end of a really good meal, provided you didn’t overeat. Voice on the other hand has more to do with an individual writer’s distinctive tone—the character or attitude of their writing. Many readers can spot Hemmingway and Faulkner and distinguish the two by reading but a few sentences or paragraphs. Voice deals more with the ability to identify who wrote a piece by the way it is written. Style, on the other hand, deals more with how well something is written. You can have the former and lack the latter. Style is more something you achieve; voice something you construct.

Everyone serious about writing must cross the boundary between how they write and how they want to write—with style. Too many writers angst over style when they should be focused on the basic quality of their writing. Style is not the way to good writing; it’s the result.

As you become confident and more facile in your writing, a style will likely emerge. Once there is a commitment to the art and craft of writing, style develops from trial and error and the accumulation of experience. It’s derived from tidbits that collect and interlock and ultimately reach critical mass and you suddenly realize the quality of your writing has gotten measurably better. By quality I mean your choice of words and how you organize them and put them together—your diction, which is a key element of style. It has to do with how your words flow and the quality of the journey on which your words take your readers. It’s the kind of writing that when you reach the last few words you find yourself disappointed that your journey is over.

We could banter about definitions forever, so instead let’s look at a few examples. Gary Provost, in his smart little paperback 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, used paragraphs “ONE” and “TWO” to distinguish style:

ONE

There wasn’t any noise at six A.M., and nobody was up yet. The wind was about the way you’d want it, and everything was pretty much okay. If you got up and took a look out the window, you could tell that summer was beginning.

TWO

It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

Following is the opening paragraph of James Hurst’s “The Scarlet Ibis:”

THREE

“It was in the clove of seasons, summer was dead but autumn had not yet been born, that the ibis lit in the bleeding tree. The flower garden was stained with rotting brown magnolia petals and ironweeds grew rank amid the purple phlox. The five o’clocks by the chimney still marked time, but the oriole nest in the elm was untenanted and rocked back and forth like an empty cradle. The last graveyard flowers were blooming, and their smell drifted across the cotton field and through every room of our house, speaking softly the names of our dead.”

While you ponder what makes any one of the above paragraphs better or more effective than the others, consider E.B. White’s description of style in The Elements of Style:

“Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind? Who knows why certain notes in music are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same notes slightly rearranged are impotent? These are high mysteries . . . There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly, no key that unlocks the door, no inflexible rule by which writers may shape their course. Writers will often find themselves steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.”

White’s words sound and feel familiar because you have no doubt pondered the question of style in regards to your own writing, probably at the end each effort. Style is the greatest challenge to a writer. Unlike learning and applying rules, your style develops after you have stumbled around, bumped into walls, and made endless edits and revisions. Then suddenly there you are, with a product that flows and has clarity. It’s only then you realize what Mr. White meant when he said style is “an increment in writing.”

When we speak of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing style, Mr. White wrote, “we don’t mean his command of the relative pronoun, we mean the sound his words make on paper,” and the reason you don’t learn style from rules, White continued, is that despite that all writing is communication, “creative writing is communication through revelation—it is the Self escaping into the open. No writer long remains incognito.”

Mr. White is telling us that developing style is developing one’s self. To have a style, a writer must not merely practice her art and craft but must become the art and craft; being immersed in it, not floating around upon its surface. The increment of writing to which Mr. White referred is the level of that immersion a writer achieves.

How does it feel as you develop style? Great, and it gets better with each little and accumulated epiphany collected over time as you struggle to pick and choose your words and organize them and put them together in sentences and paragraphs. You will sense your ascent through the increments of improvement as you become more facile and confident with your art and craft and reach that point where your words jump from the page with the force of a thrown brick rather than slide off and drip onto the floor. Style gives your words wings.

The skilled grammarian might well write a paragraph that correctly applies all the rules of grammar and is highly serviceable yet has the excitement of a paragraph from a lawnmower maintenance manual. No images or emotions fly off the pages to grab the reader and pull him or her into the story. It is the difference between a textbook that puts you to sleep and a novel that holds you in rapt attention far into the night.

Back to the three example paragraphs. The first reads much like raw reportage—a bare-bone descriptive synopsis. Perhaps the lead to a newspaper feature story. They could sound even newsier. For example:

“It was six A.M. No one had yet risen and the gentle breeze told you it was summer.”

-or-

“Everyone was still in bed at six A.M. It was the beginning of summer.”

The second example paragraph adds details and descriptions that touch a few additional senses, but it might have gone a bit too far in effort to make it sound casual. It’s vague in spots and misses opportunities to enhance the reader’s visual image and more fully touch the other senses. What is a wind with the proper touch? And does “the first real time of freedom and living” create an image or mood or emotion associated with the first morning of summer? Where is the description of the morning?

In the first twenty-five words of the paragraph from “The Scarlet Ibis,” we know exactly the time of year and that something meaningful has occurred, marked by the arrival of the ibis—a seaside bird so far from home. It opens with the seasons on the cusp and injects references to the smells and their sources. Its visual descriptions paint a scene in Technicolor rather than in shades of gray. The references to magnolia petals and the other flowers and the smell of cotton wafting across the heated fields tell us we’re in the South during summer. You can almost feel the oppressive lack of movement and the heat. Hurst has not just painted a picture with his visual references, but added an olfactory dynamic with words like “rank” and the “smell” of the raveyard flowers. We don’t know if things are peaceful or merely lazy and quiet, but you get the sense that something is lurking nearby and you want to read the next paragraphs.

Hurst’s addition of small, specific details in just the right concentration liberates our senses and enables each reader not just to paint the scene, but be there. He has created a sense of place, set the stage upon which his actors/characters will play.

Were you to re-read the three sample paragraphs in chronological order, you would see how the addition of detail engages more of the senses. That is what style does. Engages the senses.

I find another distinction between the paragraphs. Hurst’s is simply alluring because it hints of a mysterious history that the reader might get to visit. You are hooked as soon as that fragrant breeze crosses that cotton field and invites you to follow. Hurst’s words reach out and pull you into the scene, and thus, the story.

Hurst further locks his grip on you with his next graph: “It’s strange that all this is still so clear to me, now that that summer has long since fled and time has had its way.”

Tell me more. Tell me more. Tell me more.

Note that the three paragraphs could serve equally as examples to distinguish the concepts of show versus tell.

What accounts for style? According to The Elements of Style, there are twenty-one “reminders” for a writer thinking about style to keep in mind. Some of them, like “Revise and Rewrite” might be associated more with structure than style, but then that is where you catch your missteps and the speed bumps that detract and slow the reader down and detracts from style.

At this point, my advice is to pop for a copy of The Elements of Style. In fact, go for the $25 hardbound edition by The Penguin Press (2005). With its artwork and clean format, it has the feel of a textbook rather than the crammed cheat sheet of the ubiquitous, undersized, paperback version. It also includes a wonderfully descriptive piece by veteran New Yorker writer Roger Angell, the stepson of E.B. White, the person who took Cornell professor William Strunk Jr.’s “little book,” as it was known, and polished it into the perennial guide carried by tens of thousands of college and university students since Strunk’s original back in 1919.

Of the twenty-one reminders I’m going to list those I feel best relate to the concept of style:

•   Place yourself in the background – Strive to make your words, not you, important.
•   Write in a way that comes naturally – We all imitate but by trying to find a way that “comes easily and naturally to you” assures you will find and develop your personal style.
•   Work from a suitable design – You don’t need a formal outline, but you need to know where to start and from that point where you are going and hope to take your reader. Don’t take you readers into the woods and get lost.
•   Write with nouns and verbs – Another way of saying ease up on adjectives and adverbs. Find and use lush, descriptive words rather than cover ordinary ones in cloaks of adverbs and adjectives.
•   Do not overwrite – “Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.” Young, inexperienced writers too often think loading up the sentence with adjectives and adverbs and clauses makes them sound erudite. Wrong! The extra weight causes them to fall flat.
•   Avoid the use of qualifiers – Like adjectives and adverbs, terms such as rather, very, little and pretty are best when absent from your prose.
•   Do not affect a breezy manner – This is what the authors of the For Dummies books do, almost to a man/woman. By the end of the first chapter you want to grab them by the collar and slam them against the wall and say, “Get to the frigging point, would ya!” Of course, you can’t do that to a stranger, but you can, and should, do it to yourself.
•   Do not explain too much – Herein lies a tremendous challenge; what is too much? What Strunk and White were saying is avoid loading dialogue with explanatory verbs like “he consoled” and “she congratulated” and such. Research, by the way, shows that the verb “said” virtually disappears to readers. (There will be a separate blog on dialogue.)
•   Make sure the reader knows who is speaking – You don’t need to have every piece of dialogue attached to attribution, but when you shift gears or change drivers, you need to let the reader know who’s doing the talking. If you have two characters in an active two-way dialogue, you don’t need “said” at the end of every line. But if there’s a chance for confusion, supply attribution.
•   Avoid fancy words – Or as the sign I still have from my student editor days says: “Eschew obfuscation.”
•   Do not use dialect unless your ear is good – Check with Mr. Dickens and Mr. Twain for what this entails
•   Be clear – I cannot tell you how often on my third and fourth read of my own efforts I discover something to fix, or tweak. Do not treat editing as a chore. Learn from it. It will help make your first drafts better over time.
•   And for the cherry on the icing: Do not take shortcuts at the cost of clarity.

Bottom line: It’s not the rules that create style, but how you use them to make your writing take flight. All good pilots use check lists.

Jalapenos in the Oatmeal

June 12, 2014 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

Bob Markoff, The New Yorker magazine’s cartoon editor, in his book, How About Never—Is Never Good for You?, wrote, “Acting outrageously makes it that much easier to think unconventionally. If you don’t have a silly bone in your body, you’re not going to have a funny bone either. And if you can’t combine mature intelligence with some immature thinking, you’re never going to be funny enough to make a living at it.”

Markoff’s comment is so loaded with insight that it jumps off the page and slaps you across the face. It demands would-be cartoonists to highlight it and commit it to memory. For writers, it demands that we highlight it and commit it to memory.

Thinking unconventionally and immaturely are the character traits that make a fictional character bigger than life and allows him or her to break free from the gravitational pull of paper, jump off the page, and dance across your mind’s visual stage. Too many of us, me included, suffer from bouts of a form of self-consciousness, a subset of the fear of embarrassment, that keeps us from going out on the dance floor and doing the Lindy Hop. Somebody might see us! Though we admire watching others perform, we lack the courage or are too self-conscious to join in. For a writer to join in, his or her fingers first must dance unconventionally, immaturely, and unselfconsciously across the keyboard.

You can’t write a symphony using but one octave. Nor can you cripple the potential range of the thought and behavior of your characters, or their story.

By not interjecting your characters with outrageous actions and a certain level of immaturity, you risk imbuing them, and your story, with the excitement level of Pabulum. Your prose might be accurate, insightful, and reasonably active, but it will lack electricity—the fearlessness and adventurousness that snaps and zaps. That is where your characters’ cunning, wit, and creativity reside, and thus is critical not only to their own survival in the story but the survival of the story in the reader’s mind.

If you think about your favorite characters that have populated your reading history, most likely they are the ones who displayed outrageous actions and immaturity at variously elevated levels. These traits are what differentiate round and full characters from flat, cardboard ones. They empower a character to escape from the page rather become trapped on it and meander around the lines of ink. They are the knotted sheets that the imprisoned character climbs down to escape from the page after setting it afire. Your prose should make them like caged animals squeezing between your subjects and predicates to leap at the reader. It’s like putting jalapeño peppers in the oatmeal!

Without outlandish and immature behavior, characters come across stunted, undeveloped, underdeveloped, and moribund. If your writing does not push the boundaries, your characters won’t. Too many of us hang back and don’t let our characters—or our plot for that matter—reach, push against, and cross the boundaries into the kind of behavior Markoff writes about.

Most of us were not raised by international spies or having toured with the Barnum & Bailey Circus, so our collected experiences are a bit more ordinary, i.e., boring, common, and, yes, dull. As a result we sometimes unknowingly confine ourselves to a real world rather than explore a more outrageous one. As a writer, you do not need to actually act outrageously, but your characters do. To help them do that, you need to at least think outrageously, and visualize that for your characters. Take to the dance floor of your mind, and dance with them like no one is watching.

You’ve just written an action scene and have sat back and wondered why it comes across with the brightness of a nightlight rather than an intense, night-piercing searchlight. It’s probably because the scene, and the characters who populate it, lack outrageous behavior. Fantasy writers have it easy in this regard. They live in the world of outrageousness. Their stories maybe associated with or arise from some aspect of reality, but they quickly jump into a world beyond reality where their characters are not limited by it.

For the novelist or short story writer whose characters live in a world just a few blocks down and over from the one we live on, there’s a boundary where outrageous can become too unbelievable and actually destroy the effectiveness of a story or scene, thus killing its credibility. But that boundary is farther out there than you think. Words on paper have us rooting for humans trying to bring down Godzilla. As long as Godzilla appear reasonably logical in the world where it resides, we’re along for the scaly ride.

As a fun exercise, watch a scene from such a movie, then synopsize and describe it on paper. You’ll find yourself wondering why it worked so well on screen? It’s because the boundary of outrageousness exceeds the more limited boundary of our reality-based, word-grounded, conservative appropriateness. The scene on the screen taps into your imagination, and thus your emotions, from a purely visual angle. That’s the angle you want to try and inject into your writing. (I suggest writing that touches all five of the reader’s senses helps you achieve this same effect. See my blog, “Common Senses.”)

We all know that reading fiction is a form of escapism, except the writer must remember it’s not so much where you’re escaping from that counts as where you’re letting your readers escape to. That is what allows the writer to push the boundaries of normal behavior well beyond normalcy; your readers put their trust in your hands. Don’t disappoint them.

Readers simply want to believe, and as a result they allow the boundaries of normalcy to be stretched and expanded. John Grisham did it on smaller scale with his character Theodore Boone. (Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer). Really, a middle school legal whiz? It worked because Grisham took familiar behaviors and assigned them to unfamiliar territory. He’s written a sequel, Theodore Boone: The Abduction. The plots, the characters—they’re simply outrageous. Delightfully so.

The outrageousness of Grisham’s Theodore Boone pales in comparison to the characters in Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. It opens with a brutal murder of a family and won a Newberry Medal. Gaiman artfully blurs the boundaries between the worlds of fantasy and reality, but because he writes in the tone of reality the reader doesn’t notice, or care. Gaiman simply cuts lose and pushes aside the limitations of normalcy and makes it all seem rational.

How can this be achieved? Therein lies the rub. There exits no formula and it’s easy to take the readers too far, miss the target, and lose them in the process. There are hidden and undefined mine fields, and if you step into or onto one, you’ll blow up your characters’ or your plot’s credibility.

Readers love heroes who have a human side, flawed by little weaknesses or beliefs . . . or big ones sometimes. They also love them to display traits we can only dream of. And that is what the writer needs to feed—not the realities of the readers’ minds but the unrealities—the stuff they dream of and willingly buy into. Everybody is his or her own Walter Mitty. As a writer, you have a duty to feed their Walter Mittys.

A novel is not unlike a car race. We go to races to watch the speed and daring of the participants, but we love the occasional smash-ups and spinouts and flying debris and flames and smoke, and the screeching of tires, and the crunch of metal on metal. Why do you suppose traffic slows to a crawl as it passes an accident scene? In part to see what might be there to be seen, even if it grosses people out. Your writing needs smash ups, and it’s the outrageous behavior of your characters that causes them and slows the traffic down so the reader can strain to see the carnage.

Every character needs his or her strengths, but also their Kryptonite. In all the outrageousness, you don’t have a character lose all human traits, especially ones that are foundational to a character’s philosophy and ideals and to which their humanness is anchored. It’s what makes them fundamentally credible and provides the WOW when contrasted against their more outrageous elements. Finding (creating) and maintaining the balance between these two seemingly diametrically opposed states is the writer’s territory. Characters can’t be indestructible; otherwise there can be no credible conflict because there is no risk. But they can miraculously survive by not just luck, but cunning, incredible quickness, unbelievable bravery . . . The list of descriptors goes on.

Take away Kryptonite and Superman becomes just another indestructable super hero. Much of the potential for conflict and tension disappears. Where would the thrill be if you took away Jimmy Stewart’s crippling fear of heights in “Vertigo”? In Stewart’s case, his weakness is the heart of his character and the story. Don’t forget, characters can be called upon to overcome both external and internal conflicts. Real tension arises when they have to do both, at the same time. Otherwise, the temperature of the conflict (scene) would drop to something approaching zero in much the same way it would if Kryptonite had no deleterious effect on Superman.

You can see how the outrageousness of behavior is the key element in conflict.

In the original “Die Hard” movie, New York police detective Bruce Willis, in LA at Christmas to visit his estranged wife and two children, takes his shoes off and wiggles his toes in the plush carpet to relieve the tensions of his cross-country flight, only to find himself barefoot and running across broken glass in a hail of bullets to save himself and his wife and her colleagues from alleged terrorists. Similarly, Harrison Ford, in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” speaks of his phobia about snakes only to end up in a pit filled with them and armed with a dying torch, and, well, that whip.

Both situations are simply outrageous, if measured from the normal end of the continuum of human behavior, but they work, and work very well, because we want them to. Readers willingly suspend several levels of reality and dismiss normal skepticisms as the outrageous behavior logically moved toward the far end of the behavioral continuum.

Don’t be afraid to feed you readers a bowl of outrageous behavior. Just put some jalapenos in the oatmeal.

Common Senses

June 5, 2014 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

“It was a dark and stormy night . . .” opens the story by that famous novelist, Snoopy. The opening often is used as the example of the type of hackneyed writing to avoid. But take a closer look. Combined, dark and stormy become powerful visual words that allude to senses other than just sight and sound. You can certainly visualize a darkened sky, perhaps the lightning, and hear the thunder off in the distance, rolling and coming toward you. “It was to be one of those nights when you could taste the electricity in the air and smell the rain’s arrival as it splashed on your sweat-drenched skin to bring relief from the August heat and humidity and a fresh aroma to your nose, like the washing you hung on the line for your mother when you were a kid.”

How about that for a finish, Snoopy?

Little Snoopy accomplished something that we all should think more about—appealing to all of our readers’ senses in order to heighten the impact of what we write. In seven words, Snoopy brushed up against sight, taste, smell, sound, and touch as the impending rain begins to fall.

Not bad for a little beagle.

Most languages, certainly English, are very visual in nature because they started as pictographs and hieroglyphics on cave walls to which our ancestors attached sounds that evolved into verbal and then into written language.

A long-ago communication professor asked members of our seminar to discuss the word purple. He simply wrote the word in white chalk on the slate blackboard. The discussion quickly focused on taste, color, similes, and metaphors to the obvious, grapes, for instance. But purple has no sound descriptors and you had to stretch a bit for smell. But for some reason we say that some people write “purple prose.”

Paul West in a New York Times article back in 1985, entitled “In Defense of Purple Prose,” wrote, “It takes a certain amount of sass to speak up for prose that’s rich, succulent and full of novelty.” He said purple “is immoral, undemocratic and insincere; at best artsy, at worst the exterminating angel of depravity.”

Yet purple, as a color, has always been associated with royalty. What’s it doing down there in the gutter? I was taught to associate the term “purple prose” with pornographic or certainly something sexually oriented or racy or raunchy.

West went on: “So long as originality and lexical precision prevail, the sentient writer has a right to immerse himself or herself in phenomena and come up with as personal a version as can be. A writer who can’t do purple is missing a trick. A writer who does purple all the time ought to have more tricks.”

What does “doing purple” mean? I suggest it’s when a writer expands his or her efforts to incorporate more than the senses of sight and sound. It’s not easy. Just read a few descriptions of wine posted in your favorite store, or better yet, try to write a description of your own favorite wine and you will realize that trying to describe taste and smell and touch can get you into a muddle—where the image you had hoped to convey falls short of or off target.

“George, you look depressed.”

“I wouldn’t say my mood is depressed. I just feel purple today.”

Huh? To include the five senses in your narrative description, the challenge is to find clarity that puts your readers on the same page as you, the writer. Most of the time writers strive for clarity and understanding, or as we say in communications, to close the communication loop so the meaning of the message sent is received and accurately understood.

That perhaps explains why we tend to cluster our descriptors in groups of three. Poets, politicians and lawyers are famous for this. Take Emma Lazarus’ sonnet “New Colossus” on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.” She could have said, “Give me your citizens who yearn for freedom.” What about the rich yearning to be free? Why do citizens have to be tired, poor, and huddled to be welcomed to America? And what does huddled mean exactly? Are the three descriptions synonyms or do they describe three distinctly different classes or categories of people? Later in her poem, she mentions, “wretched refuse of your teeming shores.” Not a pretty visual that, but notice the words Lazurus used are all visual. If they are not synonyms, neither are they discordant.

We collect our descriptors in threes, likely to assure we connect with our audience at some perceived important cognizant level. We feel uncomfortable in giving a single descriptor so much responsibility as to carry the entire weight of our intended description when we’re not going to be there to interact with the reader and assure she or he understands. Frequently, however, no single word is sufficiently specific, and thus we cluster. If you look at Lazarus’ words, you can see she tried to paint a visual image by using a broad brush, to provide sufficient imagery to assure that readers got her idea/message and see the people she described—the ones who need another chance, a new opportunity, to escape from bad circumstances.

The words she used—“tired, poor, huddled, wretched refuse” are each very visual. A reader would have to be totally ignorant not to come away with at least the gist of Lazarus’ intended description of these tattered masses. Given a minute, you could probably come up with a list of more synonyms Lazarus could have employed. But likely, your list would be very visually oriented, too.

Words, especially verbs and adjectives that have the greatest impact on readers, are the ones that touch the senses. Of the five senses, most descriptors we read and use target sight and sound. For the others—touch, taste, and smell—you will find that the lists of alternatives are noticeably shorter, which makes finding the right one potentially more difficult. By right, I mean descriptors that are fresh, in more attention-grabbing and unusual ways—that enhance the impact of your overall narrative description.

One of my reference books combines sight and smell words into a single list: acrid, antiseptic, bitter, choking, clean, delicious, fragrant, fresh, juicy, medicinal, nutty, peppery, putrid, ripe, rotten, salty, savory, smoky, sour, spicy, stale, sticky, strong, stuffy, sweet, tangy, tart, tasteless, tasty. Notice that most lack specificity and rely on broad and common experiences to relay the message. That’s why we cluster our descriptions and rely on simile and metaphor to clarify their meanings. I’m not saying that is bad; it merely makes employment of words that touch on all these senses a bit more challenging to install. But it’s when you take the easy way out that your writing can sound hackneyed, or at least a bit too predictable.

You want to avoid prose where the inclusion of touch, taste, and smell descriptors reads like an accident report—”The popcorn was salty.” To have an effective impact, the use of descriptors referring to the “other” senses requires that you play with your sentence structure to make the description more prominent and thus more powerful. E.g.: “Her salty lips told me she had been drinking Margaritas for lunch.” Weave them into your narrative, don’t stick them on like a Post-It note.

Instead of “The popcorn tasted salty” you might incorporate the sense of taste with another descriptor to add a little depth and breadth: “I sat down at the bar, grabbed the bowl of popcorn and shoved a fistful into my mouth. The salt stung my lacerated lip and I took a sip of beer to wash the pain away.” Of course the brute that gave you the lacerated lip might spin you around on the bar stool, but think of the five senses you could use to describe what happened when you came around with a heavy mug of beer that crashes into his cranium.

How about, “The roiling smoke quickly coated my nostrils and I gasped for the free clean air” rather than “The room was filled with smoke.” “I dove to the floor in search of air not yet saturated by the acrid smoke but it chased me to the ground and scratched at my eyes and tried to claw its way down my throat to reach my lungs.”

It’s easy to makeyour sentences sound over wrought, so care must be taken not to insert sense descriptions that jar the tone and flow of a paragraph or seems oddly out of place. Overuse of sense descriptors can easily come across as forced, and too many sprinkled over a small area will give your writing a hackneyed flavor. But playing around with your narrative descriptions to include, in appropriate locations, something that touches a reader’s senses other than sight and sound, will add dimension and depth to your narrative and enhance the image(s) you hope to create.

Just think about it. Snoopy obviously did.

To practice, check out the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility (a.k.a. the Body Farm) and write the paragraph about a character (try it in first person) who has been abducted and finds him or herself waking up in the middle of the night on the wrong side of that fence.

Oh the places your readers will go . . . and touch, and taste, and smell.