Posts filed under ‘Tips and techniques’
My favorite ellipsis
Last night in the essays class I teach at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, the subject of ellipses came up. In a story, an ellipsis consists of leaving something out. The “something” can be anything from a few words to entire events. Unless we are reading quite technically, we usually only notice an ellipsis when it goes wrong - when the gap seems awkward or omits information we’re looking for. But when an ellipsis goes right, especially at the level of a sentence or a phrase, it can produce prose that is wonderfully economical and far more enjoyable than if the writer had included what has been omitted.
Here is perhaps my favorite ellipsis of all, in a passage from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I accepted a commission as first lieutenant when it began. In the Argonne Forest I took two machine-gun detachments so far forward that there was a half mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn’t advance. We stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last they found the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead. I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me a decoration - even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!”
Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them - with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.
He reached in his pocket, and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon, fell into my palm.
“That’s the one from Montenegro.”
To my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look. “Orderi de Danilo,” ran the circular legend. “Montenegro, Nicolas Rex.”
“Turn it.”
“Major Jay Gatsby,” I read, “For Valour Extraordinary.”
Fitzgerald here is like a magician on his day off, absent-mindedly pulling a pigeon from behind his ear in such a way we are convinced we merely overlooked the bird: a sleight of hand so quick and deft as to seem natural and not a trick at all.
The importance of stupidity in scientific research (and in writing)
Just heard of a neat article about why feeling stupid on a regular basis is actually a good sign if you’re doing serious scientific research. The article is by a fellow named Martin Schwartz, a professor of microbiology and biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia, and it was published in April of 2008 in The Journal of Cell Science. Here’s an excerpt:
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.
What I like about this excerpt - and about the entire article - is that with a very few changes, it could be speaking of writing. Writing seriously, regularly, searchingly, means feeling stupid on a regular basis. For that matter the same applies for writing even reasonably well, at least for me. I’ve had writing students come up to me anxiously after class and say, “There must be something wrong; I find writing is terribly hard work. It takes me hours.” And I tell them, “You can relax - that’s normal.”
Among well-known writers, E.B. White and Kurt Vonnegut are known to have commented on feeling stupid at times. Joan Didion often wrote of being a trifle thick about certain things, if quick in other ways. Not bad company.
You can find the full article by Martin Schwartz here.
Updated edition available of “A Better Approach to Outlining”
If you find outlining difficult, irksome, etc., and you haven’t yet read my guide to the topic, I invite you to check out the latest edition. I’ve illustrated the differences between topic-based and point-based outlines with examples, and explained the latter technique more fully. You can find this updated edition, as well as my handy guide to using “road maps,” on the Writing Guides page.
Samuel R. Delaney and the “annealing moment” of doubt
Reading the excerpt below makes me think of how difficult yet rewarding it must be to peel and eat a durian, that strange fruit found only in southeast Asia, and guarded by not only a foul odor but a thick husk of thorns. The excerpt comes from an essay by the science fiction writer, literary critic, and teacher Samuel R. Delaney called “Of Doubts and Dreams.” It’s part of a collection of related essays by Delaney titled About Writing.
Delaney is talking in this essay about doubt - doubt as a barrier to writing anything at all, to start with; but doubt also as an aid to good writing, or more accurately to the search for good writing. In particular, he notes, cliches of both language and thought must be seen for what they are and discarded - even though they are often the first things that come to mind when we set out to write. He goes on:
The act of refusing to put down words, or crossing out words already down, while you concentrate on the vision you are writing about, makes new words come. What’s more, when you refuse language your mind offers up, something happens to the next batch offered. The words are not the same ones that would have come if you hadn’t doubted . . .
If there is a privileged moment somewhere in the arc of experience running from the first language an infant hears, through the toddler’s learning that language, to the child’s learning to read it, to the adolescent’s attempts to write journals, tales, dramas, poems - if there is a moment, rightly called creative, when the possibility of the extraordinary is shored up against the inundation of ordinary rhetoric that forms, shapes, and is the majority of what we call civilized life, it is here. This is the moment covered - in the sense of covered over - by the tautology against which so many thousands of would-be writers have stumbled: “To be a writer, you must write.” You must write not only to produce the text that is the historical verification of your having written. You must write to project yourself, again and again, through the annealing moment that provides the negentropic1 organization which makes a few texts privileged tools of perception. Without this moment, this series of moments, this concatenation of doubts about language shattered by language, the text is only a document of time passed with some paper, of time spent pondering a passage through a dream.
What wonderful yet thorny motives this passage suggests - not for why we write, but why we ought to write.
- “Negentropic,” if you’re wondering, means “characterized by a reduction in entropy, and a corresponding increase in order.” ↩
Webcast: How to develop “reader sensitivity”
In his 1985 book “How to Write Like a Pro,” magazine writer Barry Tarshis makes the following provocative statement about what it takes to be a good writer:
The most important attribute you can have as a writer is something I call “reader sensitivity.” I define reader sensitivity as an ongoing awareness of how your readers are processing and reacting to what you’ve written. It’s being able to put yourself in your reader’s shoes . . .
In accomplished writers, reader sensitivity appears to be intuitive, in the same way that some entertainers have an innate feel for how an audience is responding to their performance. But in the event this awareness is not an intuitive part of what you, as a writer, bring to writing, you are operating under an all but fatal handicap - and you will remain handicapped until you sensitize yourself to the likely response of your readers.
Reader sensitivity - part 1: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Reader sensitivity - part 2: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Reader sensitivity - part 3: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download Reader sensitivity - part 4: Play Now | Play in Popup | DownloadThe perils of making it up: readers “might want their money back”
Here’s a question that often comes up these days among writers and readers of nonfiction alike: Is it okay for a writer to “make things up”? Interestingly, at least one critically well-received travel writer thinks it is not only okay to make stuff up, it is essential to do so if the writer is aiming for not mere truth, but that far headier concoction, “poetic truth.”
The writer in question is Sara Wheeler, author of such travelogues as Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica and Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey Through Chile. She is also the author of a biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the English explorer who won fame for not only being the sole survivor of Scott’s disastrous expedition to the South Pole, but for writing a stunning book about the experience, The Worst Journey in the World.
Wheeler was understandably taken with Cherry-Garrad’s morose epic, given that she had been to the same continent herself. Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard came out in 2002, to excellent reviews. Two years later, writing in The Times of London, Wheeler confessed that she had, uh, well, made some things up.
How to combine thought and story in an essay
Why write a personal essay? One reason is that few other forms allow a writer to combine story and idea, action and thought; in short, to not only relate incidents from your life, but to muse about the implications.
The question is, how to do this so that it works? You might think that an easy answer would be to write a story, than divide it into scenes; then, in between the cracks of the scenes, insert your musings. Asterisks or white space or some other visual device can be used to signal the transitions. This is certainly what I thought, in making my own first attempts at thoughtful essays.
I quickly discovered that my first-draft readers found such conglomerations hard to read. They didn’t see how the stories connected to the ideas, and worse, they found the story portions aimless and boring: “I couldn’t understand where the story was going or why I was reading it.”
For a long while I didn’t understand why this was. I had labored to select just the right events to make up my scenes, and I had described these events as well as I knew how. My readers constantly told me I was a “good” writer, a clever writer, the essays were “well-written,” and so on. So what was the problem?
For writing memoirs - to be or not to be a camera?
If you’re writing a memoir, you must decide from the outset: do you want to be a camera, or a person?
If you’re a camera, you’ll see everything that happened and relay it to your readers in great detail - but you’ll feel nothing and admit nothing. This will allow you to make your version of events and people as crazy as you like, without taking responsibility for your own involvement, either back then or now.
If you’re a person, on the other hand, you’ll have to admit that yes, you participated actively in your life: you not only saw what went on, but you made decisions, you had choices. This will apply not only to the story of back then, but to the here-and-now, where you as the flesh-and-blood writer have feelings and thoughts and opinions about what you’re telling us.
“Deliberate practice”: What works for golfers can work for writers
I’ve just read an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, ostensibly about golf, that I think raises some neat ideas about mastering any pursuit, most definitely writing included.
The article, by columnist John Paul Newport, is sardonically titled “Mastery, Just 10,000 Hours Away.” It explores research by cognitive scientists into the actual rather than apocryphal differences that distinguish prodigies from duffers, then segues into advice from such top golf instructors as Pia Nilsson, who works with Annika Sörenstam. From a writer’s perspective, here are the most salient comparisons:
An interview with Robert Plotkin, author of The Genie in the Machine
I mentioned in an earlier post on this blog that a couple of years ago, I worked as a book doctor and writing coach with Robert Plotkin, a Boston-based patent attorney. At the time he contacted me, Robert had been working for several years on an idea for a book about a new breed of software applications, which he dubbed “genies.”
Prototype genies were already in use at NASA and in the consumer products industry; the wishes they’d made come true included everything from other computer programs to radically enhanced satellite antennas and toothbrushes. Based on interviews with the computer scientists who’d come up with the genie concept, Robert estimated the eventual impact on society would be staggering. Genies can come up with designs a human being working alone could never even conceive of, and can work far faster as well. It may sound like, well, a fairy tale - but one of Robert’s predictions is that someday you and I will have access to consumer versions of genies. In which case, we’ll be able to find out for ourselves.
