Writing Tools (11 page)

The writer's interest in names extends beyond person and place to things. Roald Dahl, who would gain fame for writing the novel
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
remembers his childhood in sweet shops craving such delights as "Bull's-eyes and Old Fashioned Humbugs and Strawberry Bonbons and Glacier Mints and Acid Drops and Pear Drops and Lemon Drops.... My own favourites were Sherbet Suckers and Liquorice Bootlaces." Not to mention the "Gobstoppers" and "Tonsil Ticklers."

For poet Donald Hall, it is not candies but another delicacy of names that captures his imagination in the hilarious ode "O Cheese":

In the pantry the dear dense cheeses, Cheddars and harsh Lancashires; Gorgonzola with its magnanimous manner; the clipped speech of Roquefort; and a head of Stilton that speaks in a sensuous riddling tongue like Druids.

It's hard to think of a writer with more interest in names than Vladimir Nabokov. Perhaps because he wrote in both Russian and English — and had a scientific interest in butterflies — Nabokov dissected words and images, looking for the deeper levels of meaning. His greatest antihero, Humbert Humbert, begins the narration of
Lolita
with this memorable passage:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

In this great and scandalous novel, Nabokov includes an alphabetical listing of Lolita's classmates, beginning with Grace Angel and concluding with Louise Windmuller. The novel becomes a virtual gazetteer of American place names, from the way we name our motels: "all those Sunset Motels, U-Beam Cottages, Hillcrest Courts, Pine View Courts, Mountain View Courts, Skyline Courts, Park Plaza Courts, Green Acres, Mac's Courts," to the funny names attached to roadside toilets: "Guys-Gals, John-Jane, Jack-Jill and even Buck's-Doe's."

What's in a name? For the attentive writer, and the eager reader, the answer can be fun, insight, charm, aura, character, identity, psychosis, fulfillment, inheritance, decorum, indiscretion, and possession. For in some cultures, if I know your name and can speak it, I own your soul.

WORKSHOP

1. In the Judeo-Christian story of creation, God grants mankind a special power over other creatures: "When the Lord God formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, he brought them to the man to see what he would call them, for that which man called each of them, that would be its name." Have a conversation about the larger religious and cultural implications of naming, including ceremonies of naming such as birth, baptism, conversion, and marriage. Don't forget nicknames, street names, stage names, and pen names. What are the practical implications of naming for writers?

2. J. K. Rowling, the popular author of the Harry Potter series, has a gift for naming. Think of her heroes: Albus Dumble-dore, Sirius Black, and Hermione Granger. And her villains: Draco Malfoy and his henchmen Crabbe and Goyle. Read one of the Harry Potter novels, paying special attention to the book's universe of names.

3. In a daybook, keep a record of interesting character and place names you discover in your community.

4. The next time you research a piece of writing, interview an expert who can reveal to you the names of things you do not know: flowers in a garden, parts of an engine, branches of a family tree, breeds of cats. Imagine ways to use such names in your story.

The mayor wants to rebuild a dilapidated downtown but will not reveal the details of his plan. You write, "He's playing his cards close to his vest." You have written a cliche, a worn-out metaphor, this one from the world of poker, of course. The mayor's adversaries crave a peek at his hand. Whoever used this metaphor first wrote something fresh, but with overuse it became familiar — and stale.

"Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print," writes George Orwell in "Politics and the English Language." Using cliches, he argues, is a substitute for thinking, a form of automatic writing: "Prose consists less and less of
words
chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of
phrases
tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house." That last phrase is a fresh image, a model of originality.

The language of the people we write about threatens the good writer at every turn. Nowhere is this truer than in the world of sports. A postgame interview with almost any athlete in any sport produces a quilt of cliches:

"We fought hard."

"We stepped up."

"We just tried to have some fun."

"We'll play it one game at a time."

It's a miracle that the best sports writers have always been so original. Consider this description by Red Smith of one of baseball's most famous pitchers:

This was Easter Sunday, 1937, in Vicksburg, Miss. A thick-muscled kid, rather jowly, with a deep dimple in his chin, slouched out to warm up for the Indians in an exhibition game with the Giants. He had heavy shoulders and big bones and a plowboy's lumbering gait. His name was Bob Feller and everybody had heard about him.

So what is the original writer to do? When tempted by a tired phrase, such as "white as snow," stop writing. Take what the practitioners of natural childbirth call a
cleansing breath.
Then jot down the old phrase on a piece of paper. Start scribbling alternatives:

white as snow

white as Snow White

snowy white

gray as city snow

gray as the London sky

white as the Queen of England

Saul Pett, a reporter known for his style, once told me that he created and rejected more than a dozen images before brainstorming led him to the right one. Such duty to craft should inspire us, but the strain of such effort can be discouraging. Under pressure, write it straight: "The mayor is keeping his plans secret." If you fall back on the cliche, make sure there are no other cliches nearby.

More deadly than cliches of language are what Donald Murray calls "cliches of vision," the narrow frames through which writers learn to see the world. In
Writing to Deadline,
Murray lists common blind spots: victims are always innocent, bureaucrats are lazy, politicians are corrupt, it's lonely at the top, the suburbs are boring.

I have described one cliche of vision as
first-level creativity.
It's impossible, for example, to survive a week of American news without running into the phrase "but the dream became a nightmare." This frame is so pervasive it can be applied to almost any story: the golfer who shoots 33 on the front nine, but 44 on the back; the company CEO jailed for fraud; the woman who suffers from botched plastic surgery. Writers who reach the first level of creativity think they are clever. In fact, they settle for the ordinary, that dramatic or humorous place any writer can reach with minimal effort.

I remember the true story of a Florida man who, walking home for lunch, fell into a ditch occupied by an alligator. The gator bit into the man, who was rescued by firefighters. In a writing workshop, I gave writers a fact sheet from which they wrote five leads for this story in five minutes. Some leads were straight and newsy, others nifty and distinctive, but almost everyone in the room, including me, had this version of a lead sentence: "When Robert Hudson headed home for lunch Thursday, little did he know that he'd become the meal." We agreed that if thirty of us had landed on the same bit of humor, it must be obvious: first-level creativity. We discovered the next level in a lead that read, "Perhaps to a ten-foot alligator, Robert Hudson tastes like chicken." We also agreed that we preferred straight writing to the first pun that came to mind. What value is there in the story of a renegade rooster that falls back on "foul play," or, even worse, "fowl play"?

Fresh language blows a cool breeze through the reader. Think, for example, of all the religious cliches you've encountered about the nature of prayer and compare them to this paragraph by Anne Lamott, from her book
Traveling Mercies:

Here are the two best prayers I know: "Help me, help me, help me," and "Thank you, thank you, thank you." A woman I know says, for her morning prayer, "Whatever," and then for the evening, "Oh, well," but has conceded that these prayers are more palatable for people without children.

This passage teaches us that originality need not be a burden. A simple shift of context turns the most common and overused expression ("Whatever" or "Oh, well") into a pointed incantation.

WORKSHOP

1. Read today's newspaper with pencil in hand, and circle any phrase you are used to seeing in print.

2. Do the same with your own work. Circle the cliches and tired phrases. Revise them with straight writing or original images.

3. Brainstorm alternatives to these common similes: red as a rose, white as snow, blue as the sky, cold as ice, hot as hell, hungry as a wolf.

4. Reread some passages from your favorite writer. Can you find any cliches? Circle the most original and vivid images.

The day after the vice presidential debate of 2004,1 read a clever phrase that contrasted the appearance and styles of the two candidates. Attributed to radio host Don Imus, it described the differences between "Dr. Doom and the Breck Girl." Of course, the dour Dick Cheney was Dr. Doom, and, because of his handsome hair, John Edwards was likened to a pretty girl in a shampoo ad.

By the end of the day, a number of commentators had riffed on this phrase.
(Riff is
a term from jazz used to describe a form of improvisation in which one musician borrows and builds on the musical phrase of another.) The original Imus phrase morphed into "Shrek versus Breck," that is, the ogre versus the hair model.

What followed was a conversation with my witty colleague Scott Libin, who was writing an analysis of the language of political debates. The two of us riffed on the popular distinctions between the two candidates. "Cheney is often described as 'avuncular,' " said Scott. The word means "like an uncle." "Last night he looked more carbuncular than avuncular," I responded, like an angry boil ready to pop.

Like two musicians, Scott and I began to offer variations on our improvisations. Before long, Cheney versus Edwards became:

Dr. No versus Mister Glow Cold Stare versus Good Hair Pissed Off versus Well Coiffed

I first suggested Gravitas versus Levitas, gravity versus levity, but Edwards is more toothsome than humorous, so I ventured: Gravitas versus Dental Floss.

Writers collect sharp phrases and colorful metaphors, sometimes for use in their conversation, and sometimes for adaptation into their prose. The danger, of course, is plagiarism, kidnapping the creative work of other writers. No one wants to be known as the Milton Berle of wordsmiths, the stealer of others' best material.

The harmonic way is through the riff. Almost all inventions come out of the associative imagination, the ability to take what is already known and apply it as metaphor to the new. Thomas Edison solved a problem in the flow of electricity by thinking of the flow of water in a Roman aqueduct. Think of how many words have been adapted from old technologies to describe tools of new media: we file, we browse, we surf, we link, we scroll, just to name a few.