Words Fail Me (21 page)

Barbara Kingsolver is another writer worth borrowing from. She has a knack for getting into a subject in an interesting way. Her essay "High Tide in Tucson" begins with a story about a hermit crab she accidentally brought home to Arizona. It was sleeping in a shell she found in the Bahamas, and awoke to find itself on her coffee table. Buster, as she called the crab, adapted to life in the desert but held on to the old, familiar rhythms. And so, it turns out, did she.

"When I was twenty-two, I donned the shell of a tiny yellow Renault and drove with all I owned from Kentucky to Tucson.... I 'm here for good, it seems. And yet I never cease to long in my bones for what I left behind."

That longing is what Kingsolver's essay is all about.
She uses the uprooted crab and its crabby ways to sum up her own experience with uprootedness. "Yeah," you're thinking, "that's a neat trick, but what's in it for me?"

Perhaps you've been chosen to make a speech at the retirement dinner for the local head librarian. He's famous for anticipating readers tastes, for knowing what they like before they do. In fact, he turned you on to your favorite author, P. G. Wodehouse. You could begin your tribute with an anecdote about Jeeves, the omniscient butler who anticipates Bertie Wooster's every whim. Then compare the Wodehouse character to the prescient librarian who led you to him. There's your crab!

I don't know about you, but I tend to tire of whiny writing. Not that writers don't have a right to feel sorry for themselves on occasion. I just don't want to read about it.

One reason I like Cynthia Heimel is that she manages to whimper and whine without actually whimpering and whining. She does it by laughing at herself. That's my kind of woman. Take her column about how hard it is to lose weight. Here, she's just met with the dietician and agreed to a regimen of salad and crackers:

"'You'll lose twenty pounds in a month,' she says.

"'I'm your girl,' I say.

"I go home and start the famous prediet ritual: Eating everything I can. Cheeseburgers. Fries. Mallomars. Quite a few Mallomars. I want to throw up."

The next morning, the diet begins: "Please, somebody feed me. I'm going to faint. I'm starving to death."

Again, what's to learn? A downer goes down easier with a little humor. If you're writing about a bad experience—something depressing or discouraging—lighten up. There's probably an element of humor in there somewhere.

Say you're the marketing manager for a toy manufacturer and you're writing a training booklet for new sales reps. You want to warn them about how demoralizing it is to walk into a toy store and try to wheedle shelf space for another board game. Rather than scare them with horror stories and failure rates, why not laugh at some of the mistakes you made the first time you wooed FAO Schwarz and Toys "Я" Us? The message may be the same, but it will be a lot more effective.

When you like a piece of writing, ask yourself why. What's the author doing that works so well? Maybe it's something you can use in your own writing. But don't swipe another writer's words or style. The real you is always better than an imitation somebody else.

That doesn't mean we can't be influenced by writers we like. I've had crushes on more of them than I can remember, and I'm sure you've had your favorites, too. Our reading shapes our writing and our thinking, and it's supposed to. To love a piece of writing is to be influenced by it. Where did I get this brilliant insight? I stole it from Elizabeth Bishop.

In her
Collected Prose
, Bishop writes about her debt to the poet Marianne Moore: "I am sometimes appalled to think how much I may have unconsciously stolen from her. Perhaps we are all magpies."

A former colleague of mine used to edit steamy romance novels and was ever on the alert for unintentional howlers: a sudden change in a lover's eye color, maybe, or an ancestral manse made of brick in one chapter and stone in the next. Then there was the pregnancy that didn't add up: the heroine was expecting for fifteen months. That was a nice catch.

Unfortunately, most of us don't have editors to save our butts. Our writing goes straight to our readers. If any butts are to be saved, we have to save them ourselves. That's why the wise revise.

Revising is more than fixing what's wrong; it's making
what's passable better. The Latin word
revisere
means "visit again." Revisiting your work isn't just an afterthought, something to do if you have the time. If you haven't revised, you're not finished.

There's no right or wrong way to revise. Some writers begin at the beginning and work their way through to the end. Others take care of obvious trouble spots first, then work their way through the whole piece. I'm in the second group. I make notes to myself as I write my first draft: "Insert formula for root beer"; "Check spelling of'Bon Jovi'"; "Find cost of a dozen cantaloupes." In my first go-around, I take care of the notes, assuming I can find them. But it doesn't matter how you go about revising, as long as you do it.

The cruel reality of revision is that you sometimes have to dump what you love most. When the endorphins kick in and you've really got the subject by the throat, you're likely to repeat yourself. You'll write essentially the same sentence (or paragraph) three times in a row. Each one seems just right, a perfect gem, so you keep all three. I know it's tough, but when you revise, pick the version that says it best and drop the others. Your object is to move the point along, not to display your virtuosity.

Luckily, revising has never been so easy, thanks to the computer. The ability to search through a piece for particular words and phrases is something that Gibbon or Boswell might have killed for. A question that would otherwise be a major pain can now be answered in an instant: Have I mentioned Connie Francis yet? Where did I first refer to Uncle Eddie's stamp collection? How did I define
dithyramb?

While I grumble about the imperfections of spell-checkers, mine does find those embarrassing word repetitions I can't see myself (
the the, with with, to to,
and so on). Thank you, computer.

The biggest benefit of revising on the computer, though, is the ease of moving around large blocks of type. Should this paragraph go there? Does that sentence sound better over here? If so, simply cut and paste. If you're not sure, you can copy and paste to see what the change would look like before committing yourself.

Naturally, there's a downside to technology. There are fewer scribbled-up manuscripts for future scholars to pore over. And since writing and revising are easier, many people write too much and then putter for too long, reluctant to let go.

Computer literate or not, good writers take pains to revise their work. Great writers take great pains. One of my favorites, William Trevor, types his short stories on paper, then uses the cut-and-paste method to move scenes around. "It's an untidy, rather dirty business, and it's messy," he once told an interviewer. "And the manuscript looks like a manuscript should look: It's absolutely filthy."

J. D. Salinger, on the other hand, is said to have used the facing pages of a ledger to do his revisions. He pasted a sheet of typewritten manuscript on one side, then wrote notes to himself on the other.

Balzac—a prolific note-taker, you'll recall—sweated bullets when he revised. He tirelessly rewrote, expanded, rearranged, cut, and corrected just to arrive at a first draft. When his publishers sent him the proofs, he rewrote, expanded, rearranged, cut, and corrected those.
When new proofs arrived he did the same thing. Printers loathed him.

Flaubert wrote
A Sentimental Education
twice and
The Temptation of St. Antony
three times, after intervals of many years. Jane Austen rewrote the ending of
Persuasion.
And Tiny Tim, the heart-wrenching tyke in
A Christmas Carol
, wasn't always Tiny Tim. Along the way, Dickens called him Small Sam, Little Larry, and Puny Pete. Even the "Bah!" in "Bah! Humbug!" was added later.

This doesn't mean you should fiddle with your writing just for the sake of fiddling. Don't fix what's not broken. The idea is to cast a critical eye on what you've written. If you're happy with it, congratulations. But if you're like the rest of us, you won't be happy with your first effort. What's more, you won't always know why you're not happy. And when you don't know what's wrong, you can't fix it. Here's a checklist of questions to ask as you revise.

Do I still like the beginning?
Your ideas probably evolved as you wrote, so be sure the head now sits comfortably on the body. (Chapter 4)

Can I be simpler?
Replace the long word with the short, the trendy with the tried-and-true, the pompous with the plain, the foreign with the domestic. (Chapter 6)

Can l be clearer?
Every word, every sentence, every paragraph should be as clear as you can make it, with no chance that your reader might misunderstand. (Chapters 6, 9, 10)

Do l make sense?
Check for any contradictions or lapses in logic. (Chapters 12, 17)

Do my numbers add up?
Check every figure at least twice. (Chapter 19)

Do my sentences hang together?
They should follow one another smoothly. Don't make them all the same length, or you'll put the reader to sleep. (Chapters 12, 13)

Do my verbs pull their weight?
Replace the ninety-seven-pound weaklings and weed out unnecessary passives. And move verbs as close as you can to their subjects. (Chapters7, 8, 21)

Do I need every modifier?
Ditch any adjectives or adverbs you can do without. Be sure the ones you keep are where they belong—close to the nouns and verbs they describe. (Chapter 11)

Am I using the right image?
Try to picture the imaginative flourishes in your writing. Careless images can create the wrong picture and make you look silly. (Chapters 11, 17)

Have I got rhythm?
Listen to the sound of your writing. It should be rhythmic and easy to read, without unintentional jingles or rhymes. And the rhythm shouldn't clash with the subject matter. (Chapters 11, 24)

Am I playing in tune?
Listen to the tone of your writing and make sure you like the person you hear. The tone should be in harmony with what you're writing about—not too flippant or too grim, for example—and it should be consistent. (Chapters 2, 20)

Can I trim?
Cut whatever you can. If you've said something twice, make it once—even if you love both versions. (Chapters 6, 16, 21)

Have l made my case?
Step back and consider what you've written. Did you say what you set out to say? Try to imagine the reader's overall impression. (Chapters 2, 3)

How's my grammar?
Check your grammar, spelling, and punctuation. If you aren't sure, don't guess—look it up. (Chapter 18)

The hardest part of revising is making yourself do it. The second hardest is knowing when to stop. No piece of writing is ever perfect. There's always something that could be better.

Your favorite novel or history or memoir is just someone's last revision. Even
Hamlet
might have been improved if Shakespeare had had another week to work on it. I can hear his agent now: "Hey, Bill! These producers are all over me like a cheap suit. Where's that last act?"

At some point you have to stop futzing and say, "That's it." But how do you know when you're done? Some writers say an inner voice tells them when to stop, giving them a "sense of completion." They're probably lying.

Most of the writers I know don't stop because they are suffused with satisfaction and feel some Zenlike fullness, or emptiness, or whatever. They stop because they have to stop someplace and this looks like a pretty good place. Either that or the piece is physically wrested from them. I've seen this happen to reporters who won't let go.

Like those reporters, I find that nothing beats a deadline. Ready or not, it's done when the bell goes off. But if deadlines aren't a consideration, here's how to tell that you're finished:

• You're hung up on trivialities. If you honestly can't decide between two piddling choices, it probably doesn't matter. Pick one.

• You're revising your revisions, and the revisions of the revisions.

• You're making things worse instead of better. (Don't forget to save the original.)

• It may not be perfect, but you gave it your best shot.

• It's good enough, and you're sick of looking at it.

• You like it. Even the person you ask for a second opinion likes it.

No doubt I've left things out. I had some fabulous notes on yellow stickies somewhere, but they must have come unstuck along the way. Let that be a lesson to you. No matter. There's always the revised edition.

Meanwhile, try to loosen up and have a good time. Writing can be a lot of fun. Nothing beats the feeling you get when you're writing something good—except the feeling you get when you're finished.

Duck walks into a hardware store. "Got any duck food?" he quacks. "Sorry, no," says the proprietor. Duck leaves.

Next day the duck is back. "Got any duck food?" "No," says the proprietor. "I told you before. We don't carry it."

Next day he's back again: "Got any duck food?" The proprietor glares at him. "Look, buddy, we don't sell duck food. We never have and never will. And if you ask me that one more time, I'll nail your little webbed feet to the floor."

Next day the duck is back. "Got any nails?"

"We're out of nails today," says the proprietor.

"Got any duck food?"

The Careful Writer: A Modern Guide to English Usage.
Theodore M. Bernstein. New York: Atheneum, 1977.

The Elements of Style.
William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White. 3d ed. New York: Macmillan, 1979.

A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper.
John Allen Paulos. New York: Anchor Books, 1996.