Words Fail Me (19 page)

"Mr. Coyote states that on December 13th he received of Defendant via parcel post one Acme Rocket Sled. The intention of Mr. Coyote was to use the Rocket Sled to aid him in pursuit of his prey. Upon receipt of the Rocket Sled Mr. Coyote removed it from its wooden shipping crate and, sighting his prey in the distance, activated the ignition. As Mr. Coyote gripped the handlebars, the Rocket Sled accelerated with such sudden and precipitate force as to stretch Mr. Coyote's forelimbs to a length of fifty feet. Subsequently, the rest of Mr. Coyote's body shot forward with a violent jolt, causing severe strain to his back and neck and placing him unexpectedly astride the Rocket Sled."

What follows is a litany of mishaps involving various products and a request for damages in the amount of $38,750,000 against the Acme Company, its directors, officers, shareholders, successors, and assigns.

What's so funny? In a word, it's absurd. How often do we see a cartoon character in a real court of law, his
improbable bodily injuries described in deadpan medical terminology?

You can use this technique, too. Let your imagination off the leash. Be incongruous. And incongruouser and incongruouser. Imagine the dust bunnies under your bed coming to life. Dr. Ruth as a marriage counselor at the court of Henry VIII. Your toaster oven plotting to short-circuit the microwave. A couple of newborns in a hospital nursery scheming to swap parents.

As for Mr. Coyote, I think he has a pretty good case.

If you want to write humor, read humor. There are many more ways to be funny than the few I've talked about. Use those that seem most natural to you, and never strain to get a laugh.

If you have doubts about whether something's funny, play it straight. Nothing is worse than a lame joke. And if you're not sure humor is appropriate, it probably isn't. What leaves you rolling on the floor might not go over so well with Aunt Mabel. As Mel Brooks put it: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die."

Of course you care. You feel things deeply. I do, too. But we can write about feelings without letting feelings run the show. We don't have to hit readers over the head to get across fear, sorrow, love, pity, jealousy, greed, and other powerful emotions. Writing is more moving when it leaves something to the imagination.

Take Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho.
It's one of the scariest of all scary movies. Why? Because it's one of the least bloody. Hitchcock forces us to imagine the most frightening parts, and nothing on the big screen could be as frightening as the workings of a frightened mind.

Good writers make the reader's imagination work for them. Say you want to describe an avaricious corporate biggie. You could come right out with it: "He's a greedy SOB." Or you could quote the SOB himself—"The hell with an eighty-five percent market share, I want it all!"—and let the reader figure it out.

Sometimes it's not what you put in that stays with the reader—it's what you leave out. If you're writing a research paper that has a particularly ominous conclusion, you don't have to tell readers how ominous it is. Let the research speak for itself.

Think of the writing that moves you the most. I'll bet the writer holds something back, something you have to fill in yourself. Good writing is not a spectator sport; both the writer and the reader participate. Whenever I reread something that's affected me deeply, I'm surprised at how much of what I remember is my contribution.

Now I'll show you some writing that conveys powerful emotion without overwrought language. Instead, readers are drawn in with evocative details and invited to fill in the blanks.

Primo Levi survived the Holocaust but never left its horrors behind. In this passage from
Survival in Auschwitz
, he describes his arrival at the concentration camp. Freezing, hungry, and desperately thirsty after four days in a cattle car, Levi and his fellow prisoners are put in a cold room where drops of putrid water fall from a faucet:

"A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our
feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink the water, and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen. What can one think about? One cannot think any more, it is like being already dead. Someone sits down on the ground. The time passes drop by drop."

With one small detail—the relentless drip of the tap—Levi sums up the fear and dread of waiting for an unknown terror.

Jealousy is a difficult emotion to describe, particularly in first-person writing. A mere "Boy, was I jealous!" doesn't cut the mustard. In this passage from her novel
A Thousand Acres,
Jane Smiley portrays jealousy without using the word. The narrator, Ginny, who has nursed her sister through an illness, learns that Rose has stolen her lover. She thinks of the two familiar bodies, now secretly sharing an intimacy that each once shared with her:

"And so, here, at last, was Rose, all that bone and flesh, right next to, right in the same bed with, Jess Clark. If I remembered hard enough I could smell her odor, feel the exact dry quality of her skin, smell and feel her the way he did during those mysterious times when I wasn't around. I could smell and feel and hear and see him, too, with a force unmatched since the first few days after we had sex....Every time I could not actually see one or the other of them, I had a visceral conviction that they were together."

Amazing, isn't it? A few intimate details can conjure
up the ravenous green-eyed monster. Technicolor and Surround sound are not required.

William Styron has described his terrifying descent into depression as an overwhelming horror that the feeble word
depression
only makes a mockery of. But in his memoir
Darkness Visible
he does something better than merely describe this torment; he helps the reader see it through the eyes of a sufferer. In this passage, he suddenly realizes how ill he is:

"One bright day on a walk through the woods with my dog I heard a flock of Canada geese honking high above the trees ablaze with foliage; ordinarily a sight and sound that would have exhilarated me, the flight of birds caused me to stop, riveted with fear, and I stood stranded there, helpless, shivering, aware for the first time that I had been stricken by no mere pangs of withdrawal but by a serious illness whose name and actuality I was able finally to acknowledge. Going home, I couldn't rid my mind of the line of Baudelaire's, dredged up from the distant past, that for several days had been skittering around at the edge of my consciousness: 'I have felt the wind of the wing of madness. "

Much later, as Styron's depression begins to lift, another wild bird appears, but this one is a sign of hope: "Although I was still shaky I knew I had emerged into light. I felt my-self no longer a husk but a body with some of the body's sweet juices stirring again. I had my first dream in many months, confused but to this day imperishable, with a flute in it somewhere, and a wild goose, and a dancing girl."

Styron doesn't just tell us the madness is loosening its grip. He shows us how he knows.

Frank McCourt, in
Angela's Ashes
, writes about the anger he felt as a child when a little brother died senselessly. He doesn't say he was angry, but who can doubt it after reading this bleak burial passage?

"I did not like the jackdaws that perched on trees and gravestones and I did not want to leave Oliver with them. I threw a rock at a jackdaws that waddled over toward Oliver's grave. Dad said I shouldn't throw rocks at jackdaws, they might be somebody's soul. I didn't know what a soul was but I didn't ask him because I didn't care. Oliver was dead and I hated jackdaws. I'd be a man someday and I'd come back with a bag of rocks and I'd leave the graveyard littered with dead jackdaws."

As young Frank strikes out at the crows in the cemetery, we can feel his rage over Oliver's death. You might remember that when you write about strong feelings. Give just enough detail to summon up the emotion. The readers will do the rest themselves.

One day I idly picked up Jane Austen's
Emma
and turned to my favorite scene. It's the ninth inning, and Mr. Knightley, the man Emma has loved for years without realizing it, declares his love for her. The two of them, alone in a garden, are overcome with emotion.

I'd remembered Emma's response as passionate and tumultuous, a three-hanky job. But wait a minute. Where's
the moving declaration of love? This is all that Austen tells us about Emma's reply: "What did she say? Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does."

It's a wonderful scene, but what makes it wonderful is what's left out. Without realizing it, we provide the missing pieces as we read. We use our imaginations. And later we remember that scene as being more impassioned than it actually is. Austen does more without words than most writers do with them.

For expressing feelings, nothing beats simple, honest writing. One small detail, such as a shoe washed up on a beach, can be more tragic than a graphic description of a drowning victim's body. A simple sentence about a honeymoon cottage with its curtains drawn for days on end can say more about passion than a catalog of sexual particulars.

Never underestimate the power of understatement. Wield a fine brush, not a trowel. You can move readers without resorting to corny clichés, icky sentiment, and heavy-handed goop.

"When there are no words," Flaubert wrote, "a glance is enough."

How often do we read things we don't believe, by authors who don't believe them either? I'm not talking about stretching the truth with exaggerations like "One size fits all" or "Easy to assemble." And I don't mean occasional white lies, the harmless fibs everyone uses now and then: "Wish you were here" or "It's just what I wanted!" I'm talking about those little gray lies we read all the time, the ones sneaky writers use to say something without really saying it.

"This isn't aimed at you personally," your supervisor writes in a negative evaluation. (Oh yes it is.)

"Idon't mean to criticize,"a neighbor says in a note about the wildflower meadow you've decided to grow instead of a lawn. (Oh yes she does.)

"I'm not a demanding person," your father-in-law writes, then proceeds to tell you exactly how he'd like his breakfast prepared when he comes to visit. (Oh yes he is.)

That type of dishonest writing doesn't fool anybody. We know it's not true, the writers know it's not true, and we know they know we know. So why the empty disclaimers? Let's look at a few of them and find out.

Many writers lie with the best of intentions. They have bad news to deliver, so they try to soften the blow. Imagine you're a violin teacher, writing a six-month review of little Herschel's progress. How do you tell his folks it's hopeless because Herschel can't play in tune?

You could take the spineless way out:
I won't say that Herschel is entirely without talent for the violin, but it may not be in his best interest to continue.

Or you could tell the truth, but tactfully:
The violin is not Herschel's instrument because he has a poor sense of pitch. But he enjoys music and has good rhythm, so why not let him try the drums?

A lie doesn't really soften a blow. It's often kinder to tell the truth, especially if there's some good in it.

A weaselly writer can always find a way to sneak in an opinion without taking responsibility for it. The most common method, the back-door denial, has become familiar enough that we take it for granted. How many times have you read statements like these?

No one's suggesting war is a good thing.
(Translation: It has its points.)

Not all performance artists are weird.
(Just most of them.)

Not every pit bull is a killer.
(Show me one that isn't.)

Lawyers don't always have their hands in our pockets.
(They have to eat sometime.)

I wouldn't say teenagers are difficult.
(They're hell on earth.)

Patent-leather pumps are not unattractive.
(I wouldn't be caught dead in them.)

Her last production wasn't a total flop.
(It bombed.)

Writers play this game when they don't have the courage to be honest.

I've heard of a college professor who didn't want to offend mediocre job applicants asking for letters of recommendation. He was reluctant to lie, but he didn't want to tell the truth, either, so he prepared a few stock comments that could be read in two ways:"I would urge you to waste no time in making this candidate an offer of employment....In my opinion, you will be very fortunate to get this person to work for you....I most enthusiastically recommend this candidate with no qualifications whatsoever."

Everyone exaggerates from time to time, and we accept that as part of being human. We don't take fish stories seriously, for example, unless the fish is in evidence. We also don't mind an exaggeration or two in humorous writing, like the yo-yo dieter's lament that her butt is as big as a Buick.

But if you want to be believed, go easy on the hyperbole. If readers think you're stretching a point here or there, even a minor one, they might suspect everything you write. Suppose you're arguing against the construction of a car wash on your street. You make a good case, based on an engineering report about potential water-pressure and drainage problems. You'd only weaken your petition to the planning commission by throwing in wild speculation about thousands of cars driving through every hour, honking noisily, and generally disturbing the peace.

Be honest. Trust the bare facts (or the bare events, if you're writing fiction). Things are amazing enough as they are. The padding will make what's underneath look suspicious.