Words Fail Me (4 page)

You can almost feel the temperature rise. Who wouldn't keep reading?

When a summary or an anecdote doesn't seem quite right, try a physical description of whatever you're writing about, whether a difficult client, the crime scene in a whodunit, or an archaeological dig.

Ernest Hemingway was especially good at this kind of beginning. Here's how he started a travel piece for a newspaper, years before he wrote his first novel:

"Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture. Every place that the land goes sufficiently sideways a hotel is planted, and all the hotels look as though they had been cut out by the same man with the same scroll saw."

And this is how he began a 1923 interview with one of Lenin's aides:

"Georgi Tchitcherin comes from a noble Russian family. He has a wispy red beard and mustache, big eyes, a high forehead and walks with a slouch like an old clothes man. He has plump, cold hands that lie in yours like a dead man's and he talks both English and French with the same accent in a hissing, grating whisper."

Keep your antennae out when you read newspapers, and don't forget the sports pages. You'll find some of the best writing (and much of the worst) on your doorstep each morning.

Readers are kindly for the most part. They'll forgive a clunky phrase or two later on if you win them over in the beginning. And when a beginning is good enough, it can win them for life. Here are some beginnings worth remembering.

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."

(Charles Dickens,
David Copperfield
)

"I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. I am not quite sure of the exact place or exact date of my birth, but at any rate I suspect I must have been born somewhere and at some time."

(Booker T. Washington,
Up from Slavery
)

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

(George Orwell,
Nineteen Eighty-four
)

"Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning."

(Bertrand Russell,
Our Knowledge of the External World
)

"When Mrs. Frederick C. Little's second son was born, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse. The truth of the matter was, the baby looked very much like a mouse in every way."

(E. B. White,
Stuart Little
)

"I can scarcely wait for the day of my imprisonment. It is then that my life, my real life, will begin."

(Elizabeth Bishop,
"In Prison," from
The Collected Prose
)

"Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him."

(Graham Greene,
Brighton Rock
)

"The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone."

(Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique
)

"What I am doing in Miami associating with such a character as Hot Horse Herbie is really quite a long story."

(Damon Runyon, "Pick the Winner")

"I was born in a house my father built."

(The
Memoirs of Richard Nixon
)

Memorable writing doesn't always start with a wow. Some of the novels I've most enjoyed lure the reader in more slowly:
Howards End, Women in Love, Hotel du Lac, The Death of the Heart, The Sheltering Sky, Excellent Women
, not to mention scores of nineteenth-century classics. But the leisurely beginning takes a kind of genius that most of us don't have and a kind of patience that most readers don't have, either. Our writing has to leave the starting gate quickly or we'll lose our audience.

You probably have a list of favorite writers. Take a look at some of the beginnings that have snagged you and kept you reading. Why do they work? What can you learn from them? If you read closely enough, you'll find ideas for your own writing. Don't steal, though, at least not outright. And please hold the clichés. "Once upon a time"was a good beginning ... once upon a time.

Not bad. You've mastered your subject, you have a plan, you know your audience, and you've started to write. In the chapters to come, you'll pick up the skills—the fundamentals as well as the fancy moves—to make your writing the best it can be. Before we get to the tricks of the trade, though, there are a few things you should know about writing. I learned them the hard way, but you shouldn't have to.

Everything you write, whether it's a shopping list, a Ph.D. thesis, or an e-mail giving directions to your house, will
make a certain demand on your time. No matter what your project is, estimate how much time you'll need and then work out a writing schedule you can live with.

Let's use the shopping list as a no-frills example. You know you have to leave the house by three o'clock to do all your errands. And you know it'll take five minutes to scope out the refrigerator and the cupboards and the space under the sink and write down what you need to buy. So set aside five minutes sometime before three to do it. You procrastinators will need to stop whatever you're doing at two fifty-five. (By the way, the business about knowing your audience applies even here. If Aunt Millie is doing the shopping for you, write "peanut butter and jelly." If you're the intended reader, you can scribble "PB&J.")

You don't need me to tell you how to make a shopping list. The point is that everything you write will be better if you allow yourself the time to do it well. An autobiography would be a more challenging example. Say you'd like to finish it in five years, and you're willing to give it two hours every Sunday afternoon. By writing a page at each sitting, you'll end up with about 250 pages at the end of five years. If that length is in the ball park, and if you enjoy writing for two hours at a stretch, then your schedule is reasonable. But if you start fidgeting after an hour, change your schedule. Make your writing sessions shorter but more frequent, perhaps an hour on Saturday and an hour on Sunday. Or if you haven't lived all that much, write for just an hour a week and shorten your memoir by half.

Above all, take it easy with the schedule and keep your
expectations moderate, at least in the beginning. If you try to do too much you'll only disappoint yourself. If you find that you can easily do more, then give yourself more to do. Psychologically it's better to add to a schedule that's too light than to retreat from one that's too heavy. Why become discouraged right off the bat?

Once you've worked out a sensible schedule, stick to it. Do this whether you intend to make writing a daily habit or have to deliver a report a week from next Tuesday. Respect your routine and insist that others respect it, too. There's no need to be rude. Just tell friends and relatives you'll be working between this hour and that, and if they interrupt, you'll break their knees.

Whether you're in the mood or not, write when it's time to write. Don't wait around for inspiration. It almost never shows up punctually, believe me. I get my best ideas while I'm actually writing, and you probably will, too. Your engine will start out cold, but it'll warm up after a few laps.

One caution. You'll be amazed at how creative you become—not creative at writing, but creative at finding excuses not to write. I still fight this tendency. I can't find the word I want, for instance, or a paragraph won't come together. I stare off into space. Before I know it I've convinced myself that the windshield-wiper fluid in the car might be dangerously low and in the interest of public safety I'd better check it out—right now! Or in the course of looking something up in the dictionary, I'll come across the word "wheat" and realize that I've never baked bread. Never! It's something I've always wanted to try. And what better time than the present?

If making up excuses were an Olympic event, I'd win the gold medal every time, hands tied behind my back. Hey, that's not a bad idea. They made synchronized swimming an event, didn't they?

Classy prose does not leap, complete and fully formed, from anyone's typewriter or computer or quill pen. While it may read as naturally and eloquently as if it were flawless from the start and couldn't have been written any other way, don't believe it.

All writing begins life as a first draft, and first drafts are never (well, almost never) any good. They're not supposed to be. Expecting to write perfect prose on the first try is like expecting a frog to skip the tadpole stage.

Write a first draft as though you were thinking aloud, not carving a monument. If what you're writing is relatively short—a financial report, a book proposal, a term paper—you might try doing your first draft in the form of a friendly letter. The person at the other end could be someone real or imagined, even a composite reader.

Relax and take your time, but don't bog down, chewing your nails over individual words or sentences or paragraphs. When you get stalled (and you will), put down a string of X's and keep going. What you're writing now will be rewritten. If it's messy and full of holes, so what? It's only the first draft, and no one but you has to see it.

Accepting that your first draft is your worst draft can be extremely liberating. It's all right to sound like a jerk at this stage in the proceedings. Cut loose. Nobody's looking.
You wouldn't believe some of the rubbish that was in the first draft of this book—and I'll never tell.

But let's talk about you. Say you work in the marketing department of a fast-food chain with a big problem. There's a perception among the public that the company's products are radioactive. Your assignment is to come up with a campaign to convince people not only that the food is safe, but that it can add years to their lives and grow hair on bald heads. "Piece of cake," you tell the boss, rolling up your sleeves. Meanwhile, you're wondering where your next job will come from.

Stay calm. Approach the project as you would any other, even if this one seems impossible. Gather and organize your material—research by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, testimonials from consumers, demographic studies, and soon. Then plunge into your first draft. If you like, dump in everything but the kitchen sink. This isn't a finished marketing proposal; you're only thinking aloud. Toss in your wildest inspirations. How about radiation sensitive food wrappings that change color when emissions are present? Sure, include that. How about TV ads featuring a ninety-seven-year-old man with a full head of hair, wolfing down burgers as doctors check him over with Geiger counters? Get it on paper, on tape, or into the computer. Don't stop to examine ideas from every angle—just keep going.

Later, when you revise, you can agonize over the details and cut out the embarrassments. (Revision, the art of tinkering with what you've written, is worth a chapter in itself. In fact, it gets one: chapter 30.) In the meantime, nothing is too ridiculous for a first draft.

While you're writing you'll come up with ideas, or make discoveries, that can take you in new directions. "Jeepers, what a swell idea!" you'll say to yourself. Or maybe, "Duh! What took me so long?"

Sometimes, though, a sudden inspiration or some eye-popping information won't fit neatly into your grand design, the organization plan we talked about in chapter 3. What to do?

Even the best-laid plan can't anticipate every brain wave. When a glowing lightbulb appears over your head, don't turn it off. A good idea is a gift, not an inconvenience. If your writing plan doesn't let in any light or leave room for a fresh idea, then change it. It's supposed to make writing easier, not harder.

Imagine that you're writing a laudatory essay about your great-uncle Klaus, who died before you were born. He emigrated from Berlin to Brazil toward the end of World War II, and you've organized your material around his many philanthropies on behalf of the Amazon Indians. Halfway through the project, you come across old documents that explain why he left Berlin in such a hurry, and how he acquired that old SS uniform in the trunk. I'd say it's time to revise your writing plan.

Flexibility is a skill every writer should develop. If the human mind weren't flexible, we'd still be living in caves.

I'll always take a plain sentence that's clear over a pretty one that's unintelligible. When your writing is hard to understand, it's just so much slush, no matter how many beautiful images and nice rhythms it has. Readers won't like what they can't understand. They may understand it and still not like it, certainly. But that's a chance you have to take.

The best writing is the clearest; we sense its meaning immediately. The subject—particle physics, perhaps—may be over our heads, but the writing should never be. Albert Einstein was able to convey difficult scientific ideas simply and elegantly."I think that a particle must have a separate reality independent of the measurements," he wrote. "That is, an electron has spin, location and so forth even when it is not being measured. I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it."

No subject is so complicated that it can't be explained clearly and simply. Of course, simplicity is deceptive. Turning out flashy, dense, complicated prose is a breeze; putting things down in simple terms that anyone can understand takes brainwork. Still, you don't have to be an Einstein to write well. When you reach the inevitable impasse, try another approach. Every time you do this, consider it a step forward, not back.