I will never forget the look on Peter Carey’s face. I was interviewing the novelist in the living room of his Greenwich Village apartment and had just asked him about the way he viewed style. Carey really wanted to help—his almost anguished expression told me that—but it was impossible for him to analyze or articulate this aspect of his craft. He said:
The big thing for me in writing a novel is the voice of the teller. Almost all of those voices, I’ve never thought about it. I never considered how it would sound, or played with it. When it comes to all the other aspects of the novel, there are a lot of things that I consider. The voice, I never thought about. It’s totally instinctive, really.
Like many types of beings, writers can be divided into two categories: those who obsessively pick apart what they do and those who flee from analysis as if it were a killer tidal wave. The latter group sees writing as art (inspiration), the former as craft (perspiration). The choice has no bearing on a writer’s merit: there are Nobel laureates who talk endlessly about their philosophy of punctuation, and hacks who take the Fifth on all writing-related questions, thinking it will spoil the magic. But it is very relevant to this volume, for obvious reasons.
To Peter Carey and the other instinctivists I interviewed, I offer my apologies for the irritating questions. And to the other group, I offer thanks for their remarkable testimony. This rarely came in the form of a philosophy of style, or any strictures that would fit nicely in a classroom or textbook. Rather, what was expressed was an approach to style, to voice, to the word, to the sentence, to writing itself. The emphases and ideas varied widely, as you can see. But what they had in common was that they were expressed with both passionate intensity and conviction. Listen:
JUDITH THURMAN: One of my favorite quotes is from Flaubert: “As if the soul’s fullness didn’t sometimes overflow into the emptiest of metaphors, for no one, ever, can give the exact measure of his needs, his apprehensions or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity.” A great sentence is always about what you couldn’t say.
There’s a line I wrote in my review of Bill Blass’s autobiography, about the women who were devoted to Blass and always wore his clothes: “Beneath the surface dazzle, there is something extinguished about the Blass Ladies—a flame smothered by convention. When style burns true, it’s cooler and more cryptic. You can’t decode it at a glance.” Style has a certain intensity, like a clean flame. All the garbage, the impurities you start with, the lighter fluid—it’s all burned off. It’s consuming something pure and clean. Isak Dinesen said that impure ingredients—eggshell, bone, and root—make a clear, pure soup. The memory of all that formed it is always there in the style.
At the same time, even though the impurities are burned off, the sense of impurity is essential to good style. Humility and rootedness are essential. As in Colette, the dialectic for me is the pure and the impure.
BILLY COLLINS: Poetry originally served as a mnemonic device—the rhyme, the alliteration, the meter, the stanzaic patterning all are memory aids for reciting a long text. When alphabets were introduced, poetry lost that function, rhyme and meter became demoted to options and the poet lost his means of automatically establishing trust. Now, the important thing is the tone. The buy-in to a poem is, Do you trust the voice? A novelist invents many characters. A poet invents one character, the voice you’re going to speak in.
JONATHAN RABAN: Style is a way of expressing a thought that one instinctively responds to. There is a sense of recognition, of saying, “God, that is true”—as if the thought had been there before the expression came to it. It gives the illusion of somehow having thought before. My favorite quotation of all time is Wittgenstein’s “The world we live in is the words we use.” Style is not an appliqué technique, a paintbrush with which we pretty something up. A good sentence alters the world.
I think, more than for any other single reason, one writes to entertain oneself. I’m not writing a report for someone, I’m not dutifully turning in my log, like Captain Vancouver, having to describe every single anchorage he dropped anchor in. I’m there to entertain myself at the typewriter—but with the cold, skeptical eye of the critic perched like a parrot on my shoulder, saying, “That doesn’t work.”
ABRAHAM VERGHESE: Writing represents putting words into the kind of internal dialogue that thoughtful physicians have. The bedside exam rests on the pillars of inspection, palpation and percussion. That level of observation brought to writing is a very good thing. The converse is true as well. It’s rare that I come in with a special body of knowledge that unlocks the case. What I can do is take the history, and what helps me do that better, and be a better physician, is when I hear it as a story.
DAVE BARRY: There is a lot of what I call “God writing” in the newspaper. We’re taught to sound authoritative and impartial and professional, and often to sound boring. I always wanted my column to look more like it was a total mistake that I had gotten hold of the word processor.
ANDREI CODRESCU: Somebody said to me one time, “I always get the impression when I read one of your stories that there is another story behind it.” Well, sometimes that’s literally true because I will write part of a story but won’t write the rest of it. But sometimes there’s a feeling that there’s something else. I think that’s true to an extent for all writers, because the language really does know more than you do. There is a sense that you write outside the words, that there is this other thing that now and then you come close to.
Today there is a required seriousness or gravitas in writing—it feels immediately threatened by humor and lushness and breaking up the rule of directness. It’s certainly evident in writing programs—the old “write what you know, be direct, don’t use adjectives.” I go very much against the whole thing. In fact, I think the more games and the more bafflement and joy, the better. Lucian Blaga, who was my favorite poet when I was growing up, said, “I’ve always felt that my duty when faced with a mystery was not to explain it but to increase its mysteriousness.”
ELMORE LEONARD: I want readers to be immersed in the story the same way I was when I was writing it. So I don’t write the way I was taught to write. We were taught to make the sentence interesting by opening with a dependent clause: “Upon entering the room, he couldn’t help but notice…” To me, that’s distracting.
I love literary writers. Roth in Goodbye, Columbus—he’s writing all the way through. Martin Amis, Updike—you’re aware of them writing. They can do it; they have the language. I don’t. Barry Lopez can describe snow and ice for four hundred pages. In a whole book, I’ll take maybe a couple of shots at the ocean.
JOHN UPDIKE: Style as I understand it is nothing less than the writer’s habits of mind—it is not a kind of paint applied afterwards, but the very germ of the thing. One has certain models of excellence, certain standards of prose evolved with the hope sometimes of teachers and editors, and certain readerly expectations that one hopes, as a writer, to satisfy. Just as one’s handwriting tends to come out the same every time, with certain quirks of emphasis and flow, so does one’s writing, with its recurrent pet vocabulary and concerns.
CAMILLE PAGLIA: I believe that the style of the critic should be suggested by the work of art. It’s almost like ESP, or telepathy. We are drawn into the world of the work; it casts a spell on us.
A lot of my work comes out of poetry, where you need intuition, and attention to the power of words. I adore the individual word and the individual sentence. Any given sentence should be able to stand on its own, and contain everything. I always have the feeling that if one sentence were left, one could recreate the writer. The paragraph is a unit of thought. It should be a world of its own.
JUNOT DÍAZ: As a person of color growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, my idea of literature was programmed by white mainstream notions. That code, that software—when I deploy it, it’s guaranteed to produce disastrous results. I struggle with “the word” and everything I’ve learned about literature.
The subconscious preserves all memories that the conscious can’t grasp. My early drafts are missives from my unconscious. I spend the rest of the time trying to decode it. A lot of times, this has nothing to do with publishing a story—it’s about my life trying to send me this message.
Young writers try to take these messages and discipline them, make them conform. Anyone with a creative streak knows that if you wait with a bit and harness, there’s a reason it doesn’t show up. You need to want to play—waiting for something you can use, and being ready to catch it when it falls out.
GREIL MARCUS: People will say to me, “How can you make so much of a song? Aw, come on, it’s just for fun.” I’ve heard that all my life. It always means the same thing: Stop thinking.
I go over stuff that I’ve written, and sometimes I’m shocked by the pomposity, the stiffness, the plumminess. When I have that reaction, it means I wasn’t engaged. I was just throwing out a judgment, getting something over with. When I read stuff and it works, I don’t think, This is well done. I do have a great sense of event. I want to feel that writing something can open something for whoever is reading it. You don’t start with a judgment but rather with a feeling that something is going on here. That becomes an event in itself.
Sometimes, as you’re writing, you discover what you know. Sometimes you find out that you didn’t have a clue. The task for me is to make that into drama. I’m not very good at analyzing, but I like to dramatize. You open the door of a theater, and if you’re lucky, someone comes in. It speaks to them. It’s so far beyond suspension of belief, it’s suspension of identity. It’s like going to see a great production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night—you totally forget who you are and what you know.
In college, I never wrote a paper that wasn’t an all-nighter. I would clutch it in my hands, bring it in to class, feel absolutely heroic. I wrote a lot of Lipstick Traces in a state of ecstasy and delirium. I felt I was the first person to feel what was special about all this—that it was a wild horse, and I was riding it.
It goes back to Pauline Kael. When I read I Lost It at the Movies, I couldn’t believe how alive this person felt when she wrote it. I wanted to know how it felt to be engaged that way. In a way, I’ve yet to find out.
TOURÉ: The ear is essential. In writing, the first thing is, does it sound good, by itself and in relation to the other words? The subject is second. You have to say it in a funky way. In the African-American community, you’ve got to walk down the street in a funky way. As Nelson George says, it’s not enough to score two points—you have to dunk backwards with two hands, embarrass the guy. Style is the most important thing.
DAVID THOMSON: Montage to me is one of the most fascinating areas of theory and practice. One of the few profound things that happened to me at film school was when we had someone talk to us about Russian editing. He put two objects on a table and asked, “How are these objects related?” Then he said, “I challenge you to find any two objects that I can’t relate.” The mind leaps to associate things. It’s so inventive. That is the beginning of the theory of montage. In writing, you can throw an odd or invented word in a sentence, or an unexpected sentence in a paragraph, or make an abrupt end to a chapter, and the reader will say, “Why did he do that?” The good readers, anyway. And then they’ll start thinking. I love that question.
This seems to work best in going from one sentence to another. A conventional opening might say, “It was the year so and so, and such and such was happening.” And then you suddenly say something that was also happening in that year, something totally unexpected but that gives a sense of the context. The nature of the cut teaches the reader to look for those cuts in the future. If you start to do something odd with sentence form, like not having a main verb, readers will start to get used to that. They might not like it, but they’ll get used to it. You can guide people how to read your book.
JAMAICA KINCAID: The great pleasure is hunting down my unconscious in writing. I don’t know if I should be paid, it’s such a pleasure. It’s a process of hunting down what I mean, dragging the reader into my consciousness. I never have a second draft—it takes me so long to hunt this thing down. There is never anything more to come.
There is so much I ask of the sentence—the way history is made, is told, the way life forms people, the impact small things have on the bigger world, the impact the world has on one person. What I want is to write about those things. But I would rather jump off a bridge than write a historical novel. So the challenge is how to say those things without putting them into a boring form. Life is not like a beginning, middle, end. A novelist is a person who tries to make order out of it. I’m not interested in order. I’m interested in the way things really happened.
Don Quixote didn’t know that what he was looking at wasn’t there. I would think that would be an admirable goal as a human being, to think that you will understand your end, even though no one never has. And, as a writer, to write the greatest sentence ever, but I won’t. I will find something that no one else ever has, even though I won’t.
Now we arrive at the land of the number 2 pencils and legal pads—of the practicalities of composition. These constitute, of course, the number-one cliché of the author-interview genre. Yet I asked questions along these lines, and I set down a selection of the responses here, because they illuminate style. Thus Harold Bloom says: “I write in record books with a Pentel black rolling ballpoint pen. It’s the only way I can write—I’ve never learned to type.” And suddenly one has an insight into Bloom’s prose, with its—yes—rolling cadences, and pre–twentieth century tone. Tobias Wolff says: “Because I don’t type, I can’t work any faster than I think.” And that sheds light on Wolff ’s style, which maintains a stately pace even as the action is speeding up.
Perhaps the most surprising finding, in the practical realm, had to do with computers—how many writers feel ambivalent or hostile toward them, or, like Wolff and Bloom, don’t use them at all. This was especially the case among those self-conscious or analytical about style. The physical effort involved in using a typewriter or pen provides for them, a helpful speed bump in a word’s passage from the brain to the page; word “processing,” nearly effortless, lacks a necessary friction, as well as the tactility common to all handcrafts.
Handmade versus machine-made: the opposition clearly pertains to prose style. A handwritten text contains (often literally) its composer’s signature, and there exist professionals who claim to be able to discern much if not everything about a personality from a single handwriting sample. Typewritten texts have a standardized look, but still, the imprint of a letter on the page is a function of personal touch. Holding a typescript in your hand, you can sense the physical presence of the writer as you read his or her words. But on a computer screen or a “printout,” everyone’s words look mass-produced and identical.
Certainly, many writers compose directly on the computer, but they tend to play Dostoyevsky to the previous group’s Flaubert: putter-inners more interested in sense than sound rather than taker-outers who agonize over the just word. For them, ease of keyboard composition is a computer’s best feature, letting the process become a modern version of nineteenth-century spiritualists’ automatic writing, the fingers wired to the soul.
That in itself is a danger. When the words come too easy, consciousness streams, and not even the most flagrant egotist would (or should) want consciousness transcribed on the page. James Wolcott says:
Editors tell me they see many more run-on sentences, and that’s because of the computer. Sentence rhythm has been slackened to the point where there aren’t any rhythms anymore. Also people have gotten wordier, because even though it’s easier to edit on a computer, it somehow looks completed once it’s on the screen, so there’s a sense that, “Geez, I said it all, I’ll just let someone else edit it.”
Today, because of computers and the Internet, a lot of people cultivate a very digressive style. David Foster Wallace will interrupt in the middle of a piece with a long digression, or a list. I can’t do that—I feel it’s kind of ego-tripping. “Look how I can analyze the secret life of Buddy Sorrell on the Dick Van Dyke Show”—that kind of thing.
Several writers made a distinction: they write on a computer for journalism and book reviews, but in longhand or on a typewriter for books. The journalistic piece work does not demand so much distinction in the way of style, and so can be trusted to the word processor. Jonathan Raban:
When I write a piece, say, for the New York Review of Books, there’s a readily available voice I use. It’s a public convention, the voice of literary academia, a sort of overdignified tonal register that is instantly accessible. Of course, one tries to inflect that voice with as much of your own tone as you can to make it your own. If I could quantify, it would be something like eighty-four percent of the sentence is already created by the public convention; sixteen percent is the particular twist or inflection I can give it. I have a strong sense that writing those kinds of pieces, which I greatly enjoy doing, I’m propped up entirely by this public world.
And for some, even at this late date, the jury is still out. Fay Weldon told an English newspaper:
I’ve only recently begun to use a keyboard. It happened because I read one of my own stories in an anthology of mostly American writers, and my handwritten piece seemed gnarled and twisted compared to the easy flow of the other writers who I realized all used computers. So I decided gnarled and twisted was not the path of the future. I’ve yet to see if it makes much difference to my style.
Writers of all kinds have a lot to say about the tools of the trade but are a bit closemouthed about the moment of composition itself, which is intimate and mysterious for even the most practical-minded. It can be painful as well, as witness the frequency with which images of pregnancy and childbirth are applied to the simple act of extracting a word from your head and affixing it to a piece of paper. Camille Paglia says: “The process of writing is absolute torture. I just have to get it down, even though it sounds terrible. It is an incredible relief to get to the last sentence.”
The first words down are like a block of marble for the sculptor: raw material. The content, or much of it, comes blurting out in the first draft. (Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that this appalling stuff sounds as if it were written by someone named Philboyd Studge.) Style is usually clarified and intensified in the process of revision, which was not too traumatic for my interviewees to talk about. As a matter of fact, many described the exercise as downright enjoyable. Paglia says, “The ecstasy is going over it, getting rhythm and voice into it.” Joyce Carol Oates put it this way: “The pleasure is the rewriting. The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written. This is a koan-like statement, and I don’t mean to sound needlessly obscure or mysterious, but it’s simply true. The completion of any work automatically necessitates its revisioning.”
Here are glimpses of how some writers approach the nuts and bolts of their craft.
Preparation
CRISTINA GARCIA: I have a poetry bookcase in my bedroom, and I will choose a book randomly. It’s like an I Ching thing—I will intuitively pick out a book. I will check off things that I like, put them in brackets, and write it out in my notebook. The physical exertion of writing it in my notebook is important. Something in the process will get me started. And I have a superstition. Whatever I am working on, I will tuck into a book of poetry, so it won’t be unprotected.
GREIL MARCUS: When I’m writing a book, I’ll go on long walks all around Berkeley and compose in my head. I don’t tend to take a lot of notes. When I do, I don’t tend to look at them. I don’t make an outline—I don’t know how. I write a lot about mystery, about what makes culture alluring, and I want to capture some of that in my writing.
CAMILLE PAGLIA: I take copious notes before I even start writing. I try to empty my mind. I’m always jotting—I don’t go anywhere without a notebook. I’m always trying to catch the thought, get it down. Then I look at the notes and annotate them further.
Composition
ANDREI CODRESCU: For me, writing is almost ahead of the process of thinking, because my way of thinking about something is sitting down and writing about it.
The physical posture in front of the typewriter is important. When you’re writing a newspaper article, you simply don’t have the same physical posture that you do when you’re writing a poem. At least I don’t. It’s almost like you have to be straighter because there’s a larger audience.
Background noise is fine, people talking or whatever. I always love it, because I started writing on the kitchen table in Romania when was a kid. My mother always had her girlfriends over and they were always talking, and just the sound of female voices going on and on about something was like a warm bath, I love it.
JONATHAN RABAN: I studied literature and taught it, and I think that has helped make me into an awkwardly self-conscious writer. I’m lucky if I write five hundred words a day. I spend most of my time posting rejection slips to myself because I can see that a particular sentence might look like somebody else’s sentence. I have to make it mine, and I have to fight quite hard. The causes of dissatisfaction with a sentence are so multitudinous that you couldn’t possibly begin to list them. The ailments of a car are nothing to the potential ailments of a sentence. A sentence is like a human body—it’s got a million different ways in which it can go wrong, or fail to serve you when you want it to.
But what helps is that once you get into a voice, once you’ve set a certain tone for the writing, you don’t have to keep yoking it up, like a pair of oxen. The stylistic felicities, the particular words and phrasing, just sort of happen because the machine to generate them is there.
TOBIAS WOLFF: I hit a lot of wrong notes to hit the right one. There’s a tuning fork that you hold up to your ear. At this stage of my writing life, it’s much more hearing harmonics, testing sentences against the register.
In This Boy’s Life, I was after something as natural, capacious, expressive as possible, that would account for the adult character without having to give information about him. The person is this voice. That’s where everything important is to be found. I couldn’t use a flat, tense voice. In Coetzee’s memoir, he can’t escape that detached, arid quality. He had to find a way to infuse it with emotion, and it was to write the memoir in the third person.
GISH JEN: I’m a very intuitive writer. I mostly either feel the voice I’m in is releasing me or not. When I feel it’s not releasing me, I don’t experience that as a “difficulty.” It’s like looking for the wind when you’re sailing. It’s not difficult not to have wind. You just move the sail till you find it. You try something out. I have an experimental cast of mind. I fiddle. If it’s really not working, you abandon it. You can sort of tell because you’re bored. If I’m bored, I stop. If not, I continue.
MARGARET DRABBLE: If it’s all right, it’s all right. Sometimes whole paragraphs or pages come out absolutely fine, and they come out very fast, which I’m sure is how Dickens used to write, just very, very fast. They’re fine and you don’t need to look at them. But then there are other bits, where what you were trying to do hasn’t worked out or that sound clumsy. And sometimes if you work and work and work at a passage, you realize in the end that there’s something deeply wrong with it, and you’d better just throw it away.
DAVE BARRY: I can take a whole day to think of a topic. I finally will get one and I’ll get maybe a sentence and a half written, but if there is a good enough intro or a good enough joke, I’ll consider that a good day’s work. I’ll expect to finish that the next day, but I won’t always succeed.
I’m a very slow writer, a constant rewriter. Humor is two things: the joke and the timing. I’m fanatical about whether to use but or although because of the timing. Or should I change a number like 853 to a number like 2,040? Which is funnier? Which one is big enough to be really stupid, without being too big? I spend a lot of time thinking about things like that.
ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN: Early on, I teach myself to think like the character. The first line is the chimney. Once you get down it, the voice is pretty effortless. Half the things I write are because of clever first lines. If I wanted any literary fame, it would to be in some quiz in the back of a magazine about famous first lines. I never wanted to start a book, “It was June” or something like that. All my novels have these grand entrances.
After I’ve been writing in the voice and the character for a while, it begins to get a little claustrophobic, how intimate the narrators are. That’s when I try to step back a bit and put in a “poetic” passage, with metaphorical, literary language. That’s the only time I’m very aware of making stylistic choices. It’s almost like I can see what I’m writing projected on a wall.
CYNTHIA OZICK: Until I perfect a sentence, I’m not allowed to go on to the next sentence. And I don’t allow myself to go back to the beginning to accommodate where I am now. Therefore I’m in a trap. I have to work something out in the current sentence so there’s no need to go back and fix the antecedent action. Then, when you get to the next sentence, it’s a kind of enjambment, if that’s the word. It must respond to the previous sentence—otherwise, you get no cadence. To write sentence five, you have to read over sentences one, two, three, and four, to make sure your rhythm is constant. And if you go away for a week and come back, you have to read over and over and over to catch that tone.
It’s so physical. There are these three fingers that hold the pen, and there is the ear. Of course, it’s all ear.
Tools
DAVID THOMSON: I got a computer about three years ago, but I still write books in longhand, before transferring them to the computer. I’m not deeply impressed with the word processor, but it helps me see when something I’ve written is overly complicated. Simply “disappearing” something you loathe, I find appealing.
ANDREI CODRESCU: I absolutely feel that there is a significant transition from the intimacy of handwriting, an almost preadolescent, intrauterine sound, to the public voice of the typewriter, where you make a lot of noise and people hear you and it is also the assertion of sexuality and adolescent here-I-am kind of thing. I had my first computer in Baltimore, in 1984. The thing looked like it came from a bunker. I think that after the typewriter, the computer is something of a return. The typewriter belongs to the era of revolution and the dark basements where they printed illegal manifestoes. It’s a loud, clunky thing. When I discovered the computer it seemed like I returned to the intimacy of handwriting. It’s quieter, and you write with light.
The problem with the computer is that you lose the bottom of the page. On a typewriter, a poet can make something that has to do with the frame of the page and the length of the line. You know what it looks like, but not on the computer. There is also the problem of mistakes. On the typewriter you have to take them out with Wite-Out, so in a sense you have a record of your mistakes. On a computer you eliminate them immediately, so you’re not conscious of them. I mean, they’re gone without a trace.
GREIL MARCUS: When people started using computers, I developed a fetish that I would never use a computer, that I would stick to the typewriter—but that I would always turn in absolutely clean copy, with no Wite-Out or cross-outs. In Mystery Train, there was nothing not written twenty times, till I could say I wasn’t ashamed of it. I would write it again and again till it sounded like it was off the top of my head.
I started using a computer in ’98. Once I did, I never touched a typewriter again, to my absolute shock.
CYNTHIA OZICK: It’s all longhand. I write quickly. I can’t read it, I write so fast. I have a pen that’s called an Expresso that I have to send away for because Staples doesn’t carry it anymore. I think they’re about a dollar ninety-five each. It’s a felt-tip, very fine, something like a fountain pen. I used to use a fountain pen, but now it seems klutzy to me, like a typewriter. The Expresso is black, it sort of flies out of your fingers. It makes me feel like I’m thinking with my hands.
JOHN LUKACS: My procedure has always been to type a first draft that was almost illegible because of all the corrections. I would retype it, then give it to a typist to put on a computer.
You come at a historic moment when I have failed in the courage of my convictions. I gave in, I was a coward, I bought a computer last week. I was having trouble getting ribbons for my typewriter, and I can no longer find a repair shop.*
JAMES WOLCOTT: I used to write in longhand, then type it, but that would take so much time. Then I eventually stopped writing in longhand, but the typing exhausted me. I couldn’t sit and type out a rough draft, so I was whiting out, erasing. I would tear a hole in a page, then have to retype the whole thing. Now I write on a computer, but I am really conscious of trying not to be slippery.
CAMILLE PAGLIA: I have to write longhand. When I wrote Sexual Personae, I didn’t even have a computer. Now I have one and I use it for business letters and things like that, but I find it impossible to get my own style from writing on a computer. I like to be able to turn the pages and look back. The actual movement of the hand and arm are important, and the cross-outs.
I believe that the computer has really started to homogenize writing. It’s helped people with writer’s block, but everyone is beginning to sound alike. It’s so easy to move paragraphs around that there’s no longer the slightest regard for paragraph construction. It’s so beyond me—the idea that one could actually move a paragraph to another position.
Revision
JONATHAN RABAN: The reason I don’t use a computer for my books is that with a computer is it’s so easy to correct what you know you want to change. On a typewriter you pull the page out and retype words that you thought were perfectly okay the first three or four times, and for me it’s often only on the third or fourth time of typing a sentence that I realize, This sentence is shit. And when I know when I need to change a sentence, I work my way down the page in order to get to it, and as I do I make changes along the way. Only working with a typewriter forces you to do that, so that most pages go through several drafts, but once a page is done, it’s—as far as I’m concerned—finished. I get to the last page and that’s what goes to the publishers.
I envy hugely most of the writers I know, who scribble away at a first draft, taking no time at all, writing a book in three months, and then sit down and redraft. But I cannot do it. I’m a slow, self-conscious writer and I fiddle around with sentences endlessly until I get them right.
I like books that have an organic development of their own, so that the reader and writer both start in the same place in the same first sentence, and the books develop; things happen that surprise both writer and reader. They veer off in unexpected directions. If I were to redraft a book, I’d know everything that was going to happen. I write books for the same reason people read them, which is to find out what happens next, and if I started in at page one of a second draft, I’d know all too well what was going to happen next. I’d never get through it; the labor would be inconceivably boring.
JUDITH THURMAN: I am a very stupid smart person. I never know what I know before I say it, or say it well. I have to live with the worst drivel. My first drafts bear no relation to the final product. I’m a very slow writer, and my New Yorker pieces put me in a panic because of the deadline. I start throwing thoughts at the page. Out of that will come a few decent lines. That will be a starting point. I will do twenty drafts, all on the computer, label them a, b, c, d, e, etc. Then when I finally have something readable, I’ll print it out and go from there.
When I rewrite, I’m always taming the exuberance of the imagery. I am trying to make the prose work harder. Each word has to work as hard as possible.
TOURÉ: I look at it like popcorn. In the first draft, you lay out the kernels. They’re small and hard. That’s the general direction you want to take. And then you put heat to it. Can this sentence be better? Can this word be better? Can we take an eighty-year-old word that has a certain weight and use it in a slightly new way? This part of the sentence is not doing enough. Instead of one word, we’ll have three, or twenty. It becomes an improvisational thing.
That’s when you put the style to it, the intellectual heat to it. That’s when it becomes popcorn. Each part of the sentence explodes.
DAVE BARRY: When I’m revising a column, I probably take out the words really, actually, and very more than any three other words. Those three words will appear in virtually every sentence in the rough draft.
BILLY COLLINS: I write quickly—I can finish a poem in forty-five minutes, sometimes less. Then you go back to make it dance a little better. Eighty percent of revision is rhythmical—making changes to make the right music. Eventually, I go to the computer—you can look and see the lines that don’t work. You move furniture.
ANN BEATTIE: I have to admit that I might profit by revising more before I hit the keyboard. Your mind locks on your first way of presenting things, and once recorded, it’s not as easy as you might think to erase or change. My husband is a painter, and while I wouldn’t want to stretch the analogy, as a nonpainter I can look at a canvas and assume that something that looks right is “completed,” whatever that means. Then, the next day, he’ll have painted the sun a different color, and that also will work, or even seem an improvement, but more often than not, I remember the first sun, and try to figure out why he changed it. And sometimes, tantalizingly, some of the color of the original peeks through, though it is differently incorporated in the whole.
Sometimes, though, I’ve felt that the smallest revision has made everything come into sharp focus. One moment I remember is the revision of the short story “Skeletons,” where I’d written something like, “his need for them was never as hidden as he’d thought.” Perfectly okay line, but then the word masked came to me, and it became, “never masked as well as he thought.” That was a big improvement because the whole story, metaphorically and on the surface, has involved various masks. It’s just one word, and it may have done more to make the story three-dimensional to me than to the reader, but I think you really have to find a way to convince the reader that you, the writer, have absolute conviction about what you’re saying—even word by word.
ELMORE LEONARD: I have a good time when I’m writing, making it work the way I want it to work. I don’t write drafts—I rewrite as I go along. Every day, I’ll start maybe four or five pages before I stopped the day before. I’ll go over it, and I might add a bit of business, a drink, a cigarette.
TOBIAS WOLFF: Often I’ll make a change because I’ve been overreaching for rhetorical effect. Or sometimes I’ll change it the other way because I’ve come off like a pretend man of the people, with too much easy irony. I try to read it as if someone else wrote it. I’ll look for rhythm things: sometimes the sentences are too lush, sometimes too choppy.
If I finish with a new paragraph or two, I’m lucky. It’s not a very efficient way to compose.
ANNA QUINDLEN: If you have a discernible writing voice, you must beware of your own tics. I use of course too much, and the word seem to cover up my failure to commit, and sometimes my sentences are so baroque that they leave me breathless, which is why I read everything aloud when I’m done with it, so that I can tell intuitively where it diverges from my natural voice.
CYNTHIA OZICK: When I look at one of my manuscripts, there are so many cross-outs. It will soon be the case that everyone writes on computers. That will be such a tremendous loss, not to be able to go to a library and look down through the glass and see what great writers have crossed out, and their first thoughts. You will never see anybody’s first thoughts. It is really a crime against mind.
A postscript to this chapter: It is not the case that words go directly from the author’s pen or computer to publication. At some point or other, they come under the eye of an editor, who has license to fiddle with them—to the detriment, the benefit, or simply the alteration of style.
Rare is the writer who accepts an editor’s ministrations with grateful equanimity. Indeed, at any meeting of two or more writers, the conversation will eventually turn to how editors flattened, deadened, slicked up, or otherwise ruined their prose. Some of these changes stay in the mind an awfully long time. The second piece of writing I ever published in a legitimate periodical was an essay about pickup basketball. It described the convention of getting to play another game if your team won but having to sit out several games if your team lost, and it contained the sentence: “If collegians play for glory and professionals for money, we played for a chance to play.” I was pleased with that sentence. When I picked up the magazine, I saw to my horror that what had come in as me had gone out as Philboyd Studge. The editor, apparently following some dumb rule about only using if as a hypothetical, had changed the passage to read: “On the whole, collegians play for glory and professionals play for money. We played for a chance to play.” “On the whole”! Twenty-seven years later, the flatness of it still rankles.
Some writers dread the editing process because it feels so intrusive. Camille Paglia says:
Writing is my vocation. It’s so private, so identified with my physical self, that I can’t imagine showing it to anyone. The copyediting process can be extremely traumatic. You might as well take a scalpel and cut a bunch of flesh out of me.
But on occasion, working with a particular editor or adapting one’s style to the demands of a magazine can be beneficial. Once in a while, writers will even admit this. Jonathan Raban says:
I wrote a lot for a magazine called the New Review, which was edited by Ian Hamilton. There was no house style at all, but it had the personality of its editor, who was both hugely enthusiastic and encouraging and capable of scowling sardonically at what he thought was phony. Hemingway famously said, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector,” and that was what Ian provided for us.
I wrote this long piece for him about one of those organized quasi-family Christmases for people whose children have fled the nest, where they dress up and put on funny hats and have party games at this hotel in Monmouth in England. I described how every so often I’d escape from the hotel, where I felt like a prisoner, and how I would moodily walk along Monmouth Beach “kicking pebbles under a gunmetal sky.” I remember Ian’s comment when he saw my typescript: “Funny how everybody’s skies are colored gunmetal this year.”
That was one of the more crushing remarks ever made to me.
Greil Marcus liked the change in his own writing when he went from Rolling Stone to Creem magazine in the early 1970s:
At Rolling Stone, we knew grammar. Creem was much crazier. I felt like I was writing for the ideal reader—the other editors, who were Dave Marsh, Lester Bangs, Craig Carpell. It made you want to do better than you ever did before. It was so much fun to be surrounded by all these unforgettable voices.
Adam Gopnik and Judith Thurman both had the daunting experience of coming to the New Yorker, with its venerable house style, indefatigable fact-checkers, and stern copyeditors (exemplified by Eleanor Gould Packard, the legendary “Miss Gould,” who kept the commas for more than five decades and was famous for marking up galleys to within an inch of their lives). Gopnik, who had been a graduate student in art history, found doing journalistic art criticism difficult at first, but was helped by editors Charles “Chip” McGrath and Roger Angell:
The natural tone in graduate school is argumentative, and one result of that was my sentences tended to have a lot of but’s in them. Chip McGrath said to me, “You have enough but’s in here to form six human beings.” He taught me to write with and instead of but. Doing that leads to a somewhat disingenuous stance—you’re still being argumentative, but it’s disguised as a train of linked observations. I became more attractive to readers.
Roger taught me to tone things down. He said, “If you’re going to surprise people with an idea, tell them. Don’t put all your goods in the store window. You don’t need sixteen riffs, telling them not only your main point but all your other ideas as well. Ballplayers learn to position themselves. Take the reader into your confidence, rather than seeing him as an opponent.”
The transition wasn’t as difficult for Thurman; she had been there before:
My mother was a high school English teacher, and when I was a kid she used to tear apart my compositions with scissors and a glue pot. That made me into a ruthless self-editor. When I came to the New Yorker, I was determined to have the cleanest Gould galleys of any writer, and I did. Miss Gould was my mother.
Generally speaking, editing is less intrusive and extensive in Britain, where a subeditor might capitalize a word (or might not) but certainly wouldn’t presume to interfere with the writer’s style. In the United States, commas and identifications (“Shakespeare, the English playwright”), are blithely inserted, to preclude the possibility that some reader, somewhere, will not fully and accurately grasp every word in the work. As David Thomson says, “British editing trusts the writer a bit more.” And, one might add, the reader. Peter Carey started out with the British system in his native Australia, but now that he is based in New York he has had to contend with the American one, in the person of his editor, Gary Fisketjon. He has to admit that it’s not half bad:
If I had to endure him thirty years ago, I would have shot him, if I’d been brave enough. He takes his little green pen and goes through every sentence. I’m old enough now to recognize he’s not there to take anything away from me. I actually had a good time. I’d look at his suggestions, one by one, saying to myself, “Yes, yes, yes, fuck you, fuck you.”