Other Stylistic Odds & Ends

140}RETYPE FROM SCRATCH

When revising, I suggest retyping (or “rekeyboarding,” if you insist) from scratch, using the previous draft as a guide only. Make each sentence ring like a bell. Apply notes and suggestions by others, bearing in mind that they are just suggestions.

Ask of every word, is it essential? If not, don’t let it stand. Your allegiance should be to the story and only to the story, not to the words you’ve already written.

If nothing else, your typing skills will improve.

141}ITALICS & OTHER EYESORES

I’ve already mentioned Joyce and his aversion to quotation marks, which he called “eyesores.”

Italics—especially when deployed over long passages— similarly rub many people the wrong way. And no wonder: Italics are hard on the eyes. Italics are often used to set apart a prologue— as if the word “prologue” at the top of the section (coming just before “Chapter 1”) isn’t a big enough hint.

Joyce had it right: Unless absolutely necessary, punctuation marks and typographical embellishments are eyesores. They’re best reserved for novels, which have more room for them.

Whenever possible, revert to plain roman type.

142}! ! ! ! !

“Exclamation marks—like laughing at your own jokes.”

— F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Frank Conroy, the fabled former director of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, had a rule about exclamation points: “One per three pages,” he used to say.

I’m more generous; I say two. But use them sparingly, or your prose will look like the living room rug after you drag the Christmas tree away.

The overuse of exclamation marks indicates an author’s lack of faith in his story or his readers, or both. When a line of dialogue or even a remark made by your narrator is exclamatory, the exclamation mark is implied.

143}SIMILAR CHARACTER NAMES

Felicity and Filomena are too similar. So are Mildred and Myra. So are Inga and Igor.

Unless meant to suggest that your characters are as interchangeable as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, pick names that help us distinguish them.

144}THE WAR AGAINST “WAS”:
THE DEADEST OF VERBS

In all of its conjugations, the verb “to be” is one of the two deadest verbs in English; “to have” is the other. Since verbs are the most powerful of all parts of speech, by using “was” you defeat yourself doubly.

Try replacing conjugations of “to be” with more exact, interesting verbs (“The vase is on the table” becomes: “The vase stands on the table”). Or recast your sentences entirely (“The horse with the white spots was an appaloosa” becomes: “He rode a horse with white spots, an appaloosa”).

I also avoid the past progressive. “She was clinging” becomes “she clung.” Instead of “Harold was wearing a yellow raincoat,” write, “He wore a yellow raincoat.” Save the past progressive for moments when it truly applies: “Stuart was getting out of his car when he saw the dead rabbit lying next to the driveway.”

145}“IT WAS” &
OTHER DEAD WORDPAIRS

“It was”: the lamest word-pair in the English language, and a dreary way to begin a sentence, let alone a story or a novel. “It was a dark and stormy night.” Perhaps it was, but find another way to say so. How about, “Night fell dark and stormy”? Or “The night lumbered by in darkness and storms”—anything to get rid of that deadly duo.

Used portentously, the phrase is even deadlier: “It was then that … ” “It was so-and-so who ... ”

Other dead word pairs: “The man standing by the door.” “An essay published in ... ”

That was, which were, who is, which was: all get the editor’s ax.

146}PUT THE ADJECTIVE
AFTER THE NOUN

This is one of my former mentor Don’s good ideas. By putting our modifiers after the nouns they modify, we charge them with the actions of verbs so they feel less passive.

“Scalding tears fell from her eyes,”becomes “Tears fell scalding from her eyes.” Similarly, “A dark, heavy rain fell over the city,”becomes “The rain fell dark and heavy over the city.”

And this pungent example from Adam Day’s poem “Braunvieh”:

... Outside
a cow has dropped green dung
wet over a bucket of cherries

42 Author of First Paragraphs, one of a series of “Handbooks for the Soul” aimed at writers (the work that first prompted me to seek him out)—as well as Those Drinking Days: Myself and Other Writers, a searing confessional of the sloshed life.

43 The same can’t be said for Ada, or Ardor, Nabokov’s six-hundred-page exercise in mandarin self-gratification.

44 I wrote “parsimonious” first, then struck it.

45 “ I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.”—Ernest Hemingway.

46 Joyce’s first stab at what would become A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

47 1. Gertrude Stein; 2. James Joyce; 3. Samuel Beckett; 4. Louis-Ferdinand Céline; 5. Ernest Hemingway; 6. Saul Bellow; 7. Lorrie Moore; 8. Charles Bukowski; 9. Jane Austen; 10. Virginia Woolf.

48 The ability of a person to penetrate the barrier between himself and his object, and to secure a momentary but complete identification with it. “If a sparrow comes before my window,” wrote Keats, “I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.”

49 When we inhabit our characters deeply, their souls lend color and texture (poetry) to our prose. The best way to avoid journalese is to write from inside our characters.

50 From Advertisements for Myself, in which Mr. Mailer has something unkind to say about all his literary brothers except James Jones.

51 Trans: The Courtier’s Trifles

52 Ironically, this is the title of one of Heller’s other books, about his struggle with Guillain-Barré syndrome—a paralyzing affliction that struck Heller down in 1981 but from which he recovered.

53 Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows.

54 Mark Twain, “A Dog’s Tale.”

55 George Orwell, Animal Farm.

56 From “How to Be an Other Woman.”

57 One source for such exacting terms is a picture dictionary. Many writers refer to them.

58 Depending, of course, on the desired tone. The story Nabokov tells in Lolita could be summarized in a half-dozen pages, but the language of its telling is part of the story; to that end every syllable counts. The same can be said of any masterpiece.

59 I almost wrote—in fact I did write—“utmost respect.” Why? Because the phrase exists readymade like sauce in a jar; just heat and serve.