Good Prose (17 page)

Writers starting out—and even successfully published writers—get all sorts of advice about marketing and “branding” themselves. They are told they must develop an “elevator pitch,” a one-breath description of a book, said to be essential for sales. It can grate on the ear and the spirit to hear this, and to be told that to sell one’s book, one needs a “platform”—some identity apart from one’s role as a writer. The book proposal has become a minor genre of its own, like grant writing or the personal
essay on college applications. There are even book proposal consultants and book proposal formulas. Authors are advised to create “marketing plans” to include in their proposals, and some dutifully spend weeks on the chore. Most of this is nonsense, and bad advice. A new writer should proceed cautiously, with a trusted agent’s counsel, bearing in mind that the potential editor is primarily a reader, for whom the best marketing plan may well be twenty or thirty pages of good prose.

A writer who wants to write and to be published successfully has to try to cultivate a certain doubleness of being. When you are writing, you have to think of yourself as a writer and not as a commodity. But when your book is published, it becomes a product. Over the years publishers and agents have become increasingly sophisticated at promoting books, and to let pride keep you from cooperating in their efforts would be churlish and self-destructive.

In a magazine piece called “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” John Updike tells the story of Ted Williams’s last game, at Fenway Park. (In his final at bat, Williams hit a home run.) Updike tells us that Williams’s detractors had long accused him of not being a “clutch hitter.” Then Updike issues this rejoinder: “Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter’s myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money.” The remark is a corrective to Samuel Johnson’s: Of course a writer writes for money, but only a blockhead writes
only
for money.

Everyone hopes for success. Somewhere along the way all writers experience rejection, too, and the pain it causes is real. But pain is a purer feeling than the despair, sometimes masquerading as hubris, that comes from equating one’s self-worth with
the size of a publisher’s advance or even with the response of reviewers. It is self-defeating for a writer to live in a state of noble opposition to the business of publishing, and also self-defeating for a writer with literary ambitions to imagine that fortune is perfectly congruent with success. Some of what writers do, the best of it, is not easily or widely noticed. The deepest pleasure of a piece of writing may lie in a graceful narrative turn, an intuition about human behavior that finds exact expression, the spirit of generosity that lies behind the work. A good word for these things, when they occur, is “art.” Whatever art any book achieves may or may not be rewarded in the marketplace, but art isn’t generally achieved with the market in mind. Every book has to be in part its own reward. In happy moments one realizes that the best work is done when one’s eye is simply on the work, not on its consequences, or on oneself. It is something done for its own sake. It is, in Lewis Hyde’s term, a gift.

Surely most people have experienced this truth, even in humble circumstances. Success of this sort has a great deal to do with intention. A cook insists on a fresh herb, a carpenter repairs a piece of molding seamlessly, a radio journalist enlivens a report with a lyric phrase. It does not seem unreasonable to say that these gestures, these things that carry us beyond utility, that lie outside economic logic, are what make civilization worth inhabiting, and that their absence—which is frequent—can make the world a dispiriting place.

David Foster Wallace was admired by many of his fellow writers, and though his own highest ambitions may have been reserved for his fiction, some admired him as much for the witty, compulsively intelligent prose of his essays and reportage. At
the New York memorial service for him, the novelist Zadie Smith quoted him as having said, “… the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose: the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love, instead of the part that just wants to be loved.”

Editing isn’t just something that happens to you. You have to learn how to be edited.

Some of the first editing I experienced was performed by students at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. I went there in the early 1970s, a few years after the army, after I had written my Vietnam novel, which no one had published—which no one had published thank God, I say now. The Writers’ Workshop seemed like a respectable escape from rejection slips for the short stories I had sent to magazines (one time someone wrote “Sorry” on the bottom of one of those printed slips, which made me feel both better and worse). More than that, Iowa looked like an escape from unemployment and various symbols of failure: the subscription to
The Wall Street Journal
, which a stockbroker uncle had bought for me uninvited, and the law school applications, for which in a weak moment I had written away and which my shy, laconic father had placed on the mantel in my childhood home, where I wrote most of my war novel.

At Iowa what was called a fiction workshop often felt like an
inquisition, a dozen young writers in a seminar room, each with a copy of your story, all telling you what they thought of your creation. Withering comments were one thing: “pretentious,” “sentimental,” “boring,” “Budweiser writing.” But what made my heart sink were the transparent attempts at kindness, especially the line, “I’d like to know more about this character,” almost always said of characters about whom any reader, even one’s mother, would want to know less.

Young writers are unlikely to possess the modicum of selflessness that a good editor must have, that makes it possible for one person to act in the best interests of another’s work. Young writers, I think, are more likely to envy their peers or to disdain them out of self-disdain, and, worst of all, to be unaware of what they’re doing. But I am speaking mainly for myself. In workshops I said harsh, dismissive things about other students’ stories, precisely because they were no worse than my own, and sometimes because they were better.

I’m sure that for some of us young would-be writers the workshops were useful. Reactions varied. Some decided writing wasn’t worth the pain and went on to other professions. Some actively defended themselves. I remember a young woman who, after her story had been pummeled a while, stood up and declared to the class, “This is a story about a lot of beautiful people and a lot of beautiful things
going down
!” and stalked out of the room.

The main lesson I absorbed had to do with standards for writing, especially for fiction. Mine had been both too high and too low. I had read great novelists and short-story writers, and imagined I would soon measure up to them. Now I realized I
wasn’t measuring up to some of the writers on the other side of the table. My solution was to submit as little as possible to workshops, and, after a while, to try my hand at nonfiction. No other students I knew were writing factual stories. Locally, I seemed to have the field to myself. Did I also sense that reporting might be good for me? In college once I had set out to write a novel but managed only about thirty pages, which I decorated with marginal comments and little drawings for my biographer to find. Brief forays into journalism felt like an escape from the sound of my own mind. I was forced to listen to other voices and to think about other lives. And I got encouragement from some of the faculty, especially from Dan Wakefield, a distinguished journalist turned novelist who had come to teach for a semester. Dan was a contributing editor for
The Atlantic
, and he put in a good word for me with Bob Manning. He also told me there was a smart young editor at the magazine named Richard Todd. I should try to work with him.

For months and months, Todd remained a voice on the phone, delivering bad news about my article on the mass murder case.

It didn’t take me very long to fix the first problem, the problem of the opening sentence: “In the spring of 1971, someone went mad for blood in the Sacramento Valley.” After only a few revisions the sentence read: “In May of 1971, the police in Sutter County, California, began to find men buried in the ground outside the town of Yuba City, in the central Sacramento Valley.” Not a memorable sentence, but clear enough. And it no longer had the sound that I thought Todd meant by “melodramatic,” drama supplied by the author, not the facts.

But Todd kept finding problems in my article. The largest
ones lay in my attempts to describe the murderer’s trial, a long and tangled affair, most of which I had witnessed firsthand. How does one distill about a thousand pages of notes into a few pages of manuscript and manage to convey both the essential facts of an event like that and some of its flavor—its tedium, occasional drama, and weirdness? For starters, how to overcome the perfectly sensible conviction that this can’t be done? Time after time, I rewrote, sent Todd the draft, waited a few days, then called him up, only to hear that my account was still, at best, confusing.

At first I felt like yelling at him: “Your reading is obtuse!” But of course I didn’t yell. For a while instead I tried to use the kind of strategy too pitiful to be acknowledged while one is employing it: to make talking about what I had written achieve what my writing hadn’t. Sometimes when he replied, there was a weary sound in his voice. Once or maybe twice, he made a short laugh, like a snort, to tell me, I sensed, that what I had just said was too preposterous for comment. But he never raised his voice. I would remember if he had.

I didn’t keep the notes I made during those conversations or the many drafts I wrote of that article, drafts I never counted. No biographer sat beside me now. My adolescent dreams of writing something classic had turned into the necessity of writing something publishable. This was it for me. I really think I would have bought my own subscription to
The Wall Street Journal
if Todd had simply killed the article. As he should have done. As I would have done in his place. Months of reading the same old material from an all but unpublished writer, for an unimportant story. I never dared to ask Todd why he put up with it, but some
years later, I raised the question with his wife, Susan, and she said, “He’s willing to work as hard as the writer is.”

Some of us writers come into the world believing that we are bestowing favors when we ask others to read what we’ve written. I like to think that during those many phone calls I began to learn otherwise—that when someone takes the trouble to read and respond honestly, I ought to feel grateful, even if I don’t. But I did feel grateful, even jubilant, once the article was finally published, in a corner of
The Atlantic
called “Reports & Comment.” Bob Manning said he was impressed with the work I had put in. He did not say he was impressed with the article itself. This was honest, not unkind. At the time, I didn’t care. Publication was enough.

•

The kind of rewriting one learns, or used to learn, in high school or in a college freshman composition class, is a chore that mainly involves tinkering—moving sentences and paragraphs around, prettying up a phrase, crossing out words and substituting better ones. This is the kind of rewriting that the advent of word processing encouraged, by making it so easy. Not that finding the right word or eliminating the false note from a sentence isn’t important. Sometimes tinkering reveals larger problems in a draft, sometimes even suggests solutions, but only if you’re looking for larger problems and solutions.

I remember in college reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel
The Last Tycoon
and studying a note that he left in the manuscript: “Rewrite from mood. Has become stilted with rewriting. Don’t look—rewrite from mood.” I reread those lines so
often, trying to understand them, that they stuck in my memory. Fitzgerald knew that there are at least two kinds of rewriting. The first is trying to fix what you’ve already written, but doing this can keep you from facing up to the second kind, from figuring out the essential thing you’re trying to do and looking for better ways to tell your story. If Fitzgerald had been advising a young writer and not himself, he might have said, “Rewrite from principle,” or “Don’t just push the same old stuff around. Throw it away and start over.” In any case, a lot of learning how to be edited was for me learning the necessity of this second kind of rewriting, which was most of what Todd and I did together for the next forty years.

On the phone he had become the voice that decreed failure or its opposite, which was publication. By the time I finally met him in person, he was authority for me. He could have been a giant or a dwarf, he could have worn a kilt or a pin-striped suit, and he still would have looked the part I had imagined for him—which is the reason, I suppose, that photographs of him from that time strike me as inaccurate. In fact, he was just a couple of inches below six feet, but I thought of him as small, because he was shorter than I. He looked like a prep school teacher or else a country squire, of the Protestant Irish type: ruddy skin, reddish sandy hair, khaki or gray flannel pants, a tweed sport coat, a functional necktie; all composed in varying degrees of rumpledness, which over the years came to seem admirably unself-conscious, because he clearly noticed the clothes that others wore, particularly women, whose dresses he referred to as “frocks.”