Words Fail Me

by Patricia T. O'Conner

  Words Fail Me

  What Everyone Who Writes Should Know About Writing

  Patricia T. O'Conner

  * * *

  A Harvest Book

  Harcourt, Inc.

  San Diego New York London

  * * *

  For my mother

  Copyright © 1999 by Patricia T. O'Conner

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or

  mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information

  storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from

  the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part

  of the work should be mailed to the following address:

  Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  O'Conner, Patricia T.

  Words fail me: what everyone who writes should know

  about writing/by Patricia T. O'Conner

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 0-15-100371-8

  ISBN 0-15-601087-9 (pbk.)

  1. Authorship. 2. Creative writing. 3. Report writing.

  I. Title.

  PN147.027 1999

  808'.02—dc21 99-25610

  Designed by Lydia D'moch

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Harvest edition 2000

  E D C B A

  * * *

  Contents

  Acknowledgments vii

  Introduction 1

  Part 1

  Pull Yourself Together

  1. Is Your Egg Ready to Hatch? Know the Subject 9

  2. "The Party to Whom I Am Speaking": Know the Audience 12

  3. Get with the Program: The Organized Writer 17

  4. Commencement Address: The First Few Words 26

  5. From Here to Uncertainty: How Am I Doing? 35

  Part 2

  The Fundamental Things Apply

  6. Pompous Circumstances: Hold the Baloney 49

  7. The Life of the Party: Verbs That Zing 56

  8. Call Waiting: Putting the Subject on Hold 60

  9. Now, Where Were We? A Time and a Place for Everything 63

  10. The It Parade: Pronoun Pileups 68

  11. Smothering Heights: Misbehaving Modifiers 72

  12. Too Marvelous for Words: The Sensible Sentence 87

  13. Made for Each Other: Well-Matched Sentences 93

  14. Give Me a Break: Thinking in Paragraphs 99

  15. The Elongated Yellow Fruit: Fear of Repetition 105

  16. Training Wheels: Belaboring the Obvious 108

  17. Critique of Poor Reason: The Art of Making Sense 111

  18. Grammar Moses: Thou Shalt Not Embarrass Thyself 117

  19. Down for the Count: When the Numbers Don't Add Up 129

  Part 3

  Getting Better All the Time

  20. Lost Horizon: What's the Point of View? 141

  21. Wimping Out: The Backward Writer 149

  22. Everybody's Favorite Subject: I, Me, My 155

  23. Promises, Promises: Making Them, Keeping Them 165

  24. You Got Rhythm: Writing to the Beat 171

  25. The Human Comedy: What's So Funny? 180

  26. I Second That Emotion: Once More, with Feeling 191

  27. The Importance of Being Honest: Leveling with the Reader 197

  28. Once around the Block: What to Do When You're Stuck 202

  29. Debt before Dishonor: How and What to Borrow 210

  30. Revise and Consent: Getting to the Finish Line 215

  Appendix 222

  Bibliography 223

  Index 224

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  It occurs to me that this book has no advice about how to write acknowledgments. Hey, what better place to remedy the oversight?

  Authors write acknowledgments to acknowledge their debts, of course, to thank the people who helped in some way. Ideally, your tone should be gracious but not queenly, grateful but not groveling. Humble dignity is what you should aim for. Acknowledgments also enable you to shamelessly drop names without seeming immodest. In this way, you let the reader know that while you, the author, did the real work, a great many important people stopped whatever they were doing to give you a hand. (You may not be bosom buddies with them all, but who's to know?)

  The impressive bunch that helped with this book includes Laurie Asséo, Ann Beattie, Alida Becker, André Bernard, D. J. R. Bruckner, Jo Ellyn Clarey, Charles Doherty, Hugh Downs, David Feldman, Margalit Fox, Rob Franciosi, Samuel G. Freedman, Elizabeth Frenchman, Ken Gordon, Robert R. Harris, Jennifer Hartig, Dimitra Karras, Panayota Karras, Allen Kellerman, Craig Kellerman, David Kelly, Mitchel Levitas, Eden Ross Lipson, Rose McAllister, Charles McGrath, Kate Murphy, Deborah Nye, Lamont Olson, Jeanne Pinder, David Rampe, Tad Richards, Tim Sacco, Robert Schulmann, Michael Sniffen, Yves Tourre, Gloria Gardiner Urban, Bruce Washburn, Elizabeth Weis, and Marilynn K. Yee. I'm also grateful to my sister, Kathy Richard, and to Larry and Pamela Kellerman for their support and encouragement.

  I owe special thanks to my extraordinary editor, Jane Isay, who asked me to write this book and whose uncanny vision kept it on track. Dan Green, my agent, knows much more about writing than I, and his advice was invaluable. Herbert Mitgang, Marilyn Stasio, and Peter Keepnews were tireless and inexhaustible sources whose literary sleuthing made my job easier. John Allen Paulos, God's gift to the numerically insecure, offered advice on the chapter about mathematics. And once again, Anna Jardine proved that a good copy editor is a pearl beyond price.

  My husband, Stewart Kellerman, was virtually a coauthor. He got me out of more jams than I can count, and his wisdom shows on every page. Finally, I owe a bottomless debt to Beverly J. Newman, who was never too busy to take two little girls to the library. Thanks, Mom.

  * * *

  Introduction

  Two days into my first newspaper job and itching to see my name in print, I picked up a ringing phone and took the call that I thought would launch a glittering career.

  The man on the other end said he had a dog so intelligent that it took its meals seated at the table with the rest of the family. Not only did this dog have its own chair and its own place setting, but it refrained from eating until grace was said, then waited to be excused from the table. Would I be interested in doing a story?

  Would I! I rushed up to the hard-boiled city editor, visions of a page-one byline dancing in my head. "Mr. Murphy," I said, "I have somebody on the phone with a great human-interest story."

  "It's Murphy!" he said, spitting cigar smoke. (In those days, ashtrays were standard office equipment.) "What've you got?"

  I told him my great story.

  Silence.

  "It even wears a bib," I added.

  Murphy rolled his cigar to the other side of his mouth. "No dog stories," he said. "I hate dog stories. If we run a story today about a dog that dines at the table, we'll have to run one tomorrow about a dog that dances Swan Lake"

  "But what do I tell the guy on the phone?"

  "That's your problem. Now get me some news!"

  It was my first on-the-job lesson. The lesson wasn't "No dog stories," though. It was "Write for Murphy."

  Many years and many jobs and many bosses later, I still try to write for Murphy. Not the real Murphy, long buried now, but whoever is going to read what I write. And no matter how many people I'm writing for, I try to talk to one reader at a time.

  I owe many of the tips in this book to the editors and writers I've worked with since that firs
t job at the Waterloo Courier in Iowa more than twenty-five years ago. Some of these folks have been hard to ignore. One of my bosses liked to blow up paper bags and pop them just to make sure everybody was awake. Another was able to balance a spoon on the end of his nose while reciting the first few lines of Milton's Paradise Lost. Another had to be roused from bed every morning by a copyboy whose job it was to make sure the boss got to work. Nothing about these people was prosaic, least of all their prose. They were the ones in the balcony; if I could please them, the rest of the audience would take care of itself.

  Contrary to popular opinion, there's no mystery to writing well. It's a skill that just about anyone can learn, more craft than art. When words fail us, as they often do, the reasons are usually simple. So are the solutions. They can be as easy as breaking a sentence in two or moving a word somewhere else. The term "writing" covers a lot of ground. But whether your work ends up in a history professor's e-mail, a marketing report, a community newsletter, or a best-selling novel, the pitfalls are the same. Words Fail Me is about techniques for making poor writing presentable and good writing even better. Think of it as a user's manual for words.

  And words, written words, are getting a workout these days, in case you haven't noticed. Suddenly we're a nation of writers. By putting a keyboard in every lap, it seems, the computer has changed the way we communicate, virtually overnight. If we think of writing as conversation, everybody seems to be talking at once.

  Who isn't wired? Teenagers no longer spend their evenings yakking on the phone. They send gossipy e-mail or instant messages, hang out in chat rooms, and write. Executives who once dictated letters now click on Reply and write. College students can trade notes in newsgroups, question their professors, and turn in assignments without leaving their dorms. Gardeners, golfers, military brats, parents for and against spanking, aspiring actors, quilters, gym teachers, plastic surgeons, dog trainers, arthritis sufferers, geologists, and pizza deliverers are meeting on the Internet and swapping news, giving advice, scolding, kibitzing, and kvetching—all in writing.

  Lousy writing. If the good news from cyberspace is that we're writing more, the bad news is that most of us aren't very good at it. Our words don't do justice to our ideas.

  Computers haven't made us bad writers. We write badly because we don't know how. For many years, our schools have done a rotten job of teaching writing. Asking students to write without showing them how is like expecting them to drive before they've had a lesson. Still, it's never too late to improve. With practice, anyone who wants can write. Think of ballroom dancing: there's no shame in not knowing how, but there's no reason you can't learn. Sure, not everyone can be Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers, but who wants to run backward down a flight of stairs, anyway (especially in high heels)?

  Good writing is conspicuous by its absence. Even if you can't describe what it is, you know it when you don't see it, when what you're reading is tedious or blah or hard to follow. Good writing is writing that works. It makes sense. It's both comfy and elegant. It says just enough and no more. It has manners, not mannerisms. Good writing has all the right words—and not too many of them—in all the right places.

  Sounds simple, doesn't it? Often it is. Merely adding or subtracting a single word can do wonders for a crummy sentence. Yet some writing is harder to fix; an idea may be missing, or stuck in the wrong place. There may be problems with logic, with tone, with rhythm. These problems, too, have solutions. Words fail all of us at one time or another. That's to be expected. If something comes too easily, it's probably not your best work.

  You'll make mistakes, naturally. Who doesn't? Just as you don't expect perfection in everything you read, neither does the person you're writing for. No one has ever written anything perfect, although some have come mighty close. If you write honestly and do your best, most readers will give you the benefit of the doubt.

  A final thought, for those of you with literary ambitions. Your favorite writers, and mine too, aren't without their faults. Trollope is fond of lengthy digressions, but we relish his Barsetshire novels nonetheless. Antonia Fraser's terrific history The Wives of Henry VIII is fascinating, but it has too damn many dashes. Melville's masterpiece, Moby-Dick, introduces interesting characters, only to drop them. I love rereading Wuthering Heights, though Emily Brontë's plot is ridiculously improbable. A writer can have faults and still be wonderful, because the best writing goes beyond simple mastery of language. Its power lies elsewhere—in one's understanding of the human heart and the ways of the world, in one's capacity for making moral judgments, in knowing a thing or two about life, in telling a great story.

  So, I can hear you asking, if we aspire to greatness, why bother with the nuts and bolts? Well, the best writers may not follow every rule every time, but they follow most of them most of the time. And even if you're a Tolstoy or a Balzac, a Thurber or a McPhee, it doesn't hurt to learn the rules before you break them.

  PART 1

  Pull Yourself Together

  1. Is Your Egg Ready to Hatch?

  KNOW THE SUBJECT

  Let's face it. Some subjects are harder to explain than others. A pipe organ is more complicated than a kazoo (even I can play Bach on the kazoo). No subject, though, is so complicated that it can't be explained in clear English. If you can't explain something to another person, maybe—just maybe—you don't quite understand it yourself.

  Anything worth writing about is worth explaining. But you can't make something clear to someone else if it isn't clear to you. Before you write about a subject, make sure you know it inside and out. If there are questions in your mind, don't skip them or cover them up. Do your best to find the answers. Then, if questions remain, you can always be honest and say so; the reader will forgive you.

  Whenever there's something wrong with your writing, suspect that there's something wrong with your thinking. Perhaps your writing is unclear because your ideas are unclear. Think, read, learn some more. When your egg is ready to hatch, it'll hatch. In the meantime, sit on it a bit longer.

  The old admonition to"write what you know"is a cliché, but it's still good advice. No matter how vivid and fertile your imagination, you'll write best what you know best. Dr. Spock patted thousands of babies' bottoms, and generations of parents have turned to his venerable book on child care. Ben Hogan was the king of the swing, and his book on the fundamentals of golf has been a classic for years.

  Speaking of classics, Melville and Conrad spent years at sea, and you can almost smell the salt air in their writing. In his rough-and-tumble youth, Dickens worked in a blacking factory, lived in the poorhouse, and clerked and ran errands in law offices and courts. Not surprisingly, his most lifelike characters aren't from high society. They're street people, beggars, thieves and spongers, laborers, petty clerks, and of course lawyers.

  You may have noticed that in Jane Austen's novels, ladies are always present. What did the men say among themselves over their port when the women had withdrawn? Austen never took part in exclusively male conversation, so there is none in her novels. What's unfamiliar is kept offstage.

  Not all of us have the luxury of writing only about what we know. A college student who's asked to write a paper on Kierkegaard can't very well decline and say he'd rather write about the Spice Girls. An ad executive with a fabulous wine cellar isn't likely to turn down the Bud account just because she thinks beer is déclassé. If you have to write about something unfamiliar, learn about it. Once you know the subject, you're ready to write.

  You're probably wondering about those exceptions to the rule—writers who convincingly describe things they couldn't have seen with their own eyes. Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire is vivid and convincing, even though she's never met one of the undead (at least, I hope she hasn't). She modeled the vampire Lestat after her blond husband, and set much of the atmospheric tale in her native New Orleans. Her writing comes alive because she's borrowed from what she knows in order to create a fictional world that's as real as the real th
ing.

  Don't let the exceptions mislead you, though. An author who invents a world she hasn't seen, a reality she hasn't known, must be hellishly good to be believable. Most of us aren't hellishly good. We must know whereof we speak.

  2. "The Party to Whom I Am Speaking"

  KNOW THE AUDIENCE

  A piece of writing requires at least two people: one to write it and one to read it. Who's going to read yours? It's important to ask, because people who don't know their readers or who forget about them aren't very good writers. You'll save yourself all kinds of trouble by learning this lesson early.

  All writers, remember, are readers first. You'll read a lot more than you'll ever write. Let the reader in you influence the writer in you. Put yourself in the reader's place, then write what you'd like to read.

  If the very idea of writing strikes fear into your soul, or if you freeze up when you start to write, you may have a problem imagining your reader. Fear of writing is often fear of the reader, especially one you don't know. And no wonder. Nothing is more daunting than an audience of strangers. Break the ice and get acquainted.

  Similarly, if your writing is unfocused, your reader may be out of focus, too. When you can't see the target, you don't know where to aim. Sharpen your focus and bring the reader into the picture. Clarifying your audience will clarify your thinking and your writing.

  All writing has an intended audience, even the telephone book (it may be monotonous, short on verbs, and heavy on numbers and proper nouns, but it sure knows its readers!). Your audience probably won't be as wide as your area code, but it could be almost anyone—your landlord, a garden club, the parole board, Internet jocks, a college admissions director, fiction readers, the editorial-page editor, the Supreme Court. Someone is always on the receiving end, but who? It's a big world out there, and before you write you have to narrow it down. Once you've identified your audience, everything you do—every decision you make about vocabulary, tone, sentence structure, imagery, humor, and the rest—should be done with this target, your reader, in mind.