Archives for October 2014

Bye, Bye Strunk & White

October 23, 2014 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

It’s taken a linguist and psychologist—Steven Pinker—to potentially displace the ubiquitous “The Elements of Style” by Will Strunk and E. B. White, and have us look with fresh eyes at what it takes be a good writer. In The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (Viking, 2014), Pinker offers a refreshing approach to writing that is a far cry from the collection of rules and platitudes typically delivered by self-proclaimed masters of grammar, including Strunk & White and the more contemporary, albeit testy, British grammar stickler Lynne Truss, who, in her Eats, Shoots & Leaves, describes her “zero tolerance approach” by endorsing the “hacking up and burial in unmarked graves” of those who improperly use apostrophes.

Truss’ position epitomizes the attitudes of classical grammarians, who unfortunately have obstructed generations of students from becoming better and more effective writers and have given so many others a phobia about putting pen to paper.

Like so many professions, it’s taken an outsider to spot the weaknesses and stuck-in-the-mud conventions of teaching grammar and composition. The jacket copy aptly distinguishes Pinker’s approach: “Rather than moaning about the decline of the language, carping over pet peeves, or recycling spurious edicts from the rule books of a century ago, [Pinker] applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose”

I’ve dealt with grammar sticklers equally committed to their trade as Ms. Truss, but lest murderously so, but in the end have noticed that as accurate as they are at pontificating on the rules of grammar, they simultaneously suck the life out of the prose they employ to do so. Rules are stated, forced and fabricated examples given, and, after a brief discussion, exercises presented that require a student to prove they understand the rules rather than how to apply them to the betterment of their prose. According to “The New York Times” book reviewer Charles McGrath, Pinker takes “a liberal, much looser and more easygoing” approach than, say, the Times’ own copy editors, which he describes as “purists.”

Pinker doesn’t turn the tables and advocate that we murder purists, but he might consider banishing them. In the meantime, he has socked stuffed-shirted grammarians in the eyes and rightfully so. He sees the problem with grammar for what it is—controlled by grammarians. And the problem with writing is that grammarians have taught it.

But don’t get ready to jump on any bandwagon to go and burn the English department down. Pinker takes us down his own rabbit holes as he discusses and diagrams usage in a way that reminded me of the painful efforts of my own long-ago elementary school days of diagramming subjects and predicates and prepositional phrases as if they were elements of an electrical circuit. Don’t forget, Pinker’s a linguist first and a revolutionary grammarian second. A linguist is a bit like an English major with a microscope, and sometimes Pinker has us peering into the microscope at linguistic minutiae. But it’s a small price to pay for the value his book delivers.

By revising the priorities of knowledge and skills needed to be a good writer, Pinker has arrived at a better approach as to how to teach grammar. In a selfish reaction, Pinker makes me feel vindicated when he states what I preached to my own students about writing in a linear fashion using words that make sentences and paragraphs flow from one to the next, and how much you can learn by reverse-engineering great examples. In fact, his first chapter, titled simply “Good Writing,” is subtitled “Reverse-Engineering Good Prose as the Key to Developing a Writerly Ear.” Rather than draw battle lines between the purists and the others of us, Pinker makes you think about writing in a way that teases jurisdiction over prose away from the clutches of the grammarians to set if free to be studied in situ, as it were, and convert it from less an obstacle to more a tool of writing.

His first chapter is not ponderous but makes you ponder. He introduces writing by exploring four actual and diverse real-world examples. He presents the quoted material and then takes us on a voyage of sentence-by-sentence analysis. Opposite the traditional stating rules and giving examples of their application, he quotes really good writing and discusses what makes it so. He throws you into the deep end of the pool not to be mean but because that is where our written language resides. He explains: “The spoken word is older than our species, and the instinct for language allows children to engage in articulate conversation years before they enter a schoolhouse. But the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood and beyond.”

That statement alone is cause for relief. It’s not that you’re stupid—which is the conclusion we allow too many students to take away from their composition classes. You have to learn how to take words and effectively put them into written form. Unfortunately, the way we have chosen to teach that skill really sucks.

Because he uses examples to explore and find the rules of good writing, you can’t simply jot down his list the rules. For example, at the end of the first chapter he lists what you should have learned:
•   The “insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary;
•   “An attention to the readers’ vantage point and target of their gaze;
•   “The judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs;
•   “The use of parallel syntax;
•   “The occasional planned surprise;
•   “The presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement”; and,
•   “The use of meter and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood.”

You need to read and follow his analyses of examples from which the rules are derived to fully understand how best they are applied. Think about this approach in contrast to the traditional one of introducing a rule, giving example(s) of its proper use and application, and then being required to prove you “got it” by completing contrite sets of objectively-gradable exercises. In the end you might have memorized the rules, but likely you have learned little about how to be a better writer.

To become a better writer, you have to write. What Pinker’s book does is give you the freedom to think about writing as less an application of the rules of grammar then an effort at communication.

In chapter two, entitled “A Window onto the World” and subtitled “Classic Style as an Antidote for Academese, Bureaucratese, Corporatese, Legalese, Officialese, and Other Kinds of Stuffy Prose,” he sets out to educate the reader on what makes for good writing. He initially does so by doing what Henry Africa, my “professor” of newspaper production, did for me at Iowa. Prof. Africa would take a column of type from a newspaper article and within a few minutes halve it without losing the clarity of its content. Pinker does it with less practicality—to get the column of lead to fit into the unforgiving space allotted to it—by discussing writing in terms of style, which he describes as “how the writer imagines himself to be related to the reader, and what the writer is trying to accomplish.”

Part of his approach is to classify writing by various styles and explain their differences—such as the “classic style” and the “practical style”—in terms of the differences in their relationship between the writer and the reader. The distinctions between the styles are more substantive than nuanced, and once he has explained them you’re likely to see their importance to writing prose that achieves the clarity for your intended audience. Though this may come across as esoteric here, the distinctions have practical values, which he carefully points out.

Pinker seems to prefer the classical style, which he states “will make anyone a better writer, and . . . is the strongest cure I know for the disease that enfeebles academic, bureaucratic, corporate, legal, and official prose.”

There are still some rules but ones distilled from examples. In the ordinary grammar composition text, the rules are given and supported by examples. Pinker does the opposite. He finds via the analysis of his examples. And, the examples he uses are not contrived but the real prose of accomplished writers. His approach is the difference between reading about music and going to a concert and having the conductor explain what is going on and why. It’s not that the authors’ whose snippets he shares and uses have something important to say. That doesn’t capture what they do. Instead, says Pinker, “They write as if they have something important to show. And that . . . is a key ingredient in style.”

What has Pinker tapped into? Logic. He has applied the techniques of the science lab to teaching writing but has preserved the underlying creativity, if not enhanced it. He takes examples of writing and through analysis and discussion (dissection), shows us what the writer has done and why. If I open my Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition text I had to use to teach my middle school students, I find it akin to the federal tax codes and regulations I lugged around in law school—a ponderous compilation of rules and regulations. The distinction is that the tax laws and rules would keep clients out of jail. The rules of grammar have put too many students into a literary jail . . . without parole. Students learn writing not by emulation but through creation. Of all the subjects we teach our students, writing has been the subject taught wrong and taught wrong for a long time. Pinker might well help undo the damage that has caused.

But the powers of inertia are great. The hardest thing to open is a closed mind. Relying on Pinker, I’ll do a little prying of my own in future blogs. He’s a welcomed voice to the fields of grammar and writing.

“Incite Insights”

October 16, 2014 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

“Freytag’s Pyramid” lists the seven basic elements of fiction writing in chronological order: (1) exposition, (2) inciting incident, (3) rising action (conflicts), (4) climax (at the top of the pyramid), (5) falling action, (6) resolution, and (7) denouement. It’s important for the writer to understand that Freytag was not listing a set of rules but rather a compilation of observable structural elements present in virtually all fiction writing. They constitute the common ingredients of storytelling.

The distinction is important to the writer. Rules are compliance driven, the items on a list to be checked off; for example a pilot’s pre-flight checklist or the surgical nurse’s inventory to assure some piece of gauze or a clamp has not been left inside the patient.

Rather than rules, Freytag’s list of the fundamental common elements of fiction serve as the structural skeleton at the heart of a story—reliably ever-present but the location and precise contents of which are individually subjective. Rather than rules, the writer should consider them as tools to help construct an effective piece of fiction—one that grabs and holds a reader’s attention and carries him or her from the beginning through to the end. If readers sense the absence of any one of these fundamental elements, they likely will find what they are reading lacking and move on.

As you construct a story its skeletal elements become lost in the tissues and organs and skin you’ve added to create the completed body, but they are what holds it together. That’s what Freytag’s elements do.

Rules attempt to objectify complicated processes by breaking them down into more bite-sized pieces. For example, a cell’s structure as diagrammed in a biology textbook has sharp lines that clearly distinguish the borders of its various parts, which are neatly labeled. Under a microscope, however, there are no labels and the actual parts of a living cell appear considerably less distinct—mushy even. It becomes difficult to distinguish the boundary lines of the cell’s constituent parts.

Like a living cell, the story you are writing is considerably more organic and subjective—mushy under the microscope. The pieces of a story become blended, less distinct at their edges as the subtleties of details and transitions are added and mixed together to become a whole. Like making a cake from scratch, the ingredients are distinct, just sitting there in their containers on the tabletop, but as you blend them together, they combine into batter. If you try to maintain each element as distinctly separate, your story becomes less like smooth batter and remains lumpy. It simply won’t flow and certainly won’t bake up right.

To a reader or literature student, Freytag’s elements serve as the checklist of what to find in an analysis of a story, like locating the parts of a cell under the microscope. To a writer, however, the listed elements serve as the constituent ingredients of story to be blended together. From this perspective, awareness of and sensitivity to Freytag’s pyramid becomes an invaluable aid to the writer as s/he nurses an idea—the sudden brainstorm or flash of inspiration—into a completed story.

Once you get into writing a story, it’s easy to forget where the original idea came from, but one given remains: rarely do story ideas arrive in a complete package of chronologically arranged parts. Stories start out as fragments of action that need to be fitted into a complete story held together by Freytag’s seven elements.

Brainstorms of story ideas inevitably arrive as explosions of action or conflict that structurally belong toward the top left side of Freytag’s pyramid. An ending may come to mind, but rarely do we see the beginning in any great detail. Beginnings generally have to be constructed. This is not a weakness in your thinking but part of a quite logical process. Action is the heart of any story, and it’s the image of action that typically serves as the catalyst behind brainstorms in the first place.

Once the rising action (conflict) is visualized, you merely have to apply techniques of reverse engineering and back the action of the brainstorm or idea up to find or create a strong and effective exposition and inciting incident(s) that will dovetail into your already conceived rising action. Story ideas always arrive with the horse before the cart! A writer has to put things in order and Freytag’s elements can help do that.

So an idea explodes in your mind and you enjoy the experience, but, ultimately, you have to come up with a beginning. Think about a story idea you’ve had. I’d bet that it didn’t arrive fully developed. Your mountain climber didn’t start with a wild hair during a boring office meeting, or getting ready at basecamp, or saying goodbye to his wife. It started with Joe—played by you—on the shear face of the mountain, perhaps a thousand feet below the summit and facing certain death on the rocks three thousand feet below. He looks over his shoulder at the unexpected storm moving in very quickly as he contemplates the discovery that he brought along inferior quality pitons that likely won’t hold his weight and suddenly realizes they were a gift from his wife. Can’t climb down, but does he have the time to make it to that craggy outcropping a few hundred feet above that might offer protection from the elements? Sleet is starting to pelt him. Any free-climb path to that ledge is going to get very icy, very fast if he can’t do something about the pitons.

The conflicts come into focus—man against the mountain, nature against man, man against the clock, man against some deadly plot. It just takes some backing up from the flash-of-inspiration scene on the mountainside to find where the inciting incident belongs and what it might be. By then you will have primed your mind to come up the ingredients of the story’s exposition where the characters start to come to life. Their thoughts and actions will lead you to an appropriate inciting incident that carries the action forward to connect with your original flash of inspiration.

Creating story from an idea is similar to when you have a vivid dream. After waking up, you inevitably try to figure out where the dream came from. When you have a brainstorm for a story, it’s a similar process, only you have to invent where the story would best start.

This is where the second writer’s list plays a key role in your story development. Freytag’s elements are the file folders; you have to insert the contents. The second list, which consists of the Five W’s & H—Who, What, When, Why, Where, and How—will help with that. Come up with the answers to those questions for each of Freytag’s elements and you’ll soon have compiled the details that put life into your original flash of action and fatten your Freytag file folders. The questions will also help when you find yourself stuck on the ledge of someplace and not certain which direction to take. The questions force you to review the key ingredients of each step, starting with your exposition and on into your inciting incident. Your answers will provide focus on which “horses of action” will best pull your story’s cart forward.

This internal Q and A process will flush out the details of your characters, their actions, the location, and the all-important inciting incident that will pull a reader into your story and give it life and credibility and have the readers hooked by the time you take them to the rising action. Let’s say you like the idea that your mountain-climbing protagonist has a potentially lethal spouse. The Five W’s & H will help you come up with the details about the climb—from the mountain, its location, the other members of the climb team (too far away to help), and the underlying reason(s) that your protagonist is here in the first place. The questions will also help you decide where the wife’s plot first got started—a boyfriend perhaps, or to keep the protagonist from discovering her involvement in something far more sinister (Subplots!). Did she add a few million in insurance coverage on her husband’s life insurance policy a year ago or perhaps she has a boyfriend who is a crooked insurance agent who plans to kill her once she collects on the policy. He plans to stuff the cash into an exercise bag and slip away to the islands.

You can see how the two lists work in tandem. Freytag’s helps you keep your story linearly focused, and working through the list of W’s and H generates the details that bring your story to life.

But the two lists, although very helpful, do not comprise the complete story telling kit. A good story, well written, will create a movie in your readers’ minds. For the writer to achieve that, s/he needs to think visually about the answers to each question, and actually see the story, its characters, scenes, and actions, and then select the words that best paint the scenes into reality for your reader—in Cinemascope and Technicolor and Surround Sound. Lists won’t help you with those. You need skills of narration and dialogue, internal and external.

Joe reached down and grabbed a piton from the looped collection hanging from his belt and nestled its point into the narrow crevice—a crack in the granite that opened perhaps thousands of years ago when some temblor rattled the mountain. Once the piton was slightly wedged into the crack, he flipped his wrist in a well-practiced maneuver and his hammer jumped up and landed in his thick-gloved hand. He liked the showy move, which he practiced frequently. It gave him a sense of control and surgical synchronization. The perfection of the flip of his wrist was as reliable as the ting the tempered steel of a piton made when you first started to drive it into a crevice. But this time, there was no ting. The missing sound didn’t at first register; not until he hit the piton a second time. It returned a sound more like a six-penny nail being driven into a two-by-four. “What gives?” he thought. He pulled another from his loop and inspected it, something he should have done during bivouac at base camp, or when he was packing his gear, but didn’t because they were new, a good luck gift from his beloved Jane. The piton lacked the usual markings of its manufacturer. The lack of quality was glaring in comparison to the pitons he normally used. Didn’t Jane say they were the same brand?

“She’s always trying to save money,” he tells himself. “But why would she cut corners on these? She knows how important they are.”

Funny thing about being in a deadly dangerous situation with few if any options; your mind starts to run scenarios if not race about fully amok. You see and feel things that are not true. But sometimes you see things that are. Aspects of your life come into very sharp focus. He shouldn’t have used so many of his original supply of pitons first. He cursed himself for his carelessness as he looked up to estimate the distance to the outcrop and then over his shoulder to calculate when the full force of the storm would slam into the mountain, and him.

First he needed to think about survival. If he survived, then he’d think about the pitons. But thoughts of why slapped him in the face along with the wind-driven sleet that announced the storm. He needed to make these pitons work.

“Think about what to do now,” he yelled at himself. “Now! Now!”

He’d think about Jane’s potentially deadly intentions later . . . if there were a later.

First you have a character in a tight jamb—your brainstorm. Then you back up a bit to find the potential facets of exposition and the inciting incident(s) that will work to kick off the action that has the protagonist in the fix in which he finds himself. Ideas ping-pong back and forth between the character’s situation and the beginning exposition and events that put him there. An inventory of facts and alternatives mount and you start to pick and choose from them those that will best work.

By understanding how the process works, and the elements of a story’s structure, and how to interrogate yourself, backing up from the beginning of an idea to a beginning of a story becomes less arduous. Once you understand how something works, you can focus on making it work better for you.

Armed with these two lists you’ll soon find that nursing story from an idea becomes easier, but it’s also easy to suddenly find yourself dangling off the shear side of a mountain trying to figure out how save your story idea. But with a little practice you will gather the confidence that you can build on. Just remember to check your pitons before you start to climb into your story.

Psychic Distance

October 9, 2014 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

Years ago a dear friend invited me into his office, and as I sat down he slid a couple of pages across the desk and asked me to read them. Another mutual acquaintance had treated a friend of his in an admittedly unprofessional manner and my friend felt compelled to point out his errancy in a very sharply worded letter, in which he brushed up against threats as to how he intended to treat this person in future interactions. Based on his position of public visibility and authority, I suggested that my friend put the letter in his side drawer and let it simmer a few days, then re-read it and consider (1) rewriting it, or, (2) better yet, rounding-filing it.

My friend didn’t heed the advice, and, in the heat of passion that probably would have cooled after those self-imposed few days, he mailed the letter. It cost him dearly in terms of his position and reputation. His regrets came, but they arrived too late and were no replacement for the wisdom he should have exercised. Apologies can’t mend a well-torched bridge. My suggestion to wait was based on the knowledge that one’s written perspectives are inevitably altered by time, especially when initially driven by anger or outrage. The ardor of the night before cools by morning light. The same applies to the improvement of diction and logic. We age our wine and whiskey and need to do the same to our words.

When our thoughts first flow onto paper, the words are seldom ideal. Fortunately, our subconscious continues to mull them over along with the thoughts that prompted them, and inevitably, comes up with a different or better tack, like Monet, caught years after his painting had hung in a Paris museum tweaking a few brush strokes that apparently displeased him.

Word and phrase selection can be critically important in a letter seeking admission to the college you wish to attend or to state your qualifications for a position you seek. Time invested to let your words gestate is always a wise investment. Rarely is first written best written. It’s just the way the human brain works. It grabs something off the easy-to-reach lower shelf that will do the job, but only adequately. You have to take the time to get the ladder and climb up to the really good stuff on the top shelf.

I don’t recall anything I’ve ever written where a little additional time—and effort—did not improve it at least by a little, and, more frequently, by a lot. It is the writer’s lot to write something only to discover the original sense of clarity got lost or sidetracked in the literary fog that concealed the fact we got off track and which only becomes obvious in the brightness of a new day.

Whole concepts, approaches, words, and verbs are missed or overlooked or initially not thought of, let alone considered. What we originally think is clear is confusing. Our flow gets snagged on the rocks along the bottom of our literary stream. The fact that this happens is natural and constitutes no failure. It’s part of the creative process of constant refinement. The failure is when we don’t see what needs to be edited, rewritten, or revised.

On ancient maps, unexplored territory was sometimes indicated by the notation, “Here there be dragons.” The same applies to a writer’s map, which seldom is the product of the best cartographer. The writer is constantly sailing into new and uncharted waters and thus called upon to slay more than a few dragons, many of her own making.

With practice, getting things down the first time a little better than the first time the last time, moves the writer inches closer to attaining his desired ideal with less and less effort. But don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen. Instead, pack a lunch. It’s part of the writing process and the writing process mimics all of man’s endeavors to continually seek to improve. But, in time, the time needed to the keep the “letter in the side drawer” shortens. As you become better at putting words on paper, you become better at editing them and able to set aside the emotional investment and take on the steely-eyed, unmerciful objectivity necessary to improve them. These are cumulative skills and it’s important to exercise patience and commit to the process that allows them to continue to develop.

Younger writers will chastise themselves for “not getting it right” more quickly the first time. But it’s part of the process of learning and practice. There are a few things you can do to shorten the distance between desire and reality, or what I call “psychic distance”—the ability to look at your own work as if it was someone else’s. One, constantly practice on other people’s efforts. What would you do to improve an article you read in a newspaper or magazine or a chapter in a book? You will discover that some publications are extremely well written, i.e., edited. In those cases, assess why what you’re reading is so good, and apply those lessons to your own efforts. Don’t undersell yourself; you’ll start to discover that what you have written is actually better, or at least constitutes a good alternative to what you read. Television automobile ads are good to practice on. They frequently present the worst ad copy around, lacking in both quality and logical continuity.

Secondly, change your perspective. I do this in two ways. I change where I write. I might try the deck, which frequently includes a favorite brand of cigar, then move to the softer light of my office. I also like to put my laptop or tablet on a TV tray and sit on the couch or in my easy chair.

Thirdly, I change not just where I write, but on what I write. Only recently have I reached that point where I can walk into a Microsoft or Apple store and not walk out with a bag or a box—not because I don’t find anything, I already have everything. That means I can change not only where I write but on what I write. A blog inevitably starts on some tablet and at some point gets transferred to my desktop. My problem now is keeping track of the device on which I was working.

Fourthly, take a break and work on something else, even it’s the start of a letter to a friend. I’ll e-mail my friend who is a painter and working on his own website, thus giving me a chance to explore something other than my own effort. It’s all about creating that psychic distance that provides the fresh set of eyes when I return to my screen. It’s like being away from a familiar place for a while. When you return, it looks—at least temporarily—a little different.

Fifthly, when you find some piece of writing that is really well done, pay attention to it, especially advertising copy. A really good ad writer must tell a story in 30 to 60 seconds. That’s about one page of copy. After a while it becomes a game, and you find yourself developing a critical ear, which leads to a critical eye necessary to assess your own efforts.

Here’s an example from my Facebook posting for my recent blog entry titled “Good Enough as Not Good Enough.” Once a blog is wrapped and ready for posting, I sit down and draft three entries—one for Facebook, one for LinkedIn, and one for Twitter, in which I introduce the blog topic and provide a link to the entry. I write the Facebook one first, then “tweak it down” to one for LinkedIn, then peel off everything to the skeletal bare bones to fit into Twitter’s 139 character limit. That process alone is a worthwhile practice. Here’s the first draft I wrote for Facebook:

People who write about writing—that’s me—love little anecdotes like this one: When asked what prompted him to rewrite the end of last page of Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times, Hemingway answered simply: “Getting the words right.” Similarly, years ago, I saw an alleged draft of Dickens’ first page of A Tale of Two Cities on which he had written the first line eighteen times before finally settling on “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” So what happens to the writer willing to settle for the first effort as opposed to the sixth, or tenth, or, in Dickens’ case, the nineteenth. The answer is we don’t know because we never heard of him or her. Well, we might were he a poet in the modern world. I’ve discovered an approach to poetry that I find rather offensive—that the first words on the paper are the ones most closely attuned to the poet’s original intent and thus should not be tampered with. No other human endeavor has ever taken that position—that the first draft is good enough. It’s an invitation to mediocrity, which I explore in “Good Enough as Not Good Enough” in this week’s blog at howtobeabetterwriter.com.

This version was pared down to this:

Why rewrite the last page of Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times? Said Hemingway: “Getting the words right.” Every literary effort since man first drew on cave walls has been to edit, alter, modify, and tweak to improve the initial effort. One school of poets now argue that the first words written best reflect the writer’s intention, so hands off the red pencil. Let’s hope we don’t see an “Up with Mediocrity” movement. There’s enough mediocrity in the world. In “Good Enough as Not Good Enough,” I endorse the tradition of reaching past good and better to invest effort in the best.

I then typically print a hardcopy and let it sit while as I complete a few chores and/or work on another writing effort and come back to it with fresh eyes:

Why rewrite the last page of Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times? To get the words right, said Hemingway. Every literary effort since man drew on cave walls has been to improve his initial efforts. One school of poets now argue that the first words written best reflect the writer’s intention, so hands off the red pencil. Are we going to see an “Up with Mediocrity” movement? Enough with mediocrity. Isn’t there already enough mediocrity in the world? In “Good Enough as Not Good Enough,” I explore the tradition of reaching past good and better to achieve the best.

So then I transferred my effort from my Surface Pro to my iMac, where the last tweak was limited to modifying the last sentence to read: “. . . I explore the tradition of reaching past good and better for best.” That’s what I posted on Facebook. You’ll note that with each effort I took words out. By the end of the process, the reader didn’t need to click on the “more” option. The point I sought to make remained unchanged, just considerably more efficiently written.

Now in my own Monet-in-the-museum moment, had I more time, I would have written this:

Thirty-nine times Hemingway rewrote the last page of Farewell to Arms to “[Get] the words right.” Since his cave paintings, man has sought to improve his literary efforts. One school of poets now posits that first written best reflects a writer’s true intentions so should not be subject to the editor’s pen. In this week’s blog—“Good Enough as Not Good Enough—I posit that’s the path to mediocrity, and mediocre is never best.

As I sit back and ponder, I see a couple of other potential edits. I won’t make them, but you should always practice this editing game—to create the psychic distance that will help you to review your own efforts with fresh eyes. Soon you’ll discover that you won’t need to slip anything into the desk drawer for a few days in order to develop the skill of critical self-assessment, and the quality of your writing will improve.

Good Enough as Not Good Enough

October 2, 2014 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

When I was in journalism school, the new administration decided journalism could be taught as a lab project rather than through the classroom and practicums, one of which included writing for the university daily of which I was editor at the time. The dispute between these two educational philosophies was dubbed the Green Eyeshades vs. the Chi Squares. The products created by these new-age journalism lab rats reminded me of the mimeographed “Junior Journal” from my junior high days. They were odiferous—literally and figuratively. The experiment in this new pedagogy cost the school its Big Ten accreditation, which took years for it to win back. Fortunately, I got my B.A. and M.A. before that happened.

That old consternation generated by the abandonment of dedication to quality was recently reignited when I discovered the “new school” of poetry—that what you initially put on paper is that which is truest to the poet’s intended emotions and thus should be considered indelibly written. The philosophy at least offered an explanation for stuff I was reading and finding wholly lacking in quality, content, and clarity. I’ve always thought that any bad aftertaste from reading something should come from the subject matter and not the quality of the writing itself.

I have searched the world for an example of where this theory, that first is best, has been successfully applied to other human endeavors, in addition to literary ones, and have found none. The success of humans on this planet—and off-planet for that matter—is in part a product of our species’ innate drive to make incremental improvements to everything we do. I’m not saying that we’re always successful or that some of our choices have not been unwise or self-destructive even, but those are downside attributes of being sentient. Overall, however, we have improved our literary condition from those days when our creative medium was the charred end of sticks pulled from the cave fire. However, much of the poetry that is the product of this new thinking might better serve as the fuel for fires that char the sticks.

The “old days” were marked by the power and authority of gatekeepers who denied access to the undeserved, but unfortunately also unfairly blocked access to many who were deserving. Technology has helped break down those gates and level the playing field and now offers a soapbox to anyone who wants one. That can be seen as either a democratization of literary access or opening the gates to anarchy. Or, as one old boy told me in my formative years, life can be a bit like a cesspool; it’s not always the cream that rises to the top.

As a result, our new, technologically enhanced literary world offers great opportunity to the talented and the not so talented. What we need to keep in mind, however, is what differentiates the two and develop the skills to differentiate them as they float by on the literary surface. The distinction between the two is particularly important to those of us who seek to create literary content. My position is simple: rather than rationalize mediocrity, we must still demand the highest level of performance by keeping our own expectations and efforts high. The market place is very good at making and determining credibility—and thus the survivability of creative effort.

Not everyone will be Robert Frost; nor should they want to. The ideal is to be talented in your own special way, not talented at copying the style of others, unless parody is your wont. Along the way you will borrow elements from various sources and in time blend them and modify the results to become your own style. That is the process that has been going on since Bubba scratched the first stick-figured hunters and prey on those cave walls. But no one in the creative arts should ever consider just good enough as good enough. First thoughts and first drafts are usually rough thoughts and drafts, and, like diamonds, require additional effort to be shaped into glittering facets.

This blog entry is an offshoot of the introductory essay of the soon-to-be launched poetry page on my lowellforte.com website. In that essay, I explore the distinctions between prose and poetry and won’t repeat them here; the essay is but a click away at www.lowellforte.com. In my efforts to write that essay, however, I discovered the important distinctions between poetry and prose and the values that exploring them offer the prose writer.

Prose and poetry are two distinctly different genres for obvious reasons. But as I tried to describe their differences, I struggled to distill several thousand words of effort into the essence of what constituted the distinctions. That experience is a perfect of example of writing to learn. It is also an example of first never being best. The first draft made little sense, but gave rise to insights needed for the next draft, and the next, and so on. In the end, I found the distinctions between prose and poetry involve the level of intimacy between the writer and reader and the writer and her words.

A prose writer, armed with a thesaurus and Webster’s Third, can do great things. But a poet must dive below the surface of definitions and usage and immerse herself in the syllabic texture and rhythm and flow of individual words. It’s the difference between the person seeing the ocean from deck of the boat, and swimming the coral reefs with the fishes along on the sandy bottom. In poetry, it’s not always the search for the right word, but for the perfect word.

Asked what prompted him to rewrite the last page of Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times, Hemingway responded: “Getting the words right.”

The multiple thousands of words that can be expended in trying to describe the differences between poetry and prose is mostly an academic exercise. To truly understand the distinctions, a writer needs hands-on experience. As part of this learning-by-doing invitation, I reiterate my dislike of what is called modern poetry, especially any claim that the words that first hit the page should be impervious to the eraser’s ire. But I’m not going to climb up on my soapbox and demand a return to some past dedication to iambic pentameter or the writing of Shakespearian-styled sonnets, although efforts at each would likely enhance your respect for the forms and the contemplative processes that fuel them. But so would writing a few limericks, clean or obscene. It’s all about the effort to find just the right word to fit just right in the just right place for just the right purpose.

Set aside some time to explore poetry. Read some—old and new—and try to analyze why you liked this but not that. Poetry is an endless shelf of spices—some bitter, some sweet, and with an infinite variety of flavors in between. Besides limericks, you might delve into the structure and discipline of Haiku. (Check the poetry page for the “illustrated Haiku” I’ve put together, and for the rules on writing Haiku.) Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. Try writing one. Or compare the works of some of the U.S. Poet Laureates. You’ll discover the differences between these genres as did I—prose deals with sentences and paragraphs and chapters and plot; poetry involves self and emotions—matters of the heart.

As for the level of effort to invest, do your best. Aim high. You will learn a lot just from the climb and it will bring you that much closer to the thinner-aired nest from which writers take flight.