Part 15 (2/2)
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 Carre: ”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 cla.s.sics 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. n.o.body else in the world laughed like that.
The temptation is always to use either a cliche or a generalization, what I call ”top-of-the-head writing.” In this chapter we are trying to fas.h.i.+on 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 s.h.i.+rt.
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 st.i.tched cut that ran from his right cheek straight down into the collar of his s.h.i.+rt.
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 pa.s.sage 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 cliche would have been ”Pickpockets wait until the last second.” Instead, the journalist avoided the cliche 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 Ca.n.a.l, some fifty meters from the swing bridge crossing the ca.n.a.l. Lt. Den Brotheridge, leading the twenty-eight men of the first platoon, D Company, the Oxfords.h.i.+re and Buckinghams.h.i.+re 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.
Note the particularity with which Ambrose engages the reader. Particularity is not only the essence of fine writing, it is sometimes rewarded by the grat.i.tude of reviewers and readers, who can make bestsellers and cla.s.sics of books whose authors pay attention to detail and the precise meaning of words.
A book can be said to be an acc.u.mulation 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 b.u.mped 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 b.u.mped 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 cliches. Many of us think of cliches as something we learned all about in school. The fact is that some of the best-educated writers fall back on cliches 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 a.n.a.logy, 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.
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