November Newsletter - The Writing Life

December 2002 Newsletter

By Jessica Page Morrell

In the past week I've tossed out the pumpkins and gourds that decorate my place to make way for wreathes and berries, poinsettias and a tree. Some of my favorite moments of the year come when I sit amid flickering candles and tree lights, the scents of fir and cinnamon in the air, a winter quiet descending, soft lights scattering the dark.

In the past month I've taken a detour in my writing. After printing out a workbook for writers that I'd been working on, I realized that it was simply too long and cumbersome and I wanted to divide it into two books. I thought about it. I imagined the results. I talked it over with my agent. And I listened to my instincts, which whispered that this draft seemed stilted and dull.

So now I have a new direction, with a firmer word count in mind, and I feel gloriously revived, eager to tackle the project. I've just written a new introduction to the first book and am plunging into another version of chapter one. I feel back on track with the sort of relief that perhaps only a writer can understand.

And I'm noticing how much easier it is to write when I'm in sync with the materials, but I also know that the ideas are coming quickly because I've laid a foundation through years of writing and teaching. I trust my voice and I trust my knowledge of style. When I'm reading and editing a draft it's as if I have an inner Geiger counter that leads me to a motherlode of ideas. But my instincts will also find the convoluted sentences, the awkward phrasing, the confusing constructs. I will weed out the overblown or inaccurate metaphors, the excess and boring. I will spot my soapbox tendency and rein in the whimsical.

It all starts with style. Because you must master the craft of writing before you can explore the art. Your bedrock is an understanding of how beautiful sentences sound and look on the page. Grammatical language does not stand in the way of style, in fact, is the basis for it. So it starts with fundamentals - grammatical consistency, strong verbs, tightly constructed sentences. Now this isn't glamorous stuff but it is the basis for a powerful style.

Vivid verbs and an active voice create lively writing. Lively writing means that you deliver ideas with directness, crispness, precision. It includes the reader and carries him or her along briskly from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph.

In my critique groups a style problem that appears often is imprecise language. You cannot choose the almost right word. Gustave Flaubert asserts: "Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarisms, in order to dodge the difficulty."

Use specific nouns to paint pictures for your readers. Use modifiers sparingly. Collect verbs.

Start with a clean and elegant style. Respect each humble word, our tools, our road into the reader's heart and mind.

Well, another year has sped past. It seems to me that time is in a blistering hurry to zip along. This column could easily be a lament, mourning for time passing too swiftly.

But after all, it is the season of lights. And in the stillness of the longest nights of the year, surely lies inspiration and magic that can make you pause. And while these still moments do not come often enough, I embrace them wholly. After all this time of year is crowded with razzle-dazzle, so stepping back to drink it in brings a true relishing of the season.

My best wishes to all for a lovely holiday season and a peaceful New Year. Many thanks for reading this newsletter this past year,
Jessica

Modifiers
Modifiers are often trouble for writers. We strew them across the landscape of our writing without first determining if they are necessary. Or we use them to take the place of specific nouns and strong verbs. One of first tasks of editing is to to strip our sentence to their cleanest components. Examine every adjective and adverb and make certain that it has a job to do in the sentence. William Zinnser said, "Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident....Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of trust on the part of the reader. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold."

Here is a list of modifiers and phrases that you can often eliminate:
a bit, a little, absolutely, actual, actually, actively, alleged, any,
arguably, as a rule, available, basically, both,
carefully, comparatively, consistently,
decidedly, deeply,
definite, definitely
eminently, especially,
eventually, exactly,
existing, extremely
fortunately, generally,
herself, himself,
hopefully, ideally
in fact, in general,
in particular, in the future, in the past, indeed
inherently, inevitably,
itself, madly, mainly,
meaningful, meaningfully, namely, now
over time, overall,
particular, perfectly, pretty
pretty much, probably, quite, rather,
real, really, related,
relatively, reportedly,
respectively, so, so-called,
somewhat, specific,
specifically, themselves
total, totally, truly,
unfortunately, very,
whatever

Inspiration:

"A writer's style is his own distinctive way of expressing his personality in vocabulary, idiom, and sentence structure. Another man's style cannot be behind a paper-mache' mask that looks like Bernard Shaw or G.K. Chesterton. It might be amusing for a fancy dress ball, but only a lunatic would attempt to go about that way in ordinary life." The Golden Book on Writing by David Lambuth & others

"More than any other part of speech it is the verb that determines whether a writer is a wimp or a wizard. Novices tend to rely on is and other static verbs and lose momentum by stumbling into the passive voice....the pros make strong nouns and dynamic verbs the heart of their style; verbs make their prose quiver." Sin and Syntax, Constance Hale