taste

Eat Your Serial

September 25, 2014 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

On a recent Sunday morning, I read a short story from The Library of America—“The Ice Palace” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I marveled at his tendencies toward flourish, in contrast to Hemingway’s terse descriptions, and how it violated “style” as is now taught. I then read Adam Kirsch’s column on the last page of “The New York Times Book Review,” which captured my reaction to the now dated Fitzgerald’s style.

Fitzgerald and wife Zelda

Mr. Kirsch started his essay with: “Bad taste is not a disability but a decision, the decision not to explore beyond the boundaries of what we already know we enjoy.” He uses as an example to make his point the experiment of serving the same wine but in separately labeled bottles. “The tasters called the grand cru ‘complex’ and ‘round’ and the table wine ‘unbalanced’ and ‘weak.’ Not a single one detected that, in fact, both wines were in reality the same Bordeaux.” A few years ago, Trader Joe’s “Two-Buck Chuck” was submitted to blind taste tests, and won not a few vintner recognitions.

Mr. Kirsch included a more academic reference—to a Cambridge University lecturer who obtained similar results when he gave his students separate poems to read disclosing neither the author nor the period from which they derived. He discovered that “Good taste, in literature as in wine, turns out to be a chimera.”

He said the experiment did not mean, however, it’s pointless to have a discourse on what is better or worse, but showed that invocation of taste is designed to shut down discourse. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it takes advantage of subtle suggestions designed to have people refrain from exercising independent judgment. Marketers long ago discovered this chimeric sense of taste and have been taking advantage of it ever since.

Today, many ideas or products are presented in ways designed to encourage the assumption that quality is reflected by the snob appeal of a label as a shortcut to earned loyalty. (So much for the long-ago Zenith motto: “The Quality Goes In Before the Label Goes On”) Much of the impact of labeling (and marketing in general) is to garner a higher price—and thus profit—by extending the longevity of a brand. In marketing, brand trumps quality most of the time. Open up “The New Yorker” and you’ll see the snob appeal of products by brand that intimates the highest quality. There is some level of stitchery beyond which added cost returns no additional incremental value. You are paying for the snob appeal associated with the brand. This is not to say there are no distinctions in quality, but branding is at the heart of marketing and branding frequently has little relationship to quality. It’s focused on generating name recognition.

At the very heart of branding lies an invitation to exercise prejudice—for a particular product or against others. This is achieved by puffing the values of one product over others or by putting the others down as inferior, or at least less than superior.

Advertising is the commercial application of these techniques of propaganda. Madison Avenue uses them to tout the Cadillac; Hitler used them to persecute the Jews. The medium becomes the message, as Marshall McLuhan said. The form becomes the substance, according to me.

Mr. Kirsch argues that the allusions to taste can be counterfeit in products, but not so easy to carry off the deception in literature. Good taste, he says, often is more “a performance than a skill, and it can get messed up with other kinds of performance, above all the signaling of class privilege,” especially when applied to products of luxury. But literature is “the most democratic art” because it offers “few rewards for this kind of posturing.”

Really? Every time I walk into a bookstore, I see books displayed in ways that position them as better than their alternatives. The covers hawk the fame of the author over the title of the tale. The font size and placement of the author’s name frequently leaves little room for the title. Publishers count on name recognition to sell a book or give it an edge over those of other, lesser-known, authors. They seek to short-circuit in a few seconds of impression the judgment otherwise attained by reading a few pages.

Added to this is the growing number of publishers who see the best way to build a brand is by serializing the author and/or protagonist into a series, of which trilogies seem the most popular format. Some serials are more infinite. How many novels about Sheriff Joanna Brady has J. A. Jance written? After Sue Grafton finishes book twenty-six in her alphabet series, is there anyone who would bet that Kinsey Milhone’s life span wouldn’t be extended beyond the land of Z?

Don’t get me wrong; both Jance and Grafton are very capable novelists; their efforts rank well above average, and their successes are well deserved. And thank God that Robert Parker thought up Jessie Stone to substitute for past hardnosed coppers and detectives like Rex Stout’s Nero Wolf and his front man Archie Goodwin.

But when a business model gets wedded to a form, the substance can suffer, and in the case of literature, the gates can close to the non-serialized writers who lack potential long-term profitability that serialization can provide. A serialized character doesn’t have to be sold anew with each new book, just hyped a bit to announce the next release and keep the snowball of profitability growing.

In a world wedded to this business model, I wonder how Fitzgerald or Hemingway might now fare? Were Harper Lee younger, she might be pressured to have Scout grow up and fight the good fight on the front lines of the civil rights movement in book two, and later help Dill fight prejudice against gays in the military in book three, or link up with her father Atticus, now a law professor emeritus in a comfortable rocking chair, to solve complex crimes in a television series procedural.

The risk we take is that the writers will be lured to the gimmicky over the literary, and that is the road to becoming the hackneyed. A writer has to assume a different literary stance to produce a series. He can’t shoot the whole wad in book one, but must hold back bits and pieces of character traits and quirks of personality for disclosure and exploration in the next volume. As a reader you sometimes get the feeling you’re being manipulated as hints are dropped for volume two, like breadcrumbs. For the writer, the likely feeling is one of manufacturing product rather than writing literature.

The challenge to the writer is to create characters that are also credible and believable over the long run. No small task. The writer must also avoid what I call the “General Hospital” Syndrome. My mother turned me on to that years ago when she had not watched the soap “General Hospital” for three years and happened across it one day only to discover that the plot hadn’t really moved forward all that much. This incremental plotting technique is starting to show itself in serialized TV shows like “24” and “Under the Dome.” They can leave you feeling like you’re a trumpet player in a marching band that’s standing in place—music in constant coda but absent movement. That might work for an hour of action-packed dialogue in television, but it’s risky to think it will work for the reader who discovers after a few dozen pages that the author is dragging her around in circles.

Traditional serials have worked very well in the past. Remember the Hardy Boys and Spin and Marty? But they were established characters who merely moved from one adventure to another, pretty much like the traditional television cop show, starting with “Dragnet.” Today the effort seems to make each book in a series dig a little deeper into the protagonist’s character, to give it the appearance of expanded depth and breadth. You see this technique starting to be applied to television by use of the chatter about personal problems in a subplot as the protagonists weave together evidence about the main mystery at hand. (As a former special prosecutor who has walked into dark buildings, gun drawn, trust me, the last thing you’re inclined to do is chat about family problems or bowling scores. You’re too damn scared and who the hell wants to give away their location. Might as well walk on potato chips. Duh!) All this chatter provides little substance and typically comes across as forced. The idea is laudatory—that writers seek to develop a linear expansion of the depth and breadth of the primary characters—but too frequently the result is the same as spraying a wax coating on apples to make the shinier. The bad apple still lurks beneath.

So where does this leave the writer? In a danger zone. As the publishing industry further embraces the serialization technique as the preferred business model, writers will need to think in trilogies, which can lead to copycat crap. The risk is the same when extending any recipe—doing so without watering down the original recipe with “other natural ingredients,” a.k.a., fillers. The bigger challenge is trying to turn a novel initially written to stand alone into part of a series without watering down the product or looking like you’ve merely rewritten the first one. I am sure writer’s magazines will begin produce how-to articles on writing the “successful” serial. Actually, there are books on it available.

But for the writer the problem remains. How to break into that market? Oh the gatekeepers there will be ever looking for whoever can generate the greatest profits from a series, and who has the talent to write a very long tome that can effectively be whacked into three parts.

In the meantime, not knowing who wrote the following, what criticisms would you note in the margins in this first-paragraphs effort? Can you spot the hints of what might be the focus in volume one and those to be left for volume two? Thus the term chimera—what is hoped for but in reality is illusory or impossible to achieve.

The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensiﬁed the rigor of the bath of light. The Butterworth and Larkin houses ﬂanking were entrenched behind great stodgy trees; only the Happer house took the full sun, and all day long faced the dusty road-street with a tolerant kindly patience. This was the city of Tarleton in southernmost Georgia, September afternoon.

Up in her bedroom window Sally Carrol Happer rested her nineteen-year-old chin on a ﬁfty-two-year-old sill and watched Clark Darrow’s ancient Ford turn the corner. The car was hot—being partly metallic it retained all the heat it absorbed or evolved—and Clark Darrow sitting bolt upright at the wheel wore a pained, strained expression as though he considered himself a spare part, and rather likely to break. He laboriously crossed two dust ruts, the wheels squeaking indignantly at the encounter, and then with a terrifying expression he gave the steering gear a ﬁnal wrench and deposited self and car approximately in front of the Happer steps. There was a plaintive heaving sound, a death rattle, followed by a short silence; and then the air was rent by a startling whistle.

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.