Spunk & Bite Read online

  Here, for example, are a few compelling sentences from two books full of them:

  And so she tuned out the tour guide and heeded the October angle of the yellow light, the heart-mangling intensity of the season. In the wind pushing waves across the bay she could smell night’s approach. (—Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections)

  Once, he’d seen, through the bedroom window, a tree come shockingly into bloom. Its leaves had been bluish gray, and on that day it had given birth to an explosion of small yellow puffy balls as big as marbles, thousands upon thousands of them all at once, so that almost instantly a lemon-colored haze had filled the room. (—Anita Shreve, The Last Time They Met)

  SORTING OUT THE PEANUTS

  Bad things happen when we unload our jam-packed thoughts like a box of Styrofoam peanuts. The box is emptied, and ah, that feels good for a moment. But the contents are all over the place. Controlled sentences—take a deep breath here—deliver precise language in an emphatic arrangement based on logic, economy and clarity, all to engage the reader. (Exhale.)

  These are the qualities we seek in a polished sentence. How do we achieve them? We can begin by tuning in to our instincts as readers. We would not be writing if, as readers, we had not been stirred by good sentences and irritated by poor ones. We know the difference. We believe, as language critic Wilson Follett did, that “no one should ever be called on to read a sentence twice because of the way it is constructed.”

  When it comes to sentence repair, we can lean on certain structural frameworks associated with g-g-grammar—but let’s not tense up at the G-word. We needn’t understand retained objective complements to fix most problems. Just by putting a skilled reader’s ear to our drafts, we’ll be able to tell whether a sentence

  • strikes like a cobra, or strangles its parts boa-like;

  • swings open and clicks closed, or feels unhinged;

  • has parts that interlock, or that fly off in different directions;

  • is dramatic in its simplicity, or monotonously devoid of texture; or if it

  • soars on the wings of imagery, or collapses under its own mass.

  Read your key sentences aloud. Does your intent, your emphasis, come across? If not, what detracts from it? A weak verb? A clause too many? Related elements placed too far apart? Notice the sound quality of your words, and whether they fit your intent. Fine-tune the rhythms to your ear’s delight, using soft pauses (commas), harder pauses (dashes, semicolons, colons), and variety in sentence length and complexity.

  Pay attention long enough, and you’ll be the Mozart of sentence structure, impishly celebrating one triumph after another.

  A SENTENCE MAKER’S MANTRA

  I have a mantra for writers who let poor sentences pile up like bad credit accounts. As you sit down to write, try this chant: “When bad things happen to my sentences, I will take control.”

  Trouble begins when unstructured word clusters get dumped from brain to page. It would be nice if they assembled themselves into tight sentences, or even into stream-of-consciousness prose. But these brainloads are like ideas churning in a cement mixer; out they come to glop up our sentences. They distort what we intend to emphasize, even if some meaning manages to trickle through.

  Yes, we need to get sentences—any sentences—into a first draft. The trick is not to fall in love with their problems, not to consider them natural and inviolable expressions of the soul.

  Are we calling for a Strunk-and-White-style crackdown on inspired outbursts? No. We say go with the outbursts, but control the problems that cause them to implode. Some writers attempt the prose equivalents of Jackson Pollock paintings—brain droppings from a ladder, so to speak. The few who succeed compose their sentence splatters in ways that direct attention and sustain interest—even the interest of editors.

  * * *

  YOU BE THE EDITOR: GOOD WRITERS, FLAWED SENTENCES

  Here, from six good books by distinguished authors, I’ve culled six sentences I consider faulty, even when read in context. Can you tell how each one distorts the author’s intended emphasis, or forfeits the reader’s engagement? Some of these sentences should have been rewritten as two or more, some made into confetti.

  • She killed a man, he was only thirty-two.” (—Janet Fitch, White Oleander)

  • “That in the belief that a woman had to be beautiful, and sensuous, and witty, and wonderful, in order to trigger real love, erotic love, the kind of emotional drama that ran through to the heart of the universe, the hot line to the source of love itself, the in-love kind, Alexandra had been wrong.” (—Fay Weldon, Worst Fears)

  • “What his private hopes for her had been she did not know and so could not read if he was reconciled or relieved but either way she knew he was engaged now in an action called for not so much by the fact of her as by some theory of conduct, a notion of comportment.” (—Jeffrey Lent, In the Fall)

  • “I spent a frantic couple of hours pacing in my room—that is, I’d come to think of it as ‘mine’ but it wasn’t really, I had to be out in three weeks, already it seemed to be assuming a heartless air of impersonality—and drafting a memo to the financial aid office.” (—Donna Tartt, The Secret History)

  • “Days to come they rode through the mountains and they crossed at a barren windgap and sat the horses among the rocks and looked out over the country to the south where the last shadows were running over the land before the wind and the sun to the west lay blood red among the shelving clouds and the distant cordilleras ranged down the terminals of the sky to fade from pale to pale of blue and then to nothing at all.” (—Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses)

  • “The issue of the relevance of the truth-value of the beliefs that a poem expresses faces in two directions: towards the poet and towards the reader.” (—Malcolm Budd, Values of Art)

  * * *

  COMMON FLAWS AND FIXES

  What follows are a dozen sentences that need some help. For each, I’ve suggested fixes that would normally apply. When would they not apply? When the sentence—warts, wildness, and all—nonetheless achieves some compelling aesthetic effect. Dextrous writers like David Foster Wallace, for example, can get away with section-opening sentences like this:

  The sudden strength with which the desire to go see whether the initials I’d carved so long ago in the wood of the stall in the men’s room of the Art Building were still there, the sudden and unexpected and overwhelming strength with which these feelings had washed over me, there at the dormitory, with Lenore, was a frightening thing. (—The Broom of the System)

  Often the sheer power of image, of idea, can trump grammatical or structural conventions. Such power, however, can also work within the conventions—which themselves serve emphasis and reader-engagement.

  But now for the promised clunkers. They illustrate twelve common problems in flawed writing, with suggested fixes for each:

  BROKEN HINGE: She asked everyone for the meaning of life, who could answer?

  FIX: A comma is a soft pause, not a stop or a gate between statements. Insert hinge words like and, but, or yet, or use a semicolon instead: She asked everyone for the meaning of life, but who could answer? or She asked everyone for the meaning of life; who could answer?

  DELAYED ACTION: Ibrahim could not, in spite of all his training, knowing that the platoon depended on him, even with the armed and hated enemy in his cross-hairs, fire.

  FIX: Delayed (or “periodic”) sentences—in which the verb and subject are placed far apart—can be suspenseful, but too often they shoot themselves in the foot. Keep the verb near its subject: Ibrahim could not fire, in spite of all his training . . .

  DULL VERBS: There were loud cries by the customers for more Krispy Kremes.

  FIX: When the advantage is clear, get rid of dull there-are constructions and let subjects act through live verbs: The customers bellowed for more Krispy Kremes.

  ACTIONLESS ACTION: She had a yellow forked tongue. Its papillae were poisonous.

  FIX: T
o have and to be are actionless verbs; use stronger ones: Her tongue unraveled, yellow and forked. Poison oozed from its papillae.

  OVERCROWDING: He mowed the lawn, ran into the house, answered the phone, listened as his wife yelled and the dog scratched on the door, made a chicken sandwich, stopped thinking about what his son had said to him yesterday, and opened a beer.

  FIX: If all that action seems hard to absorb, break up the sentence into smaller ones. Some teachers cite an odd “rule of three,” which says that no more than three actions should occupy the same sentence. But often a long string of actions projects a feeling—a buildup of stress, an escalating madness. Had the last phrase above been and shot himself, all that buildup would have made sense, and we’d have had a fine emphatic sentence—if a weepy one.

  MODIFIER OUT ON A LIMB: Having climbed that tree so long ago, her memories flooded in as she touched the bark.

  FIX: Make sure all verb forms refer to the intended subject: Having climbed that tree so long ago, she touched the bark and let the memories flood in. (For more on this problem, see Chapter 25.)

  SUBJECT/VERB DISAGREEMENT: One out of every four women of that village—or maybe five—get married.

  FIX: Be sure the verb finds its intended subject-mate and agrees with it in number: One out of every four women of that village—or maybe five—gets married.

  DEADLY PASSIVE VOICE: The body was discovered in the library; later an identification was done.

  FIX: Punch up interest by revealing who performed the action, making the actor (rather than what was acted upon) the subject: A homeless woman discovered the body in the library; later the victim’s fiancee identified it.

  PUNCH LINE GIVEAWAY: The reference librarian, of all people, murdered the victim.

  FIX: Sometimes a passive construction (where the receiver of the action is the subject) can generate more drama than an active one by holding revelations until the end of the sentence: The victim was murdered by, of all people, the reference librarian.

  NEGATIVE STRUCTURE: Because the publisher did not act decisively, the book was not in any position to succeed in the chains.

  FIX: Rewrite dull sentences built around not or other negatives to allow for strong verbs in the positive voice: Because the publisher waffled, the book crash-landed in the chains.

  WORD INFESTATION: She was of the inclination that devotion to love in and of itself was all one could ever favor, without any sort of compromise.

  FIX: Eliminate emphasis-eating verbiage: She favored uncompromising devotion to love.

  SUBJECT BLOAT: The thought that he had gained ninety pounds and was no longer the athlete that had attracted her, that she’d had to cut his toenails because he could no longer reach them, that he had lost interest in everything but feeding his face, if one could still call it a face, somehow cheered him.

  FIX: A sentence’s emphasis can turn on a key verb. Don’t make readers slog through an endless subject to reach it: It somehow cheered him, the thought that . . .

  Of course, the walls of every Composition 201 classroom echo with these types of reminders; and if those walls could write, they’d be something, wouldn’t they? But for us itinerant word merchants, hauling sentences along the paths of corruption, every turn seems to present a new challenge. All we can do is plod ahead, chanting our mantra—and perhaps these words of Ralph Waldo Emerson:

  The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

  (—Journals, 1834)

  Contemporaneity

  A LEG UP ON THE COMPETITION

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  WRITING FOR NEW GENERATIONS

  Writers—get with it! Are you reaching all those generations out there? The Boomers? The Xers? The Gen-Yers or Echo Boomers or Screenagers, or whatever they’re called? And don’t forget—Generation Z has arrived, albeit mostly in diapers. The wee Zers may not catch all your nuances; but soon they’ll be the generation du jour, and you can’t afford to be, gasp, Generation Yesterday!

  See how the X-Y-Zs torment us? How the writer’s world grows crazier? Is it history or hype that launches a new generation every five minutes? Must today’s writer bust a gut playing to Pepsi’s so-called Generation Next, speaking its language, dancing to its beat?

  When publishers seek writers who “speak to” or “speak for” a generation, they usually mean the generation now shelling out dollars to discover itself—not your father’s generation, and possibly not your own. In many publishing warrens at this writing, editors from the 50-million-strong Generation X (now in their late twenties to mid-forties) are chasing the 80 million Generation Yers (preteens to those in their mid-twenties), including some 41 million mall rats spending $180 billion a year.

  Desperate to capture a share of this demographic’s attention, editors look for steroidal syntax, street voice, prose with a ’tude. Television producers seek “high-octane,” high-adrenaline reality programming, consigning scriptwriters over thirty to Jurassic pastures. According to Salon, newspapers are wording down to young audiences, believing they “do nothing but go to movies every night.” And juvenile publishers, reaching for young Yers and upcoming Zers, have embraced such kid-pleasing phenomena as manga, Japanese comic book novels. Seeing this and other shifts to graphic literature, writers are suffering from nightmares in the shape of thought balloons.

  Meanwhile, conventional writing wisdom urges us to stay calm, write within ourselves, and not chase fashions. It says to watch out for generational labels, however hot. It warns against generational stereotypes. And it counsels that assuming the communications style of a younger generation, except in dialogue, is likely to ring false.

  Yet, who can ignore audience? Who can snub 80 million potential readers, their frames of reference, values, passions and sensibilities?

  Even Cynthia Ozick, who feels that computers stunt writing skills and that e-mail tends toward “grunts,” loosened up her style for the online Slate: “I was writing for Slate, and you write for your audience,” she told The New York Times. Not that Ozick was writing hip-hop; but like all writers, like all editors, she had to consider the changing face of the modern reader and how (or whether) to relate to it.

  * * *

  GENERATIONS: A POCKET GUIDE

  NAME: Boomers

  DEFINITIONS AND COUNT: Born 1946–64; approximately 72–78 million

  OTHER NAMES: Baby Boomers, Flower Children, Love Generation, Woodstock Generation

  GREW UP: In the post-WWII age of innocence; later, in the era of counterculture, Vietnam, Dr. Benjamin Spock, suburbs, network TV, rock music, Star Trek, the Beatles, feminism, and the sexual revolution.

  STEREOTYPED AS: Socially conscious, idealistic, politically apathetic, suspicious, self-analyzing, complaining.

  SOUND BITE: “Dig the spirit of the struggle. Don’t get hung up on the sacrifice trip. Revolution is not about suicide, it is about life. With your fingers probe the holiness of your body and see that it was meant to live.” (—Abbie Hoffman, Steal this Book, 1971)

  NAME: Generation X

  Definitions and count: Generation following the Boomers. Born 1961–81; 44–50 million.

  OTHER NAMES: Gen Xers, Slackers, Me Generation, Baby Busters, Yuppies, 13th Generation (of the U.S.).

  GREW UP: On MTV, grunge music, punk rock, skateboarding culture, computers, Watergate, economic boom, and relative peace (except for the Gulf War).

  STEREOTYPED AS: Hedonistic, socially and politically disengaged, overeducated and unemployed, job-changing, media-savvy, culturally exhausted, cynical, entrepreneurial, flip, and irreverent.

  SOUND BITES: Did someone say “struggle,” or were they choking on their sushi? (Bada-boom!) Yeah, cool, whatever. Hey, sacrifice rocks . . . Not! Revolution? I’m still living with my parents. Fetch the remote, dude, we’re missing Seinfeld reruns.

  NAME: Generation X

  DEFINITION AND COUNT: Born lat
e 1970s to mid-1990s (children of some Boomers); roughly 80 million, with about 30 million teens; racially diverse

  OTHER NAMES: Gen Yers, Echo Boomers, Millennium Generation, Ritalin Generation, Screenagers, Internet Generation

  GREW UP: On coddling parental care and computers; and later, on the Internet, Ren & Stimpy, Beavis & Butthead, video games, O. J., Monica, Valley talk, rap music, and hip-hop.

  STEREOTYPED AS: Warp-speed fast on the uptake, digitally fixated, optimistic, spoiled and arrogant, impatient, multitasking, high-maintenance, materialistic, fickle, sarcastic, high on humor and irony.