Stein on Writing (32 page)

Literary Values in Fiction and Nonfiction

Commercial? Popular? Literary?

T
he commercial novelist is a storyteller who is most concerned with plot and plot gimmicks, with maintaining a high level of suspense and physical action. The success of commercial novelists is usually derived from tapping an area of adventure, romance, espionage, or whatever may be popular at the time, creating characters with sufficient skill that the reader is willing to suspend disbelief and follow the hero as he triumphs over unambiguous antagonists. John Grisham’s bestseller
The Firm,
for instance, is an adolescent fantasy, the story of a young lawyer straight out of law school who is offered a job with too much pay, an expensive car, a house, and finds himself working—of course—for the Mob, who won’t let him quit. The rest is a chase scene. The market for adolescent fantasies is demonstrably huge. And it cares little about the quality of the writing. Mitch is the beleaguered hero of this fantasy:

Mitch almost felt sorry for her, but he kept his eyes on the table.

In a box? What he kept on the table was presumably his gaze.

He stared at Royce McKnight and exposed a mammoth chip on his shoulder.

That’s not a log, it’s an attitude.

Mitch ripped two ribs apart, slinging sauce into his eyebrows.

Did his wife, Abby, sitting across the table from him in the restaurant, notice? She says:

“We just moved in this morning.”

A fact he already knows, so Mitch says:

“I know.”

On a business trip, Mitch, happily married to Abby, is the object of seduction by a woman named Julia in words like these:

Julia drooled at him and moved closer.

She rubbed her breasts on his biceps and gave her best seductive smile, only inches away.

When a private school is mentioned, we learn:

Affluent parents signed the waiting list shortly after birth.

Precocious as well as affluent? According to Grisham, the people Mitch meets have interesting though repetitive characteristics:

He frowned sincerely, as if this would be painful.

He was stocky with a slight belly, thick shoulders and chest and a huge, perfectly round head that smiled with great reluctance.

When he talked the water dripped from his nose and interfered with his enunciation.

Tammy arrived from trip three out of breath and with sweat dripping from her nose.

In this kind of commercial writing, lack of precision is not the only carelessness:

Coffee? Yes, he said, black. She disappeared and returned with a cup and saucer.

The coffee itself was presumably forgotten by the author. And so it goes. The public was forgiving. Or, more likely, didn’t notice as
The Firm
topped the bestseller lists.

The most distinguishing difference between “commercial” writers like Grisham and literary writers is the attention paid to the individual meanings and resonance of words and the respect shown for the reader’s intelligence. In this chapter my concern is with the craft of the writer who aspires to permanence, who has not an occupation but a calling.

Publishing, the work of bringing words to the marketplace, is, alas, sloppy in its attempts to distinguish books of a certain quality from everyday product that is designed to sell. The latter are called “popular” and “commercial,” though books of high quality are sometimes popular, and when they endure, prove their commercial viability by continuing to sell long after their commercial contemporaries are out of print. Both kinds of books can entertain and instruct, though they appeal to different audiences.

A prevalent way of describing the difference is calling the successful commercial book “a good read,” whereas the other is likely to be referred to as “a good book.” The implication is that one confers a transient experience on the reader, whereas the other may be durable, deserving the permanence of a hardcover binding and a place on a bookshelf, to remind one of the experience, or be reread.

I wanted to clarify the distinction for a practical reason. In the end, you write what you read. If you read literary fiction with pleasure, that’s what you will attempt to write. If you read thrillers or romances, you will in all likelihood end up writing for the audience of which you are a part. The same is true for nonfiction—not merely the field of interest, but the quality of language and insight you require of your books, read or written.

The literary novelist is concerned primarily with character understood in depth and engaged in activities that are resonant with the ambiguities and stresses of life. The richness of the best literary fiction is derived primarily from the creation of characters who will persist in the reader’s mind after the reading experience is over. Those novelists and nonfiction writers who strive to produce durable work share an interest in precision and freshness in the use of words, in insights into human nature and the physical world, and in resonance. These writers usually develop a “voice” or style that is distinctive.

The writer of commercial nonfiction is often an expert craftsman in a hurry to meet a deadline who measures the effort put in against the monetary reward. He is writing not for the ages but to put bread on the
table. Perfecting a piece beyond the requirements of the editor to him means more work for the same amount of money, work that could well go into another piece for another publication. Beyond a certain point, quality is not cost-effective for him.

Fiction writers who don’t improve their work beyond the requirements of their editors or the public do not have an interest in perfection because they are deaf to the sound of words and have no instinct or training to hunt precise nuances. They are what they read.

I have edited and published both kinds of writers and both kinds of books. I have worked closely with writers of each kind who have made millions from a single work. What I have never witnessed is a writer’s work succeeding notably in a field he doesn’t habitually read for pleasure.

Diction
is a word laymen associate with clear pronunciation. Its other meaning is the one that is important for writers. Diction involves the choice of words for their precise meaning and sound, the arrangement of those words, and their selection for effect. Excellence in diction is the most important characteristic of fine writing.

The precise meaning of words matters, a notion in disuse by the majority of people, including their presumptive leaders. The inattention to diction is pervasive, endemic, and has reached into surprising places.

On the morning that this chapter was written, the
New York Times
published a review of a biography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the leader of Desert Storm. The coauthors were both journalists. The review tells us that the authors, in their introduction, say they “will paint a picture of a man who is ‘human, blunt, clear, idealistic and swiftly effective.’ ”

I was stopped by the first adjective: human. I hadn’t thought of the general as vegetable, mineral, or other species of animal. What did these two journalists intend by leading with the word “human”?

We’d have to guess. Surely they didn’t confuse it with the word “humane,” which means something quite different. Did they mean Schwarzkopf was what in colloquial parlance we call “a regular guy”? And if so, what is meant by “a regular guy”? It’s a verbal trunk into which a hundred readers would pile many meanings relating to their own experience.

In the best of newspapers the best of journalists are usually forced to write quickly—“off the top of the head” is the convenient expression—and that’s where an imprecise use of “human” comes from: speed and a
minimum of thought, for surely both experienced authors of the Schwarzkopf biography know better.

Poetry and fiction share certain characteristics. In fashioning poetry, a common beginner’s mistake is to emote instead of to evoke, to convey the writer’s emotion rather than to stimulate an emotion from the reader. One way to a reader’s emotion is to bring two words together that have not been together before. Therefore precision is achieved in poetry by the creation of a new grouping of words rather than by using each word for its exact meaning. Precision in poetry is abetted by the sound of words, which is why poetry is sometimes so difficult to translate. The work of Dylan Thomas, possibly the best poet in the English language of this century, is full of newness, words juxtaposed for the first time to create a new meaning. In one, “Fern Hill,” he speaks of “the lilting house.” Lilt means a tune having a pleasant rhythm. A poor poet might have written “happy house,” which is direct and obvious. The “lilting house” evokes the happiness. If it’s hard to judge out of context, treat yourself to some time with Dylan Thomas’s poems.

Poetry usually involves austere compression. The most famous poem of Delmore Schwartz, “In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave,” mixes ordinary description (“A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding”) with fresh metaphor (“The street-lamp’s vigil”). The street-lamp is given a human characteristic—vigilance—with a single word. In fiction, the group of words that evoke an emotion in the reader can range from a few words, as in poetry, to paragraphs or sections.

In commercial fiction, the sound of words is rarely considered except for the occasional—and inaccurate—“splat” or “rat-a-tat-tat.” In literary fiction, the sound of words can contribute to the effect, though that is rarely noticed by readers. Literary fiction thrives on subtlety and particularity.

“Particularity” is a word my students hear often. Once the word from editors was “be concrete.” But to be specific is not as precise as to be particular, which is much more advantageous to the creative writer. Particularity deserves its own chapter, which comes next.

Particularity

I
n his book
On Becoming a Novelist,
John Gardner said, “Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.” My only quarrel with that statement is that detail is also the lifeblood of nonfiction. And I want to go a step further. It is not just detail that distinguishes good writing, it is
detail that individualizes.
I call it “particularity.” Once you’re used to spotting it—and spotting its absence—you will have one of the best possible means of improving your writing markedly.

During the decades that I served as an editor and publisher, what drew my attention to a piece of work more than any other factor was the use of apt particularities, the detail that differentiates one person from another, one act from another, one place from any others like it.

Let’s look at some examples of particularization in sketching characters, actions, and places. To characterize, particularity is used to show how an individual looks, dresses, or speaks without resort to clichés or generalizations.

Early in
The Touch of Treason,
the lawyer Thomassy is confronted by Roberts, the patrician district attorney. Watch for the words that particularize:

Thomassy could see Roberts’s handshake coming at him all the way down the aisle, above it that freckled face proclaiming I can be friendly to everybody, I was born rich.

Roberts’s smile, Thomassy thought, is an implant.

The cop-out would have been to say that Roberts had a fake smile. That is a tired expression and a generalization that doesn’t particularize. The particularization is achieved in two steps. First, his
freckled face proclaiming I can be friendly to everybody, I was born rich.
Then
Thomassy’s thought, that the smile is
an implant.
Note the use of metaphor to particularize. It doesn’t say Roberts’s smile is
like an implant,
Thomassy thinks it
is
an implant. Of course, Thomassy doesn’t believe that literally. In just a few sentences, we know that in Thomassy’s view, Roberts is a pretentious prig. The particularization, though brief, is enough to convince the reader. That helps set up the adversarial exchange that follows. Let’s observe an action that particularizes:

Thomassy moved his gaze from Roberts’s confident eyes to Roberts’s blond hair, then Roberts’s chin, then Roberts’s left ear, then Roberts’s right ear. The four points of the cross. It was what made witnesses nervous. They couldn’t figure out what you were doing. You weren’t doing anything except making them nervous.

The reader quickly understands that Thomassy disconcerts his opponents. Roberts must loathe Thomassy, the arrogant son of an Armenian immigrant. When they encounter each other in the courtroom, the reader is prepared for a battle that is motivated by more than the case.

Now let’s examine the use of particularization in describing a place:

The renting agent said it was their last best chance of finding an apartment in the neighborhood that wasn’t as cramped as the place they had now. Elizabeth and Joe hurried up the stone steps to the parlor floor. The agent stepped aside to let them in. Their first impression was a vast emptiness in which the echo of the agent’s voice reverberated.

“It’s fourteen feet high.”

They followed the agent’s gaze to the ceiling, with its tiny plaster angels around the perimeter.

Joe said, “There’s room for astronauts. How do you change the light bulbs?”

Elizabeth said, “With a ladder, dummy.”

The agent, glad to see the wonder on their faces, said, “Wait till you see the bedroom.”

“Is it in the same town?” Joe said, squeezing Elizabeth’s hand.

A lazy author might have said, “The apartment was bigger than they ever expected.” The reader would not have been able to experience the wonder of its size. By stretching out the particulars (the echo of the agent’s voice, the height of the ceiling, the carved plaster angels), the reader experiences the place along with the characters. In addition, the dialogue also
particularizes one of the characters. Joe, for instance, has a sense of humor.

If an ordinary object is important to a story, particularization will help call attention to it. Let’s look at a before-and-after example:

“You have an envelope?”

He put one down in front of her.

This exchange is void of particularity. Here’s how that transaction was described by John le Carré:

“You have a suitable envelope? Of course you have.”

Envelopes were in the third drawer of his desk, left side. He selected a yellow one, A4 size, and guided it across the desk, but she let it lie there.

Those particularities, ordinary as they seem, help make what she is going to put into the envelope important. The details do not consist of waste words; they have a purpose in making the transaction credible.

It should be clear by now that particularizing sometimes takes more words than a quick generalization. For several decades there has been pressure in nonfiction to clip language short, to simplify sentences. The movement seems to have started back in 1946 with Rudolf Flesch’s book
The Art of Plain Talk.
Simplification is useful and can be a great aid to those business persons and academicians who tend to inflate their sentences with excess verbiage and pompous jargon. However, simplification is not necessarily appropriate if one’s aim is to provide an experience for the reader. “The apartment was large” doesn’t do it. Nor does putting an envelope in front of somebody. The extra words are not wasted because they make the experience of the action possible and credible.

Excellence in particularity tells the editor that he is in the hands of a writer. I’ve seen the use of particularity make an article on a mundane subject sing on the page. The nonfiction books I edited that became classics all had the quality of particularity. And for fiction, particularity is not an option because even transient fiction requires some particularity to succeed with readers.

Perhaps my favorite example of particularization is the first sentence of one of Graham Greene’s masterpieces,
The Heart of the Matter.
It has three words every writer would do well to remember:

Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedord Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork.

The crucial words, of course, are “bald pink knees,” a particularization that makes the character and the place instantly visible and in the reader’s experience unique. If we were to eliminate the words “bald” and “pink” how diminished that opening sentence would be:

Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his knees thrust against the ironwork.

By removing the two most particular words, the sentence becomes ordinary. Moreover, though the image is still visual, there’s nothing especially memorable about it. The balcony and the Bedford Hotel are also particulars, as is the ironwork, but “bald pink knees” is fresh, original, and immediately makes Wilson visible. Those knees against the ironwork make the hotel visible, too. All of that is accomplished in a single sentence.

Particularizing is also useful if you have occasion to repeat something—like a character laughing—and don’t want to bore the reader by repeating a phrase like “She laughed” several times within the same few pages:

She looked like she was enjoying herself mightily.

If he laughed behind you suddenly in a darkened room, you’d be frightened.

His face beamed like Santa Claus. His barrel chest moved up and down, but I couldn’t hear him laughing.

She seemed about to giggle like a schoolgirl, but controlled it. She’d been out of school a long time.

His response was a sound somewhere between a guffaw and a chortle. Later I learned it was a kind of trademark with him. Nobody else in the world laughed like that.

The temptation is always to use either a cliché or a generalization, what I call “top-of-the-head writing.” In this chapter we are trying to fashion sentences that are writerly, that particularize in an interesting way. Here’s a top-of-the-head description that doesn’t tell us much:

Cecilia wore short skirts.

It doesn’t take much to turn that ordinariness into a sentence that characterizes and particularizes:

Cecilia’s skirts were three inches shorter than her age allowed.

Here’s another ordinary—I’m tempted to say lazy—sentence:

Vernon was a heavy smoker.

And now several ways to convey the same point with particularity:

Vernon coughed from the ground up.

When a waitress heard Vernon’s voice she always guided him to the smoking section without asking.

Vernon looked like those fellows that have one rectangular breast where he kept his pack of Marlboros tucked into his shirt.

Here’s a sentence that doesn’t give the reader anything to see. It’s too much of a generalization:

He didn’t know what to do with his hands.

If you’re going to deal with a character’s hands, give them something to do, as this author did:

Every few minutes his right hand checked to see that his reproductive organs were still in place.

A useful technique for particularizing a character in fiction, a person in nonfiction, or a setting in either is seeing the individual or locale first at a distance and then closer. For the reader the experience is similar to seeing a full-length view of a person and then a close-up in which more detail is noted:

Corrigan’s bulk filled the doorway.

I said, “Hi,” and got up from behind my desk quickly to shake his hand.

I stopped. His right arm was in a sling. He wiggled the fingers at me.

“Break it?” I asked.

His lips, trying to smile, quivered.

“What happened?” I said, motioning him to a chair.

He turned his face toward the window. I saw the freshly stitched cut that ran from his right cheek straight down into the collar of his shirt.

When a person comes into view, the writer’s temptation is to describe him all at once. It’s more effective to delay part of the description. Start at a distance, then notice more. It enhances the tension. The same technique of particularizing in stages works for places as well as people.

Elmore Leonard, best known for his dialogue, is also a master of particularity:

Robbie Daniels was also forty-one. He had changed clothes before the police arrived and at six o’clock in the morning wore a lightweight navy blue cashmere sweater over bare skin, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, colorless cotton trousers that clung to his hips but were not tight around the waist. Standing outside the house talking to the squad-car officer, the wind coming off the ocean out of misty dawn, he would slip a hand beneath the sweater and move it over his skin, idly, remembering, pointing with the other hand toward the swimming pool and patio where there were yellow flowers and tables with yellow umbrellas.

My favorite particularity in the passage we just read is “he would slip a hand beneath the sweater and move it over his skin, idly, remembering, pointing with the other hand toward the swimming pool and patio where there were yellow flowers and tables with yellow umbrellas.” I suppose Rudolf Flesch of
The Art of Plain Talk
would have had Elmore Leonard say something like “He scratched his skin under his sweater,” but the quality of the writing would have flown with the rest of the words.

In writing, the word “diction” refers to the choice of words, which is the activity of the writer as he is particularizing. The requirement is precision of meaning,
le mot juste,
exactly the right word. Here’s an example from a recent newspaper story:

Pickpockets board trains, wait until the exquisitely perfect last second and then step off. If anybody else does it, he’s a cop.

The lazy writer’s cliché would have been “Pickpockets wait until the last second.” Instead, the journalist avoided the cliché and sharpened the meaning by calling it “the exquisitely perfect last second.” His diction has brought a freshness to the piece.

Books of quality that make the nonfiction bestseller list and earn considerable sums for their authors almost always employ as much particularity as possible. They deserve study. An hour spent in the library just looking at opening pages of memorable recent nonfiction can be instructive. Here is the opening of the book that fared better than the other D-Day books commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of that event in 1994,
D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II
by Stephen E. Ambrose:

At 0016 hours, June 6 1944, the Horsa glider crash-landed alongside the Caen Canal, some fifty meters from the swing bridge crossing the canal. Lt. Den Brotheridge, leading the twenty-eight men of the first platoon, D Company, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry Regiment, British 6th Airborne Division, worked his way out of the glider. He grabbed Sgt. Jack “Bill” Bailey, a section leader, and whispered in his ear, “Get your chaps moving.” Bailey set off with his group to pitch grenades into the machine-gun pillbox known to be beside the bridge. Lieutenant Brotheridge gathered the remainder of his platoon, whispered “Come on, lads,” and began running for the bridge. The German defenders of the bridge, about fifty strong, were not aware that the long-awaited invasion had just begun.