Spunk & Bite Read online

  Amis, of course, lives in the literary world, that particularly lethal corner of the murderous universe. Here, too, every inch seems determined to kill—in this case, aspiring writers; tens of thousands of writers, all shooting for the stars, most of them careening back to earth, egos charred if not vaporized.

  Take away the novas occupied by celebrity and brand-name authors, by troubadours of the sensational and schlocky, and the universe can be very dark indeed for writers. See them wandering in the void: writing-program grads with promising portfolios; bloggers pouring out their souls to phantom readers; journalers laboring in the interstices between kids and sleep. So many writers. So many good writers. So few places in the stingy publishing firmament.

  And yet, hallowed places are reserved for writers possessed of just two assets: something remarkable to say to a paying crowd, and the language—the expressive style—to leave competing writers in the cosmic dust.

  But does language still matter in this supposedly dumbed-down world? Of course it does. It will matter until people stop using words to symbolize everything that stimulates them. Brilliant language, however, matters less in writing if you happen to be, say, an author named Donald Trump, or if you’ve chewed off a limb to escape enemy captors and lived to tell about it, or if your miracle diet has diminished someone’s celebrated booty.

  Also, if theme, plot, or characterization propels your fiction beyond the Van Allen Belt, then perhaps language and style can simply tag along for the ride. But in the history of storytelling, has anything roused souls and stirred juices more than the well-chosen word? Almost always, you will rise above the crowd, or be lost in it, based on how you use language.

  RISING FROM THE SLUSH

  Most editors become editors because of a special infatuation with language. As they review manuscripts and proposals, they must first consider theme (or topic) and its appeal to an audience, and then how well that theme is treated. But the themes they see, submitted time after time, can be categorized within several weary types. And while a number of the treatments are competent, they, too, take on a certain sameness after a while. Heads will jerk up at novel themes or concussively fresh approaches, but these are rare.

  More reliably, all else being equal, the masterly, distinctive use of language lifts an editor’s (or agent’s) heart. It means that the writing, as is, will please critics; that it will deliver on a promise to readers. Exciting language can elevate manuscripts from the slush heaps to that rarefied level known as “serious consideration.” And when serious contenders vie for publication, again it is language—spunky, biting, or coruscating language—that can “pierce the empyrean and make the welkin ring,” as a wordsmith once wrote of a New York skyscraper.

  Language boosts one effort above the other even among works distinguished by, say, an ingenious plot or a controversial or compelling topic, such as a breakthrough in science. Language establishes the engaging personality and point of view of narrator or character, yields voices that connect with the reader. It allows the bland to sound grand, and the grand to sound as grand as when Johannes Kepler exulted over his new harmonic law (the third law of planetary motion): “Now . . . a very few days after the pure Sun of that most wonderful study began to shine, nothing restrains me; it is my pleasure to yield to the sacred frenzy.”

  FRENZY AND RESTRAINT

  Given the leg-up importance of language, a writer has to ask: How can I sparkle? How do I rise to the next level? How do I beat out the others? I have offered my thoughts in the previous chapters, but at one point you the writer will have to yield to your own sacred frenzy; charge like some mad lepidopterist through the meadows of language—every kind of meadow—and net the butterflies, let them loose in your pages.

  The great Vladimir Nabokov literally chased butterflies in the fields of Europe and New York State, and, perhaps inspired, wrote sentence upon sentence that fluttered in a golden light. But like so many master stylists, Nabokov walked a thin line between splendor and excess. The language called attention to itself. It indulged in erudite wordplay. It showed off, grew elephantine. It might have been too much had he not directed it, like a mahout guiding his pachyderm, to the service of story and characterization.

  When virtuosity of language and style starts to overwhelm story (or, in nonfiction, the point), it is time to tug at the reins. But writers often rein themselves in from the start, never giving sacred frenzy a chance. And little wonder: There are as many pressures to write cautiously as to protect hearth and home, to avoid strangers and heed orange alerts. As Sinclair Lewis said, “every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.”

  We all know those compulsions, whether inspired by audience, employers, the national frame of mind, or one’s own anxieties. From within come fears of derision by peers and critics; of exposure as a know-nothing bungler of the language; of shame brought upon friends and family; of general censure and censorship, of Big Brother.

  Writing has always been about surmounting fears. But at the end of the day—at the beginning, too—only a single fear, that of boring your readers, merits a change in the direction of one’s language and style. Given today’s competition for reader attention, that change will likely be in the direction of excess—inventive, artful excess, but well outside the safety net. To go there takes courage. Where does it come from? From the nobility of the mission: To refresh readers from the fug of the ordinary, the numbing, and the nurturing. Writer, it is your duty to do so!

  And if occasionally you land on your tokus, that is only the journey, the way, of spunk and bite. To stand out from the crowd, one goes for broke, one wins, one loses, one learns, one survives. What is it that the protagonist of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral declares about writing in general? “As pathological phenomena go, it doesn’t completely wreck your life.”

  Spunky.

  EXERCISES FOR PRACTICE AND STUDY

  Earnest writers, including those with ambitions to publish, will want to get cracking on the techniques modeled in this book—breakaway techniques and certain conventional ones that lead to fresh, spirited, and distinctive language. While such language may not be the whole of writing, time and again it elevates the ordinary to the (publishably) brilliant. The following exercises can serve as starting points for your own ascent. (Each number corresponds to the chapter treating the topic.) Actually, don’t even think of these exercises as exercises; why spoil the fun of writing with spunk and bite?

  1. Loosen up with a “locution.” Broadly, a locution is an engaging remark, a stylish turn of phrase in any tone, fancy to funky, with flair that sometimes overrides the demands of grammar: “We are not amused,” drawls the Queen; “We don’t want nobody that nobody sent,” decrees a Chicago ward boss. Try uncorking a one-sentence locution with attention-getting quality, whether based on wit, outrageousness, rhythm, or sheer word power. For example, complete this phrase in a quotable way: “Life has taught me that_____.”

  2. Go for surprise. Write two sentences that end a series of grand items with an unexpected, trivial item (an effect called “catacosmesis”): “I ask for peace, prosperity, and a toasted bagel.”

  3. To indicate the extraordinary, take a paragraph of your writing and replace worn modifiers such as mind-boggling or infinitesimal with fresh, extreme metaphors: A Three Gorges Dam of troubles; a paycheck the size of a muon.

  4. Add a fetching term to your vocabulary from a (free) Internet word-a-day source such as Word of the Day (Lexico Publishing), which delivers to your mailbox offbeat words like fetor (a strong, offensive smell) and defenestration (a throwing of a thing or person out a window), along with definitions and usages. Use the word in a few e-mails to get the feel of it.

  5. More than a physical element, color is memory, mood, and meaning; take advantage of it. Avoid clichés (ruby red, etc.).Focus on five things in the room and describe them by using fresh hues: “as green as a fresh pickled toad” ( J. K. Rowling); “[u]pholstery the color of Thousand Isl
and Dressing” (Rupert Thomson).

  6. Adverbs can be fun, despite all those knocks against them. Invent five outrageous ones (ending in -ly) for effect: “eye-crossingly voluminous” (Michiko Kakutani); “engorgingly in love” (Malcolm Bradbury).

  7. Take a passage you’re writing and change the tense of the first two paragraphs. See whether past-to-present creates a nervous, in-the-moment uncertainty that works better, or whether the past tense of classic storytelling seems more engaging than a passage in the (often-overdone) present tense. Consider applying the change to the whole work.

  8. Change the diction of a dull passage to something other than your natural diction, perhaps an unexpected voice in the context. Would, say, street diction, egghead diction, or a child’s diction tilt the work in some compelling way? For all its high literacy, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ( James Joyce) famously opens with the voice of the hero as toddler—not, “His father wore a beard and viewed him through spectacles,” but “his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. . . . When you wet the bed, first it gets warm then it gets cold. . . . His mother had a nicer smell than his father.”

  9. Figures of speech, or “tropes,” often become the measure of an author’s appeal. Can you invent three metaphors, similes, or hyperboles—including even a warped one—to perk up a description, as in the following? “[A]s inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food” (Raymond Chandler); “talk like hot tar, that fumed and stank as it left her lips” ( Janet Fitch).

  10. Use a classified (not alphabetical) thesaurus in an unconventional way: Find a spunkier adjective to describe illumination than, say, bright. (Hint: forage in a category other than “Light.” In the category of “Violence” in Roget’s, for example, one finds brutal, barbarous, and scorching.)

  11. Like writers, readers love the sound of words. Enliven an otherwise pedestrian sentence by mimicking the sounds of the things named (onomatopoeia): “Gluglugluglug went the toilets” (Tom Wolfe); “[s]queak, she fell onto the bed. Her clogs, boom, boom, were kicked off onto the floor” (Alice Sebold).

  12. Add some novelty to a statement or story by coining your own term. Combine, blend, or shorten existing words, or invent an entirely new one. Some modern neologisms include hottitude, humint, guiltapalooza, quaffle, suckapillar.

  13. Round up some good non-English terms and use them for their novelty, atmosphere, or force: That feinschmecker loves his caviar, but he never picks up the bill. Don’t translate the word if its sense is conveyed by its look and/or sound.

  14. Write a short piece with dialogue. Buck convention and occasionally use a stronger tag than, say, he said or she replied, especially where the speaker’s manner isn’t already clear. This can add oomph: “enigmatically observed” (Vladimir Nabokov); “protested drowsily” (Nicholas Sparks); “amended . . .squeaked . . . chorused” (Sandra Brown).

  15. Shift the grammatical function of a word to create a punchy usage: She’s the new fabulous (adjective shifted to noun); I’ll usage you! (noun shifted to verb). English absorbs all sorts of functional shifting through a device known as “enallage.”

  16. Authorities tell you to reject intensifiers like so and very in favor of already intense words, like livid. Good general advice. But spoken intensifiers often have a cachet that can be captured in writing: You are so not my parents anymore; Be very, very afraid. Contemporary readers actually love the odd intensifier, so, really, why deny them? Capture, in dialogue or narration, an intensifier you ardently enjoy hearing; but try to intensify something fresh (other than great or cool, for example).

  17. The opening to a work of nonfiction must make this promise, explicitly or implicitly: Something will stimulate you if you continue reading. That something might be anything that stirs the juices—shock, surprise, inspiration, amusement, self-transformation, aesthetic pleasure, material gain, titillation, fright, even sorrow. Practice writing an opening paragraph that delivers this promise, and see where the story that follows takes you.

  18. In nonfiction, an ending isn’t the end of the world—just a last impression and the climax to everything you’ve labored to make affecting and saleable. Outside science and academia, endings deserve the same attention, the same spunk and bite, as the rest of the work. End your next piece by design rather than by default: Save good anecdotes and quotes; feel free to choose from one of about a dozen conventional models (e.g., an ending that echoes the opening), but avoid the drift toward clichéd execution.

  19. Treat readers to the fun of a Germanism, one of those maybe-it’s-better-to-show-you-than-explain-it strings of hyphenated words that modify something. Use the device creatively and you’ll achieve a shorthand-with-attitude effect of arch writing. Use it out of laziness and you’ll sound like some I’m-just-sitting-here-shooting-out-hyphens-until-an-adjective-comes-to-mind airhead.

  20. Sentence fragments. You were probably taught to avoid them. Fragments. Like these. Missing subject. Or verb. But fragments put a hop in writing—in between the grace, clarity, and direction full sentences. Fragment parts of a few paragraphs of a recent work and see what happens, as many a lyrical writer does: “Acapulco. In a house shaped like a boat. Everything curled like the fronds of a fern. The ocean. Our hair. . . . The paint on the boat-shaped house” (Sandra Cisneros, Caramelo).

  21. At some point every writer lists things: objects in a landscape, clothing on a body, dishes at a banquet, and so on. The art of listing gets scant attention; but artful choices turn laundry lists into poetry. Pay attention to word quality and favor the unexpected, painstakingly observed particular over the loudly symbolic. Finish this passage, limiting your list to six less-than-obvious items: In the bathroom [or other room] alone, one could read the evidence of my ways: . . .”

  22. The semicolon has been called our most sophisticated punctuation mark because nuance and style, not grammatical rules, guide many of its (optional) uses. As a pregnant pause between statements, it sets up a tension, an expectation that what follows will relate to what precedes in a special way. See for yourself as you rewrite these sentences with a semicolon instead of a conjunction: Run away with me, because I need you. Man proposes, and God disposes. Forget him, since he despises children. Write three similar sentences, linking the two related statements of each with the drama-making semicolon.

  23. In a dialogue sequence, experiment with one of the alternative quoting styles that have worked for Cormac McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Charles Frazier, and numerous others. Some writers drop the quotation marks, even the dialogue tags (she said, etc.). In The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Nobel laureate José Saramago abandons the quotes, paragraph breaks, and closing punctuation:

  You shouldn’t have done it, Why not, he asked in dismay, Because from now on I shall be expecting roses every day, I’ll see that you’re not disappointed, . . .

  The effect can be taut, dreamy, poetic, intense, streamlined—or annoying and baffling.

  24. Revise a work or passage with principles of feng shui in mind: Arrange yin (cool) and yang (hot) elements in a balanced, harmonious pattern to allow for maximum flow of positive ch’i (life force). Identify the source of a sentence’s or paragraph’s force and free its path of clutter. Compare this sentence with the flowing, balanced version following: 1) “The question—like a snake getting stared at by a bird—is one that faces us, with us, who just hope we don’t get swallowed by it, only able to be silent and not do anything else.” 2) “It is a question we can only stare at in silence, like a bird before a snake, hoping it will not swallow us“ ( J. M.Coetzee, Foe).

  25. Enhancing the artful sentence, the participial phrase sets the stage for a subject to come. A dangling participle, on the other hand, corrupts the whole pattern. “Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards . . .journeys a coffin (Walt Whitman).” “Passing” is the participle here; it modifies the subject “coffin.” To purge any corruptive tendencies, write three sentences with a participle that ludicrously misses the sub
ject (dangles) e.g.,Lightly buttered, he brought the muffins.

  26. Felucca, thole, vaporetto, swabby. The names of specialized things are like an undiscovered language, a treasury of fresh and poetic terms as well as precise identifiers. On the library shelves or Web, look at one of several reference sources that names things and their parts; for example, Word Menu, in which the nautical terms above and their definitions are found; or “visual dictionaries” with labeled pictures. Pick out a few terms that are irresistible in sound and inventiveness; use them in a literal or metaphorical way.

  27. Competing writers can’t afford sentences that strangle themselves, seem unhinged, fly off everywhere, lack punch, or collapse under their own mass. Pages [218–221] of this book illustrate the kind of sentence problems that assail just about every writer. How many such problems can you find in your most recent work? Correct them, and see how the writing gains power.

  28. Publishers are now eyeing Generation Y. Are you? Does your writing relate to the 80-million-strong market of readers born in the late 1970s to mid 1990s? Older writers needn’t shortchange their values in language and style, but to compete, they may have to think outside their generational boxes. Gen-Y writers, too, might want to identify the most engaging trends in peer expression. E-mail a few Gen-Y friends in what you think is typical Gen-Y diction—maybe sarcastic, manic, dotted with catchphrases, intensified, street-influenced, smart, flip, impatient. See what they think.