Stein on Writing (33 page)

Note the particularity with which Ambrose engages the reader. Particularity is not only the essence of fine writing, it is sometimes rewarded by the gratitude of reviewers and readers, who can make bestsellers and classics of books whose authors pay attention to detail and the precise meaning of words.

A book can be said to be an accumulation of paragraphs. You work on one paragraph at a time. If you perfect a single paragraph, you have a model for a book. Such is the paragraph I’d like you to look at next. It’s not by a famous author, it’s by a student of mine, Linda Katmarian, who has yet to publish her first work. Observe how she uses particularity:

Weeds and the low-hanging branches of unpruned trees swooshed and thumped against the car while gravel popped loudly under the car’s tires. As the car bumped along, a flock of startled blackbirds exploded out of the brush. For a moment they fluttered and swirled about like pieces of charred paper in the draft of a flame and then they were gone. Elizabeth blinked. The mind could play such tricks.

What’s going on here? She’s breaking rules. Adjectives and adverbs, which normally should be cut, are all over the place. They are used to wonderful effect because she uses the particular sound of words. The low-hanging branches
swooshed
and
thumped
against the car. Gravel
popped.
Startled blackbirds
exploded
out of the brush.
They fluttered
and
swirled.
We experience the road the car is on because the car
bumped along.
What a wonderful image—the birds fluttered and swirled about
like pieces of charred paper in the draft of a flame.
And it all comes together in the perception of the character:
Elizabeth blinked. The mind could play such tricks.

Many published writers would like to have written a paragraph that good. That nearly perfect paragraph was achieved with a small amount of editing and revision. The value of writing that paragraph lay, first, in giving her proof that she could do it, and, second, in giving her a benchmark for rethinking and revising the rest of her book.

A good place to practice particularizing is in letters to friends. Once upon a time, letters were an art form. Today, many people write top-of-the-head letters, full of generalizations and clichés. Many of us think of clichés as something we learned all about in school. The fact is that some of the best-educated writers fall back on clichés both in their speech and work much more often than they realize. For a fiction writer, learning to avoid them and finding those that slip in are important steps toward learning one of the most important aspects of original creative work: examining each word for its precise meaning and the likely effect of every group of words on the emotions of the reader.

For a writer, top-of-the-head writing, even letter writing, is dangerous because the habit could carry over into your work. If you work at particularizing in all of your personal correspondence, the recipients will enjoy what you write much more—and you will be practicing what you need to perfect to get your books published and to build an audience for your writings.

* * *

You’ll remember my saying that commercial fiction, too, can benefit from particularity. If you’d like to have some fun putting your knowledge of particularity to the test, you’ll need pen and paper or have your word processor turned on. Here are the first two paragraphs of a novel I will ask you to improve:

At half-past six on a Friday evening in January, Lincoln International Airport, Illinois, was functioning, though with difficulty.

The airport was reeling—as was the entire midwestern United States—from the meanest, roughest winter storm in half a dozen years. The storm had lasted three days. Now, like pustules on a battered, weakened body, trouble spots were erupting steadily.

That opening lacks particularity. “Meanest, roughest,” and “trouble spots” are generalizations. The simile “like pustules on a battered, weakened body” is an inaccurate analogy, and is off-putting in the opening paragraphs of a book. Given the generality of a long-lasting snowstorm and your likely experience of airports, how would you revise those two paragraphs to give the opening of the novel particularity? Feel free to change or discard as much as you like. Your revision can be shorter or longer. Remember what John Gardner said: “Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.” Use actions if possible. If people are in your opening, have them talk or think in particulars. Make locale, objects, and people distinctive and visible. Use other senses if appropriate. And make it ominous if you can. Stop when you’re pretty sure you’ve improved the opening.

If you like your version better than the author’s original, I have a surprise for you. You have just revised the opening of one of the biggest bestsellers of our time,
Airport
by Arthur Hailey.

I tried my hand at a more particularized version of Arthur Hailey’s opening based on the author’s own facts, scattered in the first three pages of the book. Note how particularizing and introducing a character help increase the tension of that opening paragraph:

Runway three zero at Lincoln International was out of service, blocked by an Aereo-Mexican 707, its wheels mired in waterlogged ground near the runway’s edge. Incoming traffic from Minneapolis, Cleveland, Kansas City, Indianapolis, and Denver
was stacked up overhead, some low on gas. On the ground, the wings of forty planes chafing to take off were icing up.

At the Snow Control Desk high in the glass-walled control tower, Mel Bakersfield, the airport’s general manager, drummed his fingers on the glass and peered into the darkness, as if he could will United’s Flight 111 from Los Angeles to appear. The plane was due at half-past four. It was now half-past six.

Similes and Metaphors

S
imiles and metaphors are the wonders of writing, and like all wonderful things carry a price. If figures of speech are overdone, they backfire. For instance, here’s Martin Cruz Smith in his bestseller
Polar Star
straining to get a metaphor and a simile into two successive sentences:

In the glare of the lamp, Volovoi’s crew cut was a crown of radiant spikes. Of course, Karp, who was doing all the heavy labor, perspired like Vulcan at the forge.

What we see is not Volovoi’s crew cut or Karp’s perspiration but the author laboring to provide comparisons unsuccessfully. At one point, he stages a fight, and hero Arkady gets shoved into a bookcase, which inspires this simile:

Paperbacks fluttered out like birds.

I’ll bet. The simile is imprecise. Smith can’t restrain himself. Here he goes again:

Her black eyes balanced anxiously on enormous cheekbones.

When read aloud, the vision of black eyes balancing on cheekbones always draws a laugh. That’s not a simile or metaphor, just plain overwriting. Which leads me to the principal advice I have for writers striving for color. Try, fly, experiment, but if it shows strain, if it isn’t accurate, cut it.

Inaccurate similes and metaphors have the effect of deflecting the reader’s attention from the story to the words on the page. Yet when carried off, especially when a simile is original and a metaphor sings, there is no greater glory in the practice of words.

In school we learned that a simile is a comparison of two unlike things, usually joined by the words “like” or “as.” Perhaps the “unlike” throws off writers. What is meant is that the writer shows by simile the similarity of two things that were previously not connected:

Simile:
She sprang up like a jack-in-the-box when the doorbell rang.

We identify a jack-in-the-box popping up with suddenness, but if it said “She sprang up suddenly,” we’d lose the savor of the comparison.

In a metaphor, a word or phrase is applied to something that is figuratively rather than literally similar. This figure of speech results when words or phrases are brought together that do not ordinarily belong together, yet by their proximity convey a fresh meaning:

Metaphor:
His bicycle had wings.

The bicycle was going so fast it seemed like a bird in flight or it was pedaled with élan as if it were airborne.

As we’ve seen earlier, some of the best novel titles are metaphors.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
We easily recognize the truth of such analogies.

In commercial fiction, the author often uses top-of-the-head similes and metaphors:

Simile:
He felt like a million dollars.

Metaphor:
It was food for thought.

Those examples are clichés, tired from overuse. Most good writing is characterized by a careful use of precise and sometimes original similes and metaphors:

Simile:
He felt as if he were a teenager for whom illness and death were abstractions.

Metaphor:
The thought hovered over him, waiting for his permission to descend.

One of the hazards is, of course, the mixed metaphor, in which two or more unrelated metaphors are unsuccessfully combined:

He was dog tired but still feeling his oats.

Nanci Kincaid knows how to pick the right metaphor for her barefoot youngsters:

“Melvina’s wild boys were all just barefoot as the day is long. Not wearing shirts, most of them. Just raggedy shorts and
bulletproof
feet ...”

“Bulletproof feet” is a striking metaphor, the boys walking around in bare feet as if nothing on the ground could harm them.

My students know that I am fond of quoting similes and metaphors from one of John Cheever’s best stories, “The Country Husband.” The first is an extravagant simile:

The living room was spacious and divided like Gaul into three parts.

The next simile is both accurate and original:

Francis limited herself to two week-night parties, putting a flexible interpretation on Friday, and rode through the weekend like a dory in a gale.

Cheever uses metaphor to set a mood:

The sky was overcast, and poured down onto the dirt crossroads a very discouraging light.

Metaphors can enhance nonfiction also. Witness:

In some cases, generally around public buildings like the White House and State Department, the protective cordon was Saran-Wrap tight.

One of my favorite metaphors was spoken by Clive James in his television series
Fame.

Hirohito was a 15 watt bulb.

That metaphor is worth examining. It’s a long stretch from the Emperor of Japan to a light bulb, but it sure makes its point instantly.

I’ve suggested that you check your manuscript for similes and metaphors that strain too much. I’ll add to that. In examining your work, can you find spots of “bare bones” writing that could be improved by a simile or metaphor that you hadn’t thought of when you were getting your early draft onto paper?

Increasing the Effect on the Reader Through Resonance

R
esonance
is a term borrowed from the world of music, where it means a prolonged response attributable to vibration. In writing it has come to mean an aura of significance beyond the components of a story. Resonance can come from biblical associations. “Call me Ishmael” instantly reverberates at the opening of
Moby Dick.
In this chapter I show the many ways in which resonance can be produced—by names, by reference to religious sources, by invoking life and death, by a bold conclusion, by hyperbole, by naming the parts of a book, by the use of aphorisms and epigraphs, and ideally from the writing itself, by the writer’s skillful use of similes and metaphors. Examples are drawn from important twentieth-century writers of both nonfiction and fiction.

Writers who recognize resonance when they encounter it sometimes still have difficulty in providing reverberations in their own work. Help is on the way. Let’s examine the ways of producing resonance through their sources.

We have seen how the opening words of
Moby Dick,
“Call me Ishmael,” have instant resonance because of the biblical associations of Ishmael. The same would be true of other memorable names from the Bible, whether used for characters or in appropriate phrases.

Some commercial fiction has derived resonance from the use of public or historical characters. Put an Eisenhower or a Kennedy into a story, and it resonates, especially if he appears fleetingly. I say “fleetingly” because most writers who try to reproduce historical characters at length, including their dialogue, usually fail. It’s an area where a near miss is like taking just one misstep off a cliff’s edge. Jack Higgins’s career zoomed when he began using historical characters briefly in his thrillers.

By Referring to other religious sources.
Evan Hunter, who writes also under the name of Ed McBain, is a superb craftsman. His novel
Vespers
draws some resonance from its title, but I would urge you to read at least the first four and a half pages of that book to see how liturgy lends stunning resonance to a scene that involves a killing.

By Invoking death.
In T. Correghessan Boyle’s 1987 novel
World’s End
the author lends importance to a day by the use of a metaphor drawing on the possibility of the death of the earth:

The day was typical of April in the vale of the Hudson—raw and drizzling, the earth exhaling vapor as if it were breathing its last.

In the last of his Rabbit Angstrom books,
Rabbit at Rest,
John Updike invokes his protagonist’s death at the outset:

Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what’s floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane.

By a bold conclusion.
To see how V. S. Naipaul, one of the outstanding writers in the English language in our time, uses a bold philosophical statement to lend resonance to the opening of his novel
A Bend in the River,
let us look at the second sentence first:

Nazruddin, who had sold me the shop cheap, didn’t think I would have it easy when I took over.

No resonance. But that sentence is preceded by this one:

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

That first sentence lends resonance to the sentence and paragraphs that follow, perhaps to the book as a whole.

By Invoking a setting that has greatly influenced the life of a person.
Some writers of biography will describe the subject’s birthplace in detail, but miss an opportunity for resonance. Bertram Wolfe begins his
biography
The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera
with a setting that goes a long way toward explaining a source of Rivera’s work:

Guanajuato is flooded with light. The sun beats down with brilliant intensity upon its flat-roofed houses, fills with purple darkness their windows and doorways, gives bulk to solid forms, draws clean the line that separates surrounding hills from light-drenched sky. The valley in which the city dozes is seven thousand feet above the sea. Narrow cobblestone streets circle through the old center, then begin to climb into the hills. At the outskirts trees become discouraged; ridges rise bare and brown into a sky deep, remote, free from haze, standing out sharp against the light-filled emptiness of space.

He whose eyes have been nourished on these clear forms, solid volumes, and light-filled space will never be altogether at home in the pale yellow sunlight and soft outlines of Paris treetops and towers, where the light is diffused by haze that forever hints of rain. A boy born here may get lost for a while in the Paris fashions of his day and experiment inadequately with fugitive flecks of light and blurring washes of haze in which outlines waver, planes merge, and objects lose their volume; but he can never really find himself as a painter until he has rediscovered the strongly defined forms, pure colors, clear atmosphere, and omnipresent flood of light that gives solidity to all the objects it illumines without seeming itself to appear upon the scene at all.

You can imagine how I felt editing line by line a writer who used resonance to give the reader pleasure and instruction simultaneously the way Wolfe does.

By Hyperbole.
A hyperbole is, of course, an exaggeration that is not meant to be taken literally. For the novelist, it presents an opportunity to lend resonance to what might otherwise seem ordinary. Here is Rebecca West’s opening of
The Fountain Overflows:

There was such a long pause that I wondered whether my Mamma and my Papa were ever going to speak to each other again.

By the end of the first paragraph, Papa is apologizing to Mamma, but the perception by the child narrator of a pause that seems terminal has magnified the importance of the moment of silence. For children, a pin drop of tension between parents can resonate like a thunderstorm.

By Naming the parts of a book.
Omens are important in seeding suspense. The prolific British novelist Francis King lists five parts for his novel
Act of Darkness.
The first is titled simply “Omens.” It lends a touch of resonance even before the reader encounters the first sentence.

A greater value can be derived from naming chapters in nonfiction. Orville Schell’s 1994 book on China,
Mandate of Heaven,
has some chapter titles that invoke resonance twice, in the table of contents, and at the heads of chapters:

“A Hundred Flowers Fade” evokes its familiar opposite, A Hundred Flowers Bloom.

“The Graying of Chinese Culture” derives its effect through a metaphor that resonates.

“Shanghai on Commercial Fire” also uses metaphor to resonate.

By the thoughts and speech of a character.
In
The Blue Afternoon,
a remarkable and highly praised novel by William Boyd, an early section is narrated by a character named Kay Fischer, an architect. She speaks in the first person. At one point, she says:

In architecture, as in art, the more you reduce, the more exacting your standards must be. The more you strip down and eliminate, the greater the pressure, the import, on what remains. If a room is only to have one door and one window, then those two openings must conform
exactly
to the volume of space contained between the four walls, the floor and the ceiling.

My aesthetic mentor, my inspiration, in all this was the German architect Oscar Kranewitter (1891-1929). He was a friend of Gropius and like him was heavily influenced by the austere ideologies of Johannes Itten.

The reader absolutely believes that this narrator, Kay Fischer, is an architect. She is, of course, an invention of the author. Her thoughts about architecture provide the resonance that confirms her reality.

Many years ago I invented a character called Dr. Gunther Koch, a foreign-born psychiatrist. In
The Magician
I had him assert his theory of the three categories of people, those who set their own goals, those who are followers content to obey instructions, and those who burn with frustration because they refuse to follow, can’t lead, and don’t know what they want. When the book first appeared, I heard from psychiatrists who asked to be referred to the professional literature in which I had found that theory. I hadn’t found it. I invented Dr. Koch’s theory as resonance to authenticate Dr. Koch and his profession. In commercial fiction today, technobabble is used in a similar way. One of my students, a noted inventor, confirms that what writers do in these instances is the same as what inventors do, though the writer’s inventions only need to seem to work.

By the use of Aphorisms.
I can’t recommend aphorisms as a technique for everyone, though my penchant for their creation has given me much pleasure. I use aphorisms in my characters’ dialogue. Here are a few examples from
The Best Revenge
as spoken by Louie, a character who is dead when the book begins, which hasn’t stopped him from rendering advice:

“Of course the Bible was written by sinners. How else would they know?”

“Experience is what enables you to have a guilty conscience when you do something you know is wrong because you’ve done it before.”

“If you think something is a coincidence you don’t know how God works. Pay attention, He doesn’t have time to give you private lessons.”

“The best way to move is like a duck, calm on the surface, paddling like hell underneath.”

“Save your breath. It’s the Devil who negotiates. God never made a deal with nobody.”

There are two points to remember about the use of aphorisms: If they are in the author’s voice, the point of view has to be either the third-person or the omniscient author’s point of view, not the first-person point of view of a character. If they are in a character’s dialogue, as in the case of Louie, you had better be sure the character you’ve created is the kind who could and would spout aphorisms on occasion.

By the use of Epigraphs.
While aphorisms are your own, epigraphs can be other people’s aphorisms and thoughts that lend a touch of resonance to your work. An appropriate epigraph can convey the larger import of a novel, without the novel itself becoming didactic. For instance, in
The Magician
I used two epigraphs, one short, one long, both about the true subject matter of the novelist, human nature, and designed to lend resonance to the story even before it begins.

The sources for epigraphs are many. There are quite a few collections of quotations on the market, with
Familiar Quotations
by John Bartlett, now updated by Justin Kaplan, the best known. There are also quotation collections available in software. If you haven’t used the collections in book form previously, I would suggest a trip to your local library. Browse through Bartlett and any others they might have on hand. If you take to the experience, you might invest in buying a book of quotations. I’ve found that browsing for possible epigraphs can sometimes provide additional reward in the paths it opens in a work-in-progress.

Occasionally a book will seem to be buying resonance insurance. William Styron, an admirable novelist, prefaces
The Confessions of Nat Turner
with:

1. An “Author’s Note” in which Styron briefly relates the historical background for his novel.
   
2. A three-page preface to a public document, a pamphlet published in Richmond in 1832, with the same title as Styron’s novel.
   
3. A part title, “Judgment Day.”
   
4. A five-line epigraph.
   

An excess of preliminaries might be interpreted as defensive. Don’t overdo it.

The ideal resonance comes from the writing itself.
Brooklyn-born Bertram D. Wolfe, whose biography of Diego Rivera was quoted from earlier, was a master of language who never wrote a word of fiction, but I have on occasion shown exemplary passages of his work to novelists for their instructive value. Here is how Wolfe began his masterpiece,
Three Who Made a Revolution:

The great Eurasian Plain opposes few obstacles to frost and wind and drought, to migrant hordes and marching armies. In earlier centuries the plain was dominated by vast Asiatic empires, Iranian, Turkish, Mongolian. As the last of these melted away, Moscovy expanded to take their place, expanded steadily through several centuries until it became the largest continuous land empire in the world. Like the tide over limitless flats, it spread with elemental force over an endless stretch of forest and steppe, sparsely settled
by backward and nomadic peoples. Wherever it met resistance, it would pause as the tide does to gather head, then resume its inexorable advance. Only at the distant margins does the plateau end in great mountain barriers: the snowy summits of the Caucasus; the Pamirs, roof of the world—where two of our three protagonists have peaks named in their honor, thrusting up over four miles each into the sky; the Altai, Sayan and Stanovoi mountains forming China’s natural wall. How could a people not be great and not aspire to greatness, whose horizon was an unlimited as this Eurasian Plain?