"I have fallen in love with American names." How could anybody not? (from American Moments)
Poet Peter Meinke taught me that short writing forms have three peculiar strengths: power, wit, and polish. Their brevity gives short works a focused power; it creates opportunity for wit; and it inspires the writer to polish, to reveal the luster of the language. Kuralt's essay exemplifies all three, capturing the power of the American language with witty examples off the American map, each clever name another facet cut into the diamond.
In his column for the Charlotte Observer, Jeff Elder wrote this response to a query about the extinction of an American species:
Passenger pigeons looked like mourning doves, but more colorful, with wine-red breasts, green necks and long blue tail feathers.
In 1800, there were 5 billion in North America. They were in such abundance that the new technology of the Industrial Revolution was enthusiastically employed to kill them. Telegraphs tracked their migration. Enormous roosts were gassed from trees while they slept. They were shipped to market in rail car after rail car after rail car. Farmers bought two dozen birds for a dollar, as hog feed.
In one human generation, America's most populous native bird was wiped out.
There's a stone wall in Wisconsin's Wyalusing State Park. On it is a bronze plaque of a bird. It reads: "This species became extinct through the avarice and thoughtlessness of man."
When I ask readers to appreciate this piece, they point to its many shiny facets. They notice:
• "The phrase 'rail car after rail car after rail car' looks like a rail car."
• "The words 'were gassed' carry connotations of a holocaust."
• "The first paragraph is filled with natural imagery, but the second contains the language of destructive technology."
• "Given their extinction, it is fitting that the pigeons looked like 'mourning' doves. The author takes advantage of that coincidence."
In short writing, the reader sees the ending from the get-go. With his ending, Elder adds a finish to the surface of the text.
Good fiction can be short or long, and longer works can contain powerful, witty, and polished shorter elements: anecdotes, scenes, descriptions, vignettes, set pieces that can be lifted out of the work for inspection and delight. Here is a paragraph from one of my favorite boyhood novels, Herzog by Saul Bellow:
The wheels of the cars stormed underneath. Woods and pastures ran up and receded, the rails of sidings sheathed in rust, the dipping racing wires, and on the right the blue of the Sound, deeper, stronger than before. Then the enameled shells of the commuters' cars, and the heaped bodies of junk cars, the shapes of old New England mills with narrow, austere windows; villages, convents; tugboats moving in the swelling fabric-like water; and then plantations of pine, the needles on the ground of a life-giving russet color. So, thought Herzog, acknowledging that his imagination of the universe was elementary, the novae bursting and the worlds coming into being, the invisible magnetic spokes by means of which bodies kept one another in orbit. Astronomers made it all sound as though the gases were shaken up inside a flask. Then after many billions of years, light-years, this childlike but far from innocent creature, a straw hat on his head, and a heart in his breast, part pure, part wicked, who would try to form his own shaky picture of this magnificent web.
It might take a long semester (and another book) to appreciate that passage. The wit — the governing intelligence — of the prose appears in those long fragments that capture the view from inside a moving train; in the exciting movement from junked cars to exploding stars; in that amazing image of human conflict and aspiration, topped off by a straw hat.
There is no more underdeveloped writing form in American journalism than the photo caption, but Jeffrey Page of the Record in New Jersey reveals the storytelling potential of this short form. Frank Sinatra had just died, so imagine a one-column photo that shows Sinatra from the waist up. He's wearing a tux with a black bow tie. He has a mike in his hand. He's crooning.
If you saw a man in a tux and black bow tie swagger on stage like an elegant pirate, and if you had been told he would spend an hour singing Cole Porter, Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart, and if when he opened his mouth you heard a little of your life in his voice, and if you saw his body arch back on the high notes (the ones he insisted you hear and feel and live with him), and if his swing numbers made you want to bounce and be happy and be young and be carefree, and if when he sang "Try a Little Tenderness" and got to the line about a woman's wearing the same shabby dress it made you profoundly sad, and if years later you felt that his death made you a little less alive, you must have been watching this man who started as a saloon singer in Hoboken and went on to become the very definition of American popular music.
How did Page get away with a 166-word caption — written in a single sentence with the main clause near the end — without using the dead man's name? He tells me, "I know, I know, it violates every damned rule. Screw it. They keep telling us to take chances, right? So I did. ... If you're a U.S. paper, and especially if you happen to be in New Jersey, you don't have to tell people that they're looking at a picture of Sinatra and not Mother Teresa."
WORKSHOP
1. Reread the four short pieces above. Study them for their polished style. Make an inventory of the techniques the writers use to create their brilliant jewels.
2. Find the shortest piece you have written in the last year. Compare it to the examples in this section. Revise it so that every word works.
3. Write a photo caption like the one above. Practice, using news and feature photos from newspapers and magazines.
4. Begin a collection of short writing forms. Study how they are written. Make a list of techniques you could use in your writing.
At some point, all writers confront the mythic, symbolic, and poetic, which is why they need to be aware (and beware) that common themes of narrative writing have deep roots in the culture of storytelling.
In 1971 John Pilger described a protest march by Vietnam veterans against the war:
"The truth is out! Mickey Mouse is dead! The good guys are really the bad guys in disguise!" The speaker is William Wyman, from New York City. He is nineteen and has no legs. He sits in a wheelchair on the steps of the United States Congress, in the midst of a crowd of 300,000.... He has on green combat fatigues and the jacket is torn where he has ripped away the medals and the ribbons he has been given in exchange for his legs, and along with hundreds of other veterans,... he has hurled them on the Capitol steps and described them as shit; and now to those who form a ring of pity around him, he says, "Before I lost these legs, I killed and killed! We all did! Jesus, don't grieve for me!" (from The Last Day)
Since the Greek poet Homer sang The Iliad and The Odyssey, writers have composed stories of soldiers going off to war and their struggles to find a way home. This story pattern — often called there and back — is primeval and persistent, an archetype so deep within the culture of storytelling that we writers can succumb to its gravitational pull without even knowing it.
Ancient warriors fought for treasure and reputation, but in the passage above, the blessing becomes the curse. Symbols of bravery and duty turn to "shit" as angry veterans rip them from green jackets and toss them in protest. These soldiers return not to parades and glory, but to loss of faith, with limbs that can never be restored.
Good writers strive for originality, and they can achieve it by standing on a foundation of narrative archetypes, a set of story expectations that can be manipulated, frustrated, or fulfilled in novel ways, on behalf of the reader. Examples include:
the journey there and back
winning the prize
winning or losing the loved one
loss and restoration
the blessing becomes the curse
overcoming obstacles
the wasteland restored
rising from the ashes
the ugly duckling
the emperor has no clothes
descent into the underworld
My high school English teacher, Father Bernard Horst, taught me two important lessons about such archetypes. First, he said, if a wall appears in a story, chances are it's "more than just a wall." But, he was quick to add, when it comes to powerful writing, a symbol need not be a cymbal. Subtlety is a writer's virtue.
"The Dead," by Irish author James Joyce, is the tale of a married man named Gabriel who learns at a holiday party that his wife is haunted by the memory of a young man. Years earlier,
Michael Furey had died for her love. Countless times I have read the final paragraph:
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
When I first read that paragraph in college, it struck me with a force that transcended its literal meaning. It took me years to recognize the rich texture of its symbolic iconography: the names of the archangels Gabriel and Michael; the instruments of Christ's Passion ("crosses," "spears," and "thorns"); the evocation of the last days ("fall," "descent," "living and dead"). The fact that these were veiled from my first view is a virtue of the story, not a vice. It means that Joyce did not turn symbols into cymbals.
Some of the best writers in America work for National Public Radio. The stories they tell, making great use of natural sound, open a world to listeners, a world both fresh and distinctive, yet often informed by narrative archetypes. Margo Adler admitted as much when she revealed to me that her feature story on New York homeless people living in subway tunnels borrowed from her understanding of myths in which the hero descends into the underworld.
More recently, NPR reported the story of an autistic boy, Matt Savage, who had become, at age nine, an accomplished jazz
musician. The reporter, Margo Melnicove, tapped into the standard form of the young hero who triumphs over obstacles. But the story gives us something more: "Until recently Matt Savage could not stand to hear music and most other sounds." Intensive auditory therapy turns the boy's neurological curse into a blessing, unleashing a passion for music expressed in jazz.
We use archetypes but should not let them use us. Consider as a cautionary tale, argues Tom French, the reporting on the dangers to women of silicone breast implants. Study after study confirms the medical safety of this procedure. Yet the culture refuses to accept it. Why? Perhaps it arises from the archetype that vanity should be punished, or that evil corporations are willing to profit from poisoning women's bodies.
Use archetypes. Don't let them use you.
WORKSHOP
1. Read Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces as an introduction to archetypal story forms.
2. As you read and hear coverage of military actions around the globe, look and listen for examples of the story forms described above.
3. Reexamine your writing from the last year. Can you identify pieces that fit or violate archetypal story patterns? Would you have written them differently?
4. Discuss Father Horst's advice: a symbol need not be a cymbal. Can you find a symbol in your work? Is it a cymbal?
From our earliest years, we learn that stories have endings, however predictable. The prince and princess live happily ever after. The cowboy rides into the sunset. The witch is dead. The End. Or in the case of sci-fi movies: The End? Too often, in real life, the prince and princess get a divorce. The cowboy falls off his horse. The witch eats the baby. That's the dilemma for writers: reality is messy, but readers seek closure.
In 1999, the New York Times company commissioned me to write a newspaper serial novel I titled Ain't Done Yet. The story takes place in the months leading up to the millennium and involves an old investigative reporter tracking down the leader of a doomsday cult. I did not write from an outline, or even from much of a plan, but I knew that in the final chapter the good guy, who is afraid of heights and lightning, would be fighting the bad guy at midnight, atop a giant bridge, in a hurricane. In other words, I didn't know the stopping points along the way, but I wrote with an ending in mind. So I was not surprised to learn that J. K. Rowling began writing the Harry Potter series by crafting the final chapter of the last book and has even revealed the last word: "scar."
To write good endings you must read them, and few works of literature end with the poignant majesty of The Great Gatsby.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald plants the seeds for this ending early in the novel, at the end of chapter one, when narrator Nick Carraway sees Gatsby for the first time:
I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone — he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward — and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
Powerful lessons are embedded in this passage. Look at the phrase "unquiet darkness." The author shows us that sentences and paragraphs have endings too, even as those endings foreshadow the book's final scene, some 160 pages later, when the green light, the dock, the outstretched arms will return, freighted with thematic significance.
These techniques are not for novelists alone. My colleague Chip Scanlan wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times in which he argued that journalists should take lessons from citizens when it comes to asking good questions of politicians:
As Bob Schieffer of CBS News polishes his questions for the final presidential debate tomorrow, he might want to take a page from Daniel Farley. And Randee Jacobs. And Norma-Jean Laurent, Mathew O'Brien, James Varner, Sarah Degenhart and Linda Grabel.
In that lead paragraph, Chip lists the names of citizens who had asked effective questions in the previous presidential debate. In his final paragraph, Chip closes the circle, replaying the chords he struck in the beginning:
So tomorrow Mr. Schieffer can serve the public interest and teach his fellow reporters an important lesson about truth-gathering. He can model his questions on those asked by a handful of Mis-sourians who understand the toughest questions are those that show the country what a candidate won't — or can't — answer.
There are endless ways to begin and end a piece of writing, but authors rely on a small toolbox of strategies, just as musicians do. In musical compositions, songs can build to a crescendo, or fade out, or stop short, or echo the opening. In written compositions, the author c
an choose from among these, and more:
• Closing the circle. The ending reminds us of the beginning by returning to an important place or by reintroducing us to a key character.
• The tieback. Humorist Dave Barry likes to tie his ending to some odd or offbeat element in the body of the story.
• The time frame. The writer creates a tick-tock structure, with time advancing relentlessly. To end the story, the writer decides what should happen last.
• The space frame. The writer is more concerned with place and geography than with time. The hurricane reporter moves us from location to location, revealing the terrible damage from the storm. To end, the writer selects our final destination.
• The payoff. The longer the story, the more important the payoff. This does not require a happy ending, but a satisfying one, a reward for a journey concluded, a secret revealed, a mystery solved.
• The epilogue. The story ends, but life goes on. How many times have you wondered, after the house lights come back on, what happened next to the characters in a movie? Readers come to care about characters in stories. An epilogue helps satisfy their curiosity.
• Problem and solution. This common structure suggests its own ending. The writer frames the problem at the top and then offers readers possible solutions and resolutions.
• The apt quote. Some characters speak in endings, capturing in their own words a neat summary or distillation of what has come before. In most cases, the writer can write it better than a character can say it. But not always.
• Look to the future. Most writing relates things that have happened in the past. But what do people say will happen next? What is the likely consequence of this decision or those events?
• Mobilize the reader. A good ending can point the reader in another direction. Attend this meeting. Read that book. Send an e-mail message to the senator. Donate blood for victims of a disaster.
You will write better endings if you remember that other parts of your story need endings too. Sentences have endings. Paragraphs have endings. As in The Great Gatsby, each of these mini-endings anticipates your finale.
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