As she walked toward the kitchen, Heather peeled off various items of clothing. The image she projected of neatness, she thought, was just that—an image. Heather was a slob at heart.
Stopping in the entranceway to the kitchen, she leaned against the door frame and peeled off her panty hose. As she tossed them toward the top of the refrigerator, she breathed a sigh of relief. She was still hot, but at least she was free of the confines of clothing. Now for something to eat, she thought as she stood in front of the refrigerator.
You’re likely to have spotted a couple of self-editing problems (such as the repetition and unneeded thinker attributions) in the above passage. And correcting for the self-editing points we have covered so far will help make any writing seem more professional. But you can also easily learn a few stylistic tricks that will lend your writing that extra bit of sophistication that gives it an edge. These tricks range from avoiding legitimate constructions that have been overused by hack writers to finding alternatives to certain stylistic techniques that have virtually disappeared over the last few decades. Whatever it is that makes your mechanics sophisticated, awareness of them when revising will help your work look like that of a professional rather than an amateur.
One easy way to make your writing seem more sophisticated is to avoid two stylistic constructions that are common to hack writers, namely:
Pulling off her gloves, she turned to face him.
and:
As she pulled off her gloves, she turned to face him.
Both the as construction and the -ing construction as used above are grammatically correct and express the action clearly and unambiguously. But notice that both of these constructions take a bit of action (“She pulled off her gloves”) and tuck it away into a dependent clause (“Pulling off her gloves…”). This tends to place some of your action at one remove from your reader, to make the actions seem incidental, unimportant. If you use these constructions often, you weaken your writing.
Another reason to avoid the as and -ing constructions is that they can give rise to physical impossibilities. We once worked on the autobiography of a behavioral biologist who, in the process of describing her field work, wrote, “Disappearing into my tent, I changed into fresh jeans.” The -ing construction forced simultaneity on two actions that can’t be simultaneous. The doctor didn’t duck into the tent and pull on clean pants at the same time—she was a biologist, not a contortionist.
We’re not suggesting that you avoid these phrases altogether. There are going to be times when you want to write about two actions that are actually simultaneous and/or genuinely incidental—actions that deserve no more than a dependent clause. And given the choice between an as or -ing construction and a belabored, artificial alternative, you’re well advised to use the as or -ing. But be aware that hacks have long ago run these useful constructions into the ground. Learn to spot them in your own writing and, if you see more than one or two on a page, start hunting around for alternatives.
For instance, “Pulling off her gloves, she turned to face him” could easily be changed to “She pulled off her gloves and turned to face him,” or even “She pulled off her gloves, turned to face him.” Or you can make an -ing phrase less conspicuous by moving it to the middle of the sentence rather than the beginning, where it seems particularly amateurish.
To see just how much these constructions can weaken your writing, take a look at the rest of the scene we quoted at the beginning of the chapter, with the as and -ing constructions in boldface type:
Ripping off several large, dripping hunks of burrito, she pulled up a chair to the kitchen table and took a large bite. As she chewed, she wondered who she was maddest at. Clark, she decided.
The doorbell rang. “Heather, it’s me!” boomed a deep, authoritative voice. “Clark!”
Spotting her favorite red silk kimono crumpled on the floor, Heather stooped over and picked it up. As she pulled the kimono over her shoulders, she said a prayer of thanks that the wrinkled look was in.
As her fingers unfastened the chain lock, she wondered how Clark had gotten her address. It wasn’t listed in the telephone book.
“Good evening,” Clark greeted with a small bow as the door swung open.
“The bug man came last week,” Heather said sarcastically, refusing to budge from the door. “I thought he’d exterminated all the pests in my life, but I guessed he missed one. A big one.”
“Funny, very funny,” Clark said, clearly not amused as he leaned an arm against the door jamb. “Now you’d better let me in before I start causing a scene.”
Now take a look at the same scene again, with the as and -ing clauses removed, along with some of the other self-editing problems (after all, “Clark greeted”…?):
She pulled up a chair to the kitchen table and took a large bite of the burrito she’d found behind the milk and orange juice bottles. Who was she maddest at? Probably Clark.
The doorbell rang. “Heather, it’s me!”
Clark. It had to be.
Heather sighed, stooped over and picked up her red silk kimono from the floor. Thank God the wrinkled look was in. But how had Clark gotten her address? It wasn’t listed in the telephone book.
“Good evening.” He made a small bow.
Heather didn’t budge from the door. “The bug man came last week. I thought he’d exterminated all the pests in my life, but I guess he must have missed a big one.”
“Funny, very funny.” Clark leaned an arm against the door jamb. “You’d better let me in before I start causing a scene.”
Admittedly this still isn’t deathless prose, but the editing has made the passage read a lot more professionally.
Another way to keep from looking like an amateur is to avoid the use of clichés. Virtually all clichés, of course, begin their life as original, effective expressions—so effective, in fact, that they got used until all the life went out of them. So if you come across lifeless passages, you may need to self-edit for the purpose of weeding out any clichés. Your characters should never live life in the fast lane, nor should anything in your writing be worth no more than a plugged nickel. And if you come across “She tossed her head,” the first question you should ask is, “How far?”
Watch for clichés on the larger scale, too, particularly in the creation of minor characters. Don’t outfit your accountants in Coke-bottle glasses and pocket protectors, or make your clergymen mild and soft-spoken, or let your New York cabbies drive like maniacs (although, arguably, this last example is nothing more than simple verisimilitude). When you fall into characterization clichés like these, the result is a cartoon rather than a character.
There is one caveat: in narration, there may be times when you need to use a familiar, pet phrase—yes, a cliché—to summarize a complicated situation. But before going with the cliché, give some thought to the possibility of “turning” it, altering it slightly to render the phrasing less familiar. In a celebrated novel we edited, the writer used the phrase “they vanished into thin air” to avoid a lengthy, complicated explanation. We suggested a change to “they vanished into thick air,” which fit the poetic, steamy atmosphere of the European city in which the scene was set.
In chapter 5, we warned you to watch out for -ly adverbs when you’re writing dialogue. But even when you’re not writing dialogue, be on the lookout for -ly adverbs, for the sake of sophistication. Chances are, as you bang out your first draft, you use the first verbs that come to mind—verbs that are commonplace and comfortable, verbs you don’t have to dig too deep to find. Set, for instance, as in:
“She set the cup and saucer on the kitchen table.”
Then, since set doesn’t really convey what you want, you find the extra nuance you need in an adjective, tack on an -ly to make an adverb, and hook it to the verb.
“Angrily she set the cup and saucer on the kitchen table.”
This approach may be all right for a first draft, but when you self-edit, you can root out these verb-adverb combinations like the weeds they are. The weak verbs that came to mind so readily can then be jettisoned in favor of stronger, more specific verbs—verbs that say exactly what you want to say without help.
“She slammed the cup and saucer onto the kitchen table.”
When you use two words, a weak verb and an adverb, to do the work of one strong verb, you dilute your writing and rob it of its potential power.
There are exceptions, of course, as there are to every principle in this book. If your heroine has just finished the restoration of her 1952 MG-TD, a project she has been working on for the last nine years, you might be compelled to write:
“She tightened the last nut—slowly, lovingly.”
It’s not terrific writing but it’s an understandable solution—there probably isn’t a single verb in the English language than can convey this particular way of tightening a nut. But even where the adverbs aren’t the product of lazy writing, they can still look like lazy writing, just because -ly adverbs have been used so often by so many hacks in the past. It might be better to rewrite the description of the car from your heroine’s point of view and in her voice, so that we can see that she loves it, without your having to say so. To show rather than tell us.
A simple departure from conventional comma usage can also lend a modern, sophisticated touch to your fiction—especially your dialogue. All you have to do is string together short sentences with commas instead of separating them with periods, as in these examples:
“I tried to tell him, I couldn’t get his attention.”
“Hurry up, let’s get going.”
“Don’t worry about it, she’s only sixteen.”
This comma usage, if not overdone, conveys remarkably well the way speech actually falls on the ear. Most of us don’t come to a full stop after every sentence when we’re talking, nor do your characters have to. And this special effect needn’t be reserved exclusively for dialogue passages. In Billy Bathgate, E. L. Doctorow often comma-strings sentences of narration:
[He said] “Hey, young fellow, what’s the younger generation reading these days?” as if it was really important to him. He turned the book up in my hand so he could read the title, I don’t know what he expected, a French novel maybe, but he was genuinely surprised.
There are a few stylistic devices that are so “tacky” they should be used very sparingly, if at all. First on the list is emphasis quotes, as in the quotes around the word “tacky” in the preceding sentence. The only time you need to use them is to show you are referring to the word itself, as in the quotes around the word “tacky” in the preceding sentence. Read it again; it all makes sense.
Then there are the stylistic devices that make a writer look insecure, the most notable offenders being exclamation points and italics. Exclamation points are visually distracting and, if overused, are an irritation to readers. They should be reserved for moments when a character is physically shouting or experiencing the mental equivalent. When you use them frequently, you look as if you’re trying desperately to infuse your dialogue or narration with an excitement it lacks. And, as you can see, frequent italics are the typographical equivalent of an elbow in the ribs and a frantic, “Did you get it? Did you?”
Articles and short stories in some romance magazines make such frequent use of italics and exclamation points that the result is a gushy, hyped-up style easy to parody:
“Oh, God!” Samantha said, “do you know what he did? He picked me up and threw me onto the bed, and then he just flung himself on top of me! I tell you, Shirley, I was in seventh heaven!”
Should you need any further convincing on this point, note what happens to a poignant confrontation between mother and daughter in Mary Gordon’s The Company of Women when we pump it up with just a few exclamation points and italics:
“I should never have let you go up there to Columbia. I should have known they’d take advantage of you!”
“Nobody took advantage of me, Mother.”
“Then how did you get in this condition?” she said through her teeth.
“I got in this condition because I used the wrong kind of birth control!”
“Don’t talk about that in this house!”
I had forgotten: in my mother’s canon, practicing birth control was worse than having sex.
“Whose is it?” she asked. “That goddamned professor, right?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Don’t try and protect him. I know you.”
“I’m not sure whose it is, Mother. I slept with two people. I’m not sure which one is the father!”
“Fine,” said my mother. “Very nice. Just beautiful!”
That was the last she has ever spoken about the father of my child. There was not one word of forced marriages, not a mention of paternity suits. Which is remarkable, since she is, if nothing else, a woman who believes in convention.
Now read the passage as the writer wrote it:
“I should never have let you go up there to Columbia. I should have known they’d take advantage of you.”
“Nobody took advantage of me, Mother.”
“Then how did you get in this condition?” she said through her teeth.
“I got into this condition because I used the wrong kind of birth control.”
“Don’t talk about that in this house.”
I had forgotten: in my mother’s canon, practicing birth control was worse than having sex.
“Whose is it?” she asked. “That goddamned professor, right?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Don’t try and protect him. I know you.”
“I’m not sure whose it is, Mother. I slept with two people. I’m not sure which one is the father.”
“Fine,” said my mother. “Very nice. Just beautiful.”
That was the last she has ever spoken about the father of my child. There was not one word of forced marriages, not a mention of paternity suits. Which is remarkable, since she is, if nothing else, a woman who believes in convention.
You can see that the dialogue and description convey all the emotion needed. And the writer’s voice, without the lexical trappings, is calm and confident.
There’s another stylistic device whose overuse will brand you as an amateur: flowery, poetic figures of speech, much beloved by beginning writers and used very sparingly by the pros. If you’re a poet, and most of your imagery is fresh and strong, reining yourself in may be more difficult than you might think. But unless your character is a poet and actually sees the world in poetic terms on an everyday basis, you need to do it. Otherwise, you’re taking over your story from your characters, which is never a good idea.
Take a look at this excerpt from an early draft of Peter Cooper’s novel Billy Shakes, in which a character has just learned that his wife is pregnant:
“The trouble with women,” Hoot said with a serious smile, “is that they always seem to think they have everything figured out. When the truth is, they don’t know a thing.”
“Come on, Hoot,” Lucy said. “Admit it. You’re a father.”
“As a matter of fact, Lucy, it may be that Rose is pregnant.” His eyes were a dark, dark blue, stolen jewels in a setting of bone. “But I can assure you that I am not the father.”
“What are you saying?” she asked in a horrified whisper.
“I can’t have children. That’s what I’m saying.” He paused to light a cigarette, his hand shaking ever so slightly. “It just so happens that I had a vasectomy a year before I married Rose.”
The metaphor, the dark blue stolen jewels in a setting of bone, strains for effect. Yet the problem isn’t the unworkability of the metaphor but its presence in the scene in the first place. This scene is the moment on which the plot of the entire novel turns—we find out in the next few paragraphs that Hoot’s best friend, Lucy’s husband, is the father of Rose’s child. Yet just when it’s most important that we focus on events, we’re pulled aside to notice the writer’s poetic turn of mind. And like exclamation points or italics, phrases that call attention to themselves rather than to what’s being said make it obvious that you’re working hard for your effects.
When it comes to handling sex scenes, the last thing you want is to seem to be working hard to achieve your effects. The subtler stylistic approach will nearly always be the more professional looking choice. This means you’ll want to avoid heavy breathing, whether it’s the type appropriate to novels with titles like Love’s Helpless Fury or the type common to novels with titles like Motel Lust or Lust Motel. There was a time when explicit sex scenes added a sense of sophistication, of authenticity to a book—to say nothing of boosting sales. But in a day when photographs that once would have been sold under the counter are used to advertise blue jeans, this approach has lost its power to shock or titillate.
The subtle approach, on the other hand, engages your reader’s imagination and so is likely to be far more effective. This is an area where it might be a good idea to bring back an old-fashioned narrative convention: sexual encounters that take place in linespaces. After all, if you leave the physical details to your readers’ imaginations, they are likely to be far more engaged than if you spell it all out. A linespace may be a far more erotic place for two characters to make love than a bed.
For instance, take a look at what is arguably the most famous sex scene in modern literature, from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind:
He swung her off her feet and into his arms and started up the stairs. Her head was crushed against his chest and she heard the hard hammering of his heart beneath her ears. He hurt her and she cried out, muffled, frightened. Up the stairs he went in the utter darkness, up, up, and she was wild with fear. He was a mad stranger and this was a black darkness she did not know, darker than death. He was like death, carrying her away in arms that hurt. She screamed, stifled against him and he stopped on the landing and, turning her swiftly in his arms, bent over her and kissed her with a savagery and completeness that wiped out everything from her mind but the dark into which she was sinking and the lips on hers. He was shaking, as though he stood in a strong wind, and his lips, fallen from her body, fell on her soft flesh. He was muttering things she did not hear, his lips were evoking feelings never felt before. She was darkness and he was darkness and there had never been anything before this time, only darkness and his lips on hers. She tried to speak and his mouth was over her again. Suddenly she had a wild thrill such as she had never known; joy, fear, madness, excitement, surrender to arms that were too strong, lips too bruising, fate that moved too fast. For the first time in her life she had met someone, something stronger than she, someone she could neither bully nor break, someone who was bullying and breaking her. Somehow, her arms were around his neck and her lips trembling beneath his and they were going up, up into the darkness again, a darkness that was soft and swirling and all enveloping.
When she awoke the next morning, he was gone and had it not been for the rumpled pillow beside her, she would have thought the happenings of the night before a preposterous dream….
A modern editor might break this up into another paragraph or two—we certainly would. But no editor in his or her right mind would add explicit sexual or anatomical details. The effectiveness of the scene in evoking the reader’s imagination is as much in force today as it was in the late 1930s.
What is true of sexual details is also true of profanity. There was a time when your characters were convincingly worldly and streetwise if they swore a lot. But profanity has been so overused in past years that nowadays it’s more a sign of a small vocabulary. Of course, if profanity is appropriate to your character, then have that character swear. But keep in mind that a moderate amount of profanity or obscenity can suggest a lot—your readers will get the idea. If you include a great deal of it, you’re likely to turn them off. Just think about how much power a single obscenity can have if it’s the only one in the whole fucking book.
The surest sign that you are achieving literary sophistication is when your writing begins to seem effortless. Not that it will be effortless, of course—crafting good prose is hard work. We often guide writers through four drafts before we see the novel published, even though the first draft we see may not be the first one the writer wrote.
And the goal of all this careful, conscious work is to produce a novel or short story collection that reads as though no hard labor were involved in producing it. Fred Astaire worked tirelessly to make dancing look like the easiest, most natural thing in the world. And that’s what you’re trying for—a level of effectiveness that can make what was hardest to achieve look effortless.
Checklist
Exercises
Grabbing up a pelt she pulled it close about her and gave him an impishly wicked look as she grinned. Turning on her heels with a low laugh, she went to the hearth, there to lay small logs upon the still warm coals. She blew upon them but drew back in haste as the ashes flew up and sat back upon her heels rubbing her reddened eyes while Wulfgar’s amused chuckles filled the room. She made a face at his mirth and swung the kettle of water on its hook over the building heat as he crossed to the warmth of the fire beside her and began to dress.
All this time Tweedledee was trying his best to fold up the umbrella, with himself in it, which was such an extraordinary thing to do that it quite took off Alice’s attention from the angry brother. But he couldn’t quite succeed, and it ended in his rolling over, bundled up in the umbrella, with only his head out; and there he lay, opening and shutting his mouth and his large eyes—“looking more like a fish than anything else,” Alice thought.
“Of course you agree to have a battle?” Tweedledum said in a calmer tone.
“I suppose so,” the other sulkily replied, as he crawled out of the umbrella; “only she must help us dress up, you know.”
So the two brothers went off hand in hand into the wood, and returned, in a minute, with their arms full of things—such as bolsters, blankets, hearthrugs, tablecloths, dish covers, and coal scuttles. “I hope you’re a good hand at pinning and tying strings?” Tweedledum remarked. “Every one of these things has got to go on, somehow or other.”
Alice said afterward she had never seen such a fuss made about anything in all her life—the way those two bustled about, and the quantity of things they put on, and the trouble they gave her in tying strings and fastening buttons—“Really, they’ll be more like bundles of old clothes than anything else by the time they’re ready!” she said to herself, as she arranged a bolster round the neck of Tweedledee, “to keep his head from being cut off,” as he said.
“You know,” he added very gravely, “it’s one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle, to get one’s head cut off.”
“But Ernestine, honey,” Winthrop breathed, “I swear I was never anywhere near the John Smith motel!”
“Winthrop, darling,” Ernestine said sarcastically, “that’s not what I heard from Helena.” She looked out the window.
Winthrop found himself looking at his hands. He scuffed the carpet with his foot, feeling like a small boy with a baseball bat in front of a broken window. But then his gorge began to rise at the injustice of it. “No!” he thought, defiant, “I intend to brazen it out.” Helena Basquette was known to be the trouble-making type.
“Ernestine,” he said sincerely. “You should have better sense than to trust to the ramblings of as big a fool as Helena Basquette. Why only last week…”
The doorbell rang resoundingly.
Laying her cigar carefully on the ashtray at her arm, Ernestine crossed the room and opened the door.
The young man silhouetted against the streetlight was tall, his shock of black hair glimmering faintly with condensation from the evening fog. Over his lanky frame he wore a loose-fitting bomber jacket and faded, stone-washed jeans.
And in his hand, that familiar square box.
“You the guys that ordered the pizza?” he snarled.
Ernestine looked away. “Winthrop, sweetie,” she continued bitingly, “are you responsible for this outrage?”
“Oh no,” thought the pizza man. “He’s been fightin’ wid his old lady. I ain’t gonna get no tip outta this one.”