Stein on Writing (27 page)

Check those two sentences. Can you detect three bits of flab? Try to find those words before you go on.

Perhaps you found the same words I did. They are in bold face:

In the moment of illumination,
though,
he saw
him.
Buster Devonne
was
counting his money.

This leaves us with a shorter version that seems stronger than the original:

In the moment of illumination, he saw Buster Devonne counting his money.

Note how much faster that sentence seems to read than the two-sentence version that contained the flab. And that’s from a prize-winning book, the author making a slip that you will not make when you’ve mastered the advice in this chapter.

Let’s take a look at some sentences from which we want to eliminate flab. The protagonist in this story is proud of his house, where he has had meetings with important people. He is also a do-it-yourselfer. Here’s the first draft of his thoughts as he comes home one day:

The best scenes of my private and public life have been enacted here. Over the last fifteen years every room has been improved by my labor.

What excess words would you remove? Try to find them before going on.

The best scenes of my [private and public] life have been enacted here. [Over the last fifteen years] Every room has been improved by my labor.

Note how much the pace increased after the author took out the bracketed words:

The best scenes of my life have been enacted here. Every room has been improved by my labor.

The word “life” encompasses private and public. “Over the last fifteen years” provided unnecessary information that weakened the sentence.

The next sentences come from the same novel. A successful loan shark is intent on hiring a lawyer named Bert Rivers:

I went there to kind of smell out what he was like. That was the last time I was in Bert Rivers’ office. From then on Bert Rivers came to my office.

What I did in revising was quite simple. I cut the entire middle sentence, which didn’t add anything. The deletion strengthened what was left and stepped up the pace:

I went there to kind of smell out what he was like. From then on Bert Rivers came to my office.

At chapter endings, cutting can be especially important. The following is from the point of view of a mother who has learned that her sixteen-year-old son has been killed in a fight. Here’s the original:

I looked up at the ceiling, knowing above the ceiling was the roof, and above the roof was the sky, and somewhere in the sky there was a power who knew your secrets, a power who emptied out the days and gave your kid to the maggots. What does a mother do with her love? It wasn’t fair. Why did God do nothing?

In revising, I thought the sentence “What does a mother do with her love?” excessively sentimental. And “Why did God do nothing?” was too abstract to leave the reader with a suitable emotion at the end of the chapter. I cut both sentences. Here’s how the chapter now ends:

I looked up at the ceiling, knowing above the ceiling was the roof, and above the roof was the sky, and somewhere in the sky there was a power who knew your secrets, a power who emptied out the days and gave your kid to the maggots. It wasn’t fair.

The author I have spent more time editing than any other is Elia Kazan, winner of two Academy Awards and director of five Pulitzer Prize plays who turned to fiction and became a number-one bestselling novelist. In his autobiography Kazan said, “I was now in a new profession. My publisher Sol Stein was my producer, and my editor Sol Stein was my director. ... He saw quickly ... that I delighted in saying the same thing over and over, thereby minimizing its impact (“One plus one equals a half,” Sol would say).”

Eliminating the redundance was an important factor in his novel
The Arrangement
remaining number one on the bestseller charts for thirty-seven consecutive weeks.

I’ve been teaching my strange formula “One plus one equals a half” for a long time. It has been of value even to the most talented and successful of writers. The formula gives beginners insight into one of the factors that hurts chances for publication.

Catching “one-plus-ones” is a function of what is called “line editing.” Shouldn’t writers rely on editors to catch things like that? The
hard fact is that editors do a lot less line editing than they used to. If a novel requires a lot of line editing, it is less likely to be taken on by a publisher, who has to consider the cost of editing. Which is why is it incumbent upon writers to become, in effect, their own editors. This also applies to nonfiction writers and to writers of screenplays and TV dramas.

On television, the program
In the Heat of the Night
had a glaring example of one-plus-one when Virgil Tibbs’s wife said to him, “My parents, Mom and Dad .. .”

Who else might her parents be besides “Mom and Dad”? The script writer should have kept one or the other, not both.

Most often the one-plus-one has the repetition put in a slightly different way. Here’s an example from an American classic:

He was dirty. Everything about him was unclean. Even the whites of his eyes were soiled.

What did the author fail to eliminate? Before you go on, why don’t you try your hand at being his editor and bracket what you’d leave out.

You could have eliminated either of the first two sentences. My preference would be to eliminate the second sentence because the short first sentence sets up the effective last sentence better:

He was dirty. Even the whites of his eyes were soiled.

That example of one-plus-one comes from Sherwood Anderson’s classic,
Winesburg, Ohio.
Here’s another example:

It was a dreadful situation, a time of purest humiliation.

Here the choice is clearer. The first clause is general and familiar. “It was a time of purest humiliation” is more specific. All you have to do is delete the words “a dreadful situation” and you have a more specific sentence that doesn’t say the same thing twice.

The following is an example of one-plus-one from a recent book by a much admired and successful novelist:

He had time to think, time to become an old man in aspic, in sculptured soap, quaint and white.

Now let’s think about that sentence. There are two images, “an old man in aspic” and an old man “in sculptured soap.” What’s wrong?

Both images convey the same thing. A person in aspic is immobilized. A person in sculptured soap is immobilized. Two images that convey the same thing make the reader conscious of the images instead of letting the reader experience the effect. And by cutting one of the two, the pace speeds up. If the author chose the second one, the old man “in sculptured soap,” he should have eliminated “quaint and white.” We usually think of soap as white unless a color is indicated. And “quaint” means “odd in a pleasing way” or “old-fashioned.” Neither definition really helps the image in this context. “An old man in sculptured soap” is strong. “An old man in sculptured soap, quaint and white,” is weaker. If the author felt he had to elaborate on sculptured soap to make the image work, perhaps he should have chosen “an old man in aspic” instead.

Sometimes a one-plus-one is created by an unnecessary repetition:

I noticed the finesse with which Mr. Brethson held the creases in his trousers as he sat down. I was always fascinated by what people did to keep dress-up clothes in shape.

The first-person narrator notices how Brethson holds the creases in his trousers. The narrator’s generalization of what he sees is distracting. In the editing, the second sentence should come out.

Earlier in this book I have several times expressed admiration for the work of a new novelist, Nanci Kincaid, whose
Crossing Blood
was published in the autumn of 1992. Her effective characterization, often accomplished in a stroke, deserves high praise. But she’s evidently had no training in eliminating one-plus-ones. In fact, here she demonstrates one-plus-one-plus-one equals one third! Let’s look at what she does one sentence at a time:

Sometimes I wished I had run after Daddy, hugged his leg like a boa constrictor.

Not bad, though perhaps the image of a boa constrictor is more negative than the author intended, as the context would seem to indicate.

Sometimes I wished I had run after Daddy, stuck to him like a Band-Aid.

A nice image.

Sometimes I wished I had run after Daddy, locked myself around him like a ball on a chain, like I was the law and he was the prisoner.

Fine. The only problem is that Nanci Kincaid used
all three images,
one after the other. The passage from her novel reads:

Sometimes I wished I had run after Daddy, hugged his leg like a boa constrictor, stuck to him like a Band-Aid, locked myself around him like a ball on a chain, like I was the law and he was the prisoner.

Any one of the three images would be stronger than all three strung together. And the pace would, of course, quicken. The images don’t reinforce each other. Once again we break our experience to become conscious of words on paper.

It’s time for a word of caution. The “one plus one” guideline does not apply to a conscious piling-up of words for effect. Here is an example of a purposeful piling-up first of verbs and then of adjectives, taken from a recent nonfiction book:

Their object is to tear down the individual in the eyes of the court, to deprecate, denounce, defame, condemn, and revile him, and to besmirch whatever reputation he may have had. Their intent is to leave him demoralized, disheartened, discouraged, depressed, and shaken.

Clearly, this intentional piling on of verbs or adjectives is done consciously for effect, unlike the “one-plus-ones” that diminish the effect rather than add to it.

In this chapter, we’ve learned to look closely at what we write, to test each word and phrase both for accuracy and necessity. We’ve also learned to eliminate most adjectives and adverbs as unnecessary flab. And we’ve found out that even successful writers trip up and reduce the effect of their work with unnecessary repetition.

Removing all forms of flab, including one-plus-ones, increases pace, helping a reader to feel that “this book moves fast.”

I trust you’ve enjoyed improving the pace of classics and bestsellers and knowing that you won’t be making the same mistakes.

Tapping Your Originality

O
ne of the most important things a writer of fiction or nonfiction can do over time is to find his individual voice, style, and view of the world. The author’s “voice” is made up of the many factors that distinguish an author from all other authors. Recognizing an individual author’s voice is like recognizing a voice on the telephone. Many authors first find their “voice” when they learn to examine each word for its necessity, precision, and clarity, as we are doing here. The originality of some of the writers I have worked with was immediately apparent: James Baldwin and Bertram Wolfe come to mind. Among my recent students, a young man named Steve Talsky began his work this way:

I am the way, the answer and the light, through me all things are possible.

He had written this once as a joke on the headboard of his bed.

No one else I know—published or unpublished—could have written that beginning. More recently, when I saw the early pages of a completed novel by Anne James Valadez, my spirits rose in the hope that she could sustain the promise of those early pages, a thoroughly believable scene of two trees who were once lovers and now, rooted in place, can only report what goes on beneath their branches. Despite the rootedness of the trees, the story is anything but static. It is a work of remarkable originality.

An extremely small percentage of writers show signs of an original voice at the outset. It usually develops over time, and has two components, the originality of what is said and the originality of the way it is said.

Over the years, I encountered writers who felt they didn’t make their mark because what they wrote was not sufficiently different from what other writers write. I developed a teaching strategy, a way for writers to discover what they alone can do. It is a high-risk, high-gain experiment. Though it can be accomplished in minutes, it takes hard thought and perseverance. If the exercise works for you, it could tap your originality.

I ask you to imagine yourself on a rooftop, the townspeople assembled below. You are allowed to shout down one last sentence. It is the sentence that the world will remember you by forever. If you say it loud enough, everyone in the world will hear you, no matter where they are. Think of shouting the sentence, even if you seldom shout. What one thing are you going to say? If you’d like to try that exercise now, write down the sentence.

Is your sentence one that could have been said by any person you know? If so, revise it until you are convinced no one else could have said that sentence.

When you’ve reworked your original sentence, consider these additional questions:

Is your sentence outrageous? Could it be? Is your sentence a question? Would it be stronger as a question?

Make whatever changes you like. I have still more questions:

Would the crowd below cheer your sentence? Can you revise it to give them something they’d want to cheer?

As you can see, I am asking question after question to help you strengthen and individualize your sentence. I continue:

Suppose the person you most love in all the world were to strongly disagree with your sentence. Can you answer his or her disagreement in a second sentence? Please add it.

Some writers will try to get out of further work by saying that their loved one would agree with the sentence. People have different scripts. If your sentence is original, the chances of another person—even your closest loved one—agreeing with it without the slightest exception is extremely unlikely.

Has your second sentence weakened your first? It usually does. If so, make it stronger than the first.

When you’ve done that, you now have the option of choosing one or the other sentence. There may be value in combining and condensing them.

Finished? Now imagine that you look down and see that the crowd below you is gone. You see only one person, your greatest enemy, who says, “I didn’t hear you. Would you repeat that?”

It is a fact that given one last sentence, addressing one’s enemy can light up the imagination more than an anonymous crowd can. You don’t want to give your enemy the last word or let him respond in a way that would demolish what you’ve said. Can you alter your sentence so that your statement will be enemy-proof?

This, of course, continues the exercise with one of its most difficult phases, creating an original sentence that is strong and to the best of the writer’s ability, seemingly incontrovertible.

Suppose you found out that the only way to get your message across would be if you whispered your sentence. How would you revise it so that it would be suitable for whispering?

It isn’t always easy to change a shouted sentence to one that can be whispered and heard, but it sometimes produces intriguing results and shows how the intent to whisper can produce words that are stronger than shouted words.

The last thing I’ll ask is for you to look at all of the versions of your sentence. Is there a prior version that is actually stronger than the last? Can the virtues of one be embodied in another? And most important, which sentence now strikes you as the most original, the one least likely to have been written by someone else?

The first attempt at this exercise may not produce your ideal original expression. Save your results and try again. But my experience has been that often the first run of this exercise will direct you to a theme or expression of a theme that is uniquely yours. You have begun to tap your originality, to find your voice. In the meantime, you’ve had another lesson in the value of shunning the sentence that comes first, and honing, changing, polishing the words of a single sentence to test all of its possibilities. That is, after all, the writer’s work.