Nuts & Bolts 4: Words & Phrases

132}I KNOW NOT SHOULD:
WHY THE CONDITIONAL KILLS

Routine can infect our stories unintentionally, through the words we choose and even our choice of tense (see Meditations # 15–17).

Look at this paragraph:

Frank would never bother to knock, though Harriet would always complain that he should knock, that it was rude of him not to. “Family don’t count,” Frank would say to her, and Harriet was as good as family. And anyway he wouldn’t just barge in. He would walk in gently and announce himself. As far as he was concerned Harriet could complain herself blue in the gills: His way was good manners enough.

At first glance there’s nothing wrong with this. In fact it has its charms. Yet it’s not all it could be. All those woulds and coulds suck the life from the passage.

A revision:

Frank never knocked. “You damn well ought to,” Harriet scolded. “It’s rude not to.”

“Family don’t count,” Frank countered: Harriet was as good as family. Anyway he hadn’t barged in; he’d entered gently, announcing himself. That was manners enough as far as he was concerned.

Here the sense of routine is preserved, but without the fly-in-amber fossilization that results from overuse of the conditional tense. The same scene, or one much like it, may have occurred often in the past, yet the reader experiences these events uniquely, as they occur now, with the authority and urgency of a present singular moment. The particular illustration merely proves the rule.

Often in student stories I’m told what a character “would” (generally) do. “Hal Conklin would sit out on the steps of the town hall with a bag over his head and both middle fingers held erect for all the world to see.” This is less effective than, “That last week of October, all week long, Hal Conklin sat on the steps of the town hall with a shopping bag over his head and both middle fingers held erect for all the world to see.”

When you find yourself leaning hard on “would,” ask whether you may be stuck in routine mode. Dramatize a specific event and have that event stand for the routine.

133}BRIGHT YELLOW FLUID:
PERFUNCTORY MODIFIERS

Modifiers (adjectives and adverbs) should be used to add nuance or meaning that isn’t already inferred or implied by the words they modify.

We already know tears wash silently down a person’s face; no need to say so. But when a narrator tells us a character’s shoes make “a light sticking sound on the linoleum,” that supplies me with valuable sensory information.

Not all modifiers are perfunctory. Even piled on in machine-gun bursts, they can work well. “Yet sometimes it washes over me in big fat sloshing waves of sadness how much I miss her.” Here, three adjectives are better than one or none.

But later in the same story, describing a catheter bag, the same narrator gives us “a pouch filled with a clear bright yellow fluid the color of a sugary summertime drink.” The words “clear bright yellow fluid” are more than enough to evoke the image. “Bright yellow fluid” would suffice; so would “yellow fluid.” So would “urine” or one of its less formal variants. By adding “sugary summer drink” the writer gilds his already golden lily.

134}FLOATING BOWLING BALLS &
FROZEN MAGGOTS: DEAD SIMILES

The battle fields of “creative” writing are littered with the corpses of dead similes. Among my favorite casualties:

Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.

The hailstones leaped from the street like maggots when fried in hot grease.

He was as tall as a 6'3" tree.

The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

The brick wall was the color of a red-brick colored crayon.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

The horizon swallowed the setting sun like a dog sucking an egg.

135}THE CASE AGAINST “SPIED”:
WRITERLY VERBS

We need to avoid writerly verbs, like “chortle,” “utter,” “opine” and “spy.” I call them “writerly” since they’re almost never used except by those who want to sound like writers—who believe that a writer’s vocabulary must distinguish itself from that of mere laymen.

Writers are in fact humans who speak in human tongues. Whatever words they use, good writers come by them honestly, through their characters and settings and the stories they have to tell about them.

Yet even practiced writers can slip into “writerly” language, using the verb to “place” as a synonym for “put”: “She placed her suitcase on the floor”; “He placed his arm around her waist.” We should avoid anything that calls attention away from our stories to the web of words they’re made of—and pay attention to the choice between “put” and “placed.”

On the same note I can almost always live without “acquire” or “purchase” as synonyms for “buy.” And why, in fiction, do people always “glance” and never simply “look” at things?

As for verbs like “spy,” “spot,” “utter,” and “chortle,” they are in effect one-word clichés. Who ever “spies” “or “spots” anything, except in works of fiction? Unless your characters happen to be espionage agents, stick to “saw” or “noticed.”

136}EVITARE POLYSYLLABIC MERDA:
ESCHEW LATINISMS

Judges, scientists, and academics tend to favor Latin. Discourse, excavate, expectorate, elevate, illuminate, indicate, liberate, concatenate, incarcerate, masticate, copulate—these are a few of the Latin-based baubles that some of us can’t resist rolling around in our mouths.

Yet each of these words has a fine, blunt, Anglo-Saxon equivalent: talk, dig, spit, raise, light, point, free, jail, chew, fuck. Their Latin cousins are more intent on talk than action.

Anglo-Saxon derived words are the kind we use most among our friends. They are the words of spoken or informal, as opposed to written or formal, English. This is exactly why, as good writers, we should lean on them, since good writing is writing that’s vivid and earthy and gets its point across in as few syllables as possible.⁵⁸

137}HEDGES, WIND, & CHATTER:
MORE CRAP WORDS & PHRASES

Our language is riddled with commonly accepted words and phrases that don’t withstand scrutiny.

The phrase “proceeded to” should, most of the time, be followed by something other than a verb: “He proceeded to the principal’s office.” Otherwise it’s an empty phrase: “Gaylord proceeded to cry”; “The wind proceeded to howl.” It’s an emperor with no clothes, since all actions implicitly “proceed” from other actions. “The majority of” is another crap phrase. Just say, “most.”

I don’t mean to give offense, but I do mean to provoke you—into thinking more about such phrases before putting them on paper.

We need to be suspicious of choices that are usually taken for granted. For instance, why write, “He began to reel in the fishing line”? The beginning of any action is implied by the action. Similarly: “He started to run after her”; or “Sally turned around and started laughing in his face.” Better say, “Sally laughed in his face”—unless the way she turns has some specific gravity: “She spun around and …”

Avoid the toxic conditional: “Jim could see Jill coming toward him.” Unless he was blind a sentence ago, the point isn’t that Jim can see, but that he sees Jill.

Through this sort of detailed questioning we evolve the principles (and prejudices) that define our personal aesthetic; we arrive at the right stylistic choices for ourselves. We also heighten our sensitivity to, and appreciation for, language itself. By questioning words, we show our respect⁵⁹ for them.

Some other words and phrases to hold suspect:

WORDS:
almost / seemed / somewhat / anyway / suddenly / really / actually / quickly / literally [and most other adverbs]

These words fall into two categories: hedging words (like “somewhat”) indicate an author’s unwillingness to commit fully to the truth of a statement; superfluous adverbs (like “actually”) do nothing but take up space.

PHRASES:
for example / for instance / of course / seemed to / in this case / such as it was [or is] / little did [fill in the blank] know / at this [or that] point in time / as a matter of fact / for that matter / without a doubt / some kind of / unbeknownst to [whomever] / pretty much / I can honestly say / to say the least / disappear or vanish from sight or view / happens to be / be that as it may

All of these phrases add nothing but wind and chatter.

138}SCISSORS & RAZOR BLADES:
CUT, CUT, CUT

An editor at The New Yorker has just telephoned to say how much she enjoyed your story. It’s nearly perfect, she says, and she’d like to publish it. There’s just one thing. It needs a little … um … trimming. Say—by a third. Meaning, since the story runs 9,000 words, you’ve got to cut 3,000.

The New Yorker pays two dollars per published word. Think you can make those cuts? You’d better believe it!

Whether The New Yorker calls or not, if you can possibly cut 3,000 words from a story, you should probably cut them. If you don’t cut every extra word from your work, odds are no editors will be calling.

You’d be amazed at what you can cut when you have to. You may use too many modifiers, or “double-dip” your dialogue, which is also flabby with “naturalisms” like “oh” and “well.” You state what’s implied and explain what’s already shown. You paint every leaf on every tree, instead of letting your readers’ imaginations do some painting themselves.

How to go about cutting?

• Read your stuff out loud, pencil in hand.

• If you can’t cut entire pages, cut paragraphs; if you can’t cut paragraphs, cut sentences; if you can’t cut sentences, cut phrases; if you can’t cut phrases, cut words.

• If you can’t cut words, go after syllables.

• Avoid the passive voice, progressive tense, and dead verbs.

In this story about a teenager botching a burglary, the excess words slow the action.

I run through the next-door neighbor’s backyard, running, legs flying, heart beating, thudding in my chest. I climb a fence, the chain links rattling, flip over the top and land with a hard thud, stop, look around, my breath catching in my throat. I’m in some sort of alley now, surrounded by sleeping apartment buildings. There’s someone’s swimming pool to my left with a four-foot fence between it and me. What should I do? There’s nowhere to run. I dash, leap, climb up the fence, cut my arm on something, hear a crash of metal on metal behind me somewhere, the sound of gunmetal banging against the chain-links. I run around the pool, dart across slippery pool tiles, feeling like Jesus running on water. Then up and over the next chain-link fence, onto a strip of grass. I hear a voice or voices shouting above me. There’s a gate opening into another yard. I come to a glass door …

The style aimed for here is machine-gun prose that wastes no words, every syllable a bullet. But it needs cutting:

I run through the backyard, hop a fence, stop, look. In some sort of alley now, between apartment buildings. A swimming pool to my left. A four-foot fence between it and me. Nowhere to run. I dash, leap, cut my arm. A crash behind me—metal meets chain-link. Keep running. Dart across slippery pool tiles, Jesus running on water. Another fence, another strip of grass. Shouting above me. A gate opens into another yard. I come to a glass door, slide it open, slither into darkness. Kitchen smells—coffee, tea bags, dishwater, dog food. Refrigerator hum. I lie on my back under the table tasting my bloody fucking arm …

Even when not writing machine-gun prose, you want to make every bullet count. Pretend there’s a gun to your head and just do it.

But when cutting and trimming remember, too, that conveying mere information in the proper order isn’t enough: Your narrator should have a distinct voice, whose rhythms and syntax should be respected even as cuts are made.

So, cut by all means. Forget the tweezers. Cut with a chainsaw, a hatchet, a scalpel, or a razor blade. But try not to slit your narrator’s throat.

139}WHITE SPACE:
A WRITER’S BEST FRIEND

What about all those transitions you’ve labored over, making the material between scenes interesting so it doesn’t read like mortar between bricks? Consider doing away with them completely. Who needs mortar, if you can build a story out of pure bricks, held together by gravity and air?

As writer Mary Gordon has said, “Honor the white space.”

White space: That thin slice of empty narrative real estate, achieved by hitting an extra hard return between paragraphs.

White space signals a transition, and creates it. The transition may be temporal—a switch to another location or time—or it may be to another character’s point of view, or it may be a transition in tone or style.

Or it may be all of these things.

She never wanted to go back to the men’s apartments. After a two hundred dollar meal, men sometimes expected it. Even if it was expense account. Things seemed drab after the restaurant. The glow of good eating was gone. She preferred making love first, then eating. Anticipating dinner afterwards made the end of sex less lonely.

She had met Edward on her lunch hour at the stand-up coffee bar at Bloomingdales …

Author Joanna Torrey inserts a break in her short story “Hungry” to emphasize the distinction between her heroines’ past dating experiences and her present love affair—a distinction that (we sense) may be more apparent than real.

Sometimes my students use white spaces capriciously or without sufficient reason; more often, they neglect to use them. The beauty of white spaces is that they throw the transition ball into the reader’s court, letting him fill in the gap. Should the transition be written poorly, the reader has no one to blame but himself.

Another way to think of white space: As a serving of green tea sorbet, to cleanse the palette between courses in a meal.