Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

  Kidder, along with many writers, claims that the first draft is the hardest. I have never fully understood this. The first draft is the occasion to scatter all your bright notions on the page, without the awful limitations of finality, the facing-it recognition that what you’ve got is all there is. But perhaps it is a matter of the strictures you place on yourself, a matter of what you mean by a first draft. If it is more than an elaboration of notes, if it struggles for sequentiality, then yes, draft one can make you quail. Kidder, in one of the many head games he plays upon himself, has a capacity to pretend that his first draft is his final draft even though another part of his mind knows full well that it will be altered greatly, maybe even discarded.

  Kidder has accused me of disingenuousness for always praising a first draft. It’s true that initial praise is almost a reflex for me. But praise of the imperfect need not be insincere. In fact, it can sometimes be more sincere than the writer realizes, sincere in a different way. I may like not what I see but what I imagine. You have to envision the potential of a piece of writing, and potential can sometimes be more exciting than reality. Emily Dickinson’s line “I dwell in possibility, a fairer house than prose” is an editor’s motto.

  No writer known to me revises so energetically and even enthusiastically as Kidder. It is a great gift to be able to consider your own work—hard wrought—as thoroughly provisional. Of the things we have learned in revising, perhaps the most important is the concept of sacrifice. Sometimes passages, even chapters, characters, or themes, that are perfectly good in themselves must go for the good of the whole.

  All good writing ultimately is a contest with the inexpressible. Every good passage leaves something unsaid. So it ought to be hard. But you don’t want to make it harder than necessary. The best thing an editor can do is to help the writer to think, and this is the most satisfying part of an editor’s work, collaborating at the level of structure and idea.

  The process that Kidder and I have worked out over the years has been a source of great comfort—for both of us, I think. The ritual of the final read-aloud has a particular significance. I know this is not a universal practice among writers and editors, and for understandable reasons. One approaches it with some apprehension. It is inevitably chastening. The writer cannot hide from the sound of his own voice, and writer and editor alike must encounter mistakes that have lurked in plain view all along, now suddenly blatant and full of reproach. And satisfying as it is to correct them at last, you know that some other blunder remains undiscovered. All books are imperfect. John Updike once wrote about his lifelong pleasure in receiving the first copy of a book of his from the publisher, a pleasure, he said, that lasts until you find the first typo. At some point in our proceedings Kidder will likely invoke Melville: “This whole book is draught—nay but the draught of a draught.” And I may then chime in with my own favorite line from that passage: “God keep me from ever completing anything.”

  In the long course of a book and the longer course of a career, we have disagreed and even nettled each other from time to time (and done some eye rolling in private). But we have never exchanged an angry word. It helps, I suppose, that we were both raised to be polite. But we have also had our well-established roles.

  Only recently have we experimented in reversing them.

  Late in our association, after we had been working together for about thirty-five years, I wrote The Thing Itself, which claimed to be cultural criticism. It was that, but as it got closer to the end it became increasingly personal, part essay, part memoir. I gave Kidder the manuscript for his comments. He returned it a few days later, and I opened it to see his bold hand—large and legible, completely unlike the squiggly marks I tend to make—marching through the pages, leaving various messages, none of them wanting in candor. His most memorable advice was “Shit-can this.” I was fully recovered within three weeks.

  Subtler instruction did occur. For instance, I had written about something of which I had been “absurdly proud,” something that it would have been absurd to be proud of, in fact. Kidder had circled “absurdly.” I stared, then got it. I had been begging for the reader’s sympathy. The adverb was asking forgiveness for what the adjective confessed. Out went “absurdly,” and the sentence was stronger for it.

  But it was not until we were deep into the present book that I felt the full otherworldly power of role reversal. Kidder was trying to cajole me into a piece of work, and he cited Keats’s advice to Shelley on avoiding excesses: “Curb your magnanimity,” wrote the tactful Keats. I had the opposite problem, in Kidder’s view: stinginess. He was trying to make me flesh out a typically underdone paragraph of mine. “Unleash your magnanimity,” he said.

  Oh brother. It had come to this. One had heard oneself.

  NOTES ON USAGE

  In 1859 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Never use the word development. Dangerous words in like kind are display, improvement, peruse, circumstances …”

  Those words have survived the great man’s scorn—though he was probably right about “peruse.” Every generation has its verbal fashions and critics who deplore them. Some usages, seemingly poisonous, get absorbed harmlessly into the language; others die out. A century after Emerson, many were alarmed by the spread of “finalize,” but that epidemic subsided, and the word doesn’t seem to cause much concern when it appears today. About the same time, “hopefully” (as in, “Hopefully, things will get better”) sent critics into merry indignation. Strunk and White sniffed, “It is not merely wrong, it is silly.” William Zinsser called it an “atrocity.” It was said to be grammatically incorrect, a “misplaced modifier.” In fact, in its disputed usage, “hopefully” serves as a sentence adverb, a word modifying an entire sentence, not necessarily the word it precedes. It functions no differently from “seriously,” or “frankly.” The unacknowledged objection to “hopefully” was social, a matter of taste. Sophisticated people just didn’t like the sound of what was then a new usage, especially since unsophisticated people were using it with such apparent pleasure. Today, probably because of the opprobrium heaped on it, fewer people seem to use “hopefully,” and even fewer seem to care.

  It is tempting to despise all neologisms, but many of them simply reflect the constancy of change in the world. Here is a sentence from the news in 2011 that couldn’t have been understood ten years earlier: “Christopher Lee, a second-term Republican from upstate New York, resigned after a disclosure by a Web site, Gawker.com, that he had sent embarrassing photographs and misrepresented himself to a woman he contacted through Craigslist.” You can mourn for a world where companies were once named like mighty ships. Now they take names that sound like bath toys, such as Yahoo! or YouTube, but that’s what they’re called, and there’s no way around it. To Google has entered the language, and it’s precious to surround the word with ironic quotation marks.

  English changes constantly. No sensible person would want it otherwise. But even if they do it silently, all writers and most readers simmer with distaste for certain words and phrases. We do this even as we acknowledge that today’s outrage is tomorrow’s shrug. Here are some usages, circa 2012, that we would happily expunge from the language.

  • “Going forward.” Sometime in the 1990s, many Americans of the corporate and professional classes seemed to grow tired of the phrase “in the future” (and “someday” or “soon” or “later on” or the unadorned future tense), and they started saying “going forward” instead. It may be here to stay, but it still carries a Panglossian tone, a faith in the five-year plan.

  • “Proactive.” This is a neologism and an annoying one. Even more annoying, it’s a succinct way of naming a quality that otherwise takes a couple of words to express. It too seems to ally the writer with a world of committees and agendas, as do “stakeholder,” “planful,” “impactful.”

  • Certain nouns used as verbs: “parent,” “access,” “impact.” Also nouns rejiggered into verbs—“incentivize,” or just “incent,” for instan
ce.

  • “Grow,” as in “to grow one’s business,” deserves a category all its own. Why does it seem okay to grow corn and not an economy? Sheer prejudice, and we share it.

  • Adjectives and adverbs suffering from exhaustion: “sustainable,” “green,” “iconic,” “incredible” and “incredibly.” The last two, like Chernobyl, should be out of service for decades to come. “Ironic” and “ironically” must be used reluctantly and not as labels for things that are merely odd. “Famously” (“As Yogi Berra famously said …”) is just a tired way of excusing a tired reference.

  • Phrases that once seemed fresh: “low-hanging fruit,” “tipping point,” “herding cats,” “on steroids,” “putting the toothpaste back in the tube,” “at the end of the day,” and “welcome to the world of …” (as a way of announcing the subject of a story after an anecdotal opener).

  • Misused words: “Enormity” still means something horrible, not just anything big. “Fractious” means ill-behaved, not divisive. “Disinterested” (impartial) and “uninterested” (bored) are not synonyms, nor are “infer” and “imply.”

  • Phrases that seem to be in a transitional state and can no longer be used for fear of confusion: “Beg the question” was once used as a criticism of a circular argument, but now can mean “makes you want to ask.” Neither meaning can be assumed. “The proof is in the pudding” is an illogical phrase that exists only because of its history. If you use the original version, you sound quaint: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Something similar has happened to “couldn’t care less,” which has inexplicably devolved into the illogical “could care less.” There is also the uncompleted “as far as,” as in, “As far as geography, I think it’s in Africa.”

  • Malapropisms: “free reign,” “shoulder on,” “tow the line,” “perks your interest,” “a tough road to hoe,” “doesn’t jive with the facts.”

  • Words whose main function is to call attention to themselves: e.g., “eponymous.”

  • Overused intensifiers: “preternatural,” “quintessential,” “epicenter.”

  • Journalistic adjectives: “top,” “key,” “leading,” “ranking.”

  • Words invoking metaphorical places: “realm,” “arena.” Or words expressing big, vague numbers: “myriad,” “light-years.”

  • Medical vulgarisms and clichés: “adrenaline” for energy, “testosterone” for masculinity, “anatomy” for body, and “cancer” for any bad thing that has “metastasized.”

  • Political clichés: “grassroots,” “groundswell,” “kicking the can down the road,” “partisan bickering,” “red meat,” “playing to the base.”

  • “Folks” for people. Now used indiscriminately everywhere, but especially by public speakers stooping to an audience. When a president says “folks like me,” you are only reminded that there are no folks like him—he’s the president. Other aggressively informal words: “most” for almost (“most everyone agrees”), “couple” as an adjective (“he drove for a couple miles”).

  • Words that proclaim one’s own inability as a writer: “indescribable,” “beyond words,” “ineffable.”

  • Phrases from pop culture that come all too easily to a weary mind: “a little help from my friends,” “make my day,” “it’s not over ’til it’s over,” “a perfect storm,” “your fifteen minutes” (of fame), “it is what it is,” “I’m just sayin’,” “zip, zilch, nada” (and other cute ways of saying none). To realize how sad these expressions will look in print within a decade or so, consider some of their ancestors: “sock it to me,” “fab,” “dig it,” “far out.”

  • Words and phrases of the digital age: “killer app,” “reboot.” Also “mega” and “giga” and “nano” as prefix-metaphors.

  • The euphemism “pass” for “die.” (“Pass away” was bad enough.)

  • All sports metaphors.

  SOME NOTES ON GRAMMAR

  Like mangled phrases, grammatical errors gain legitimacy through widespread use, but more slowly, perhaps because they never stop offending the ears of those who learned to fear them in elementary school. Here are some that should still be avoided:

  • “Between you and I.” It is properly “between you and me,” and the objective case is required in all such instances. (“They invited my wife and me to participate”; “It seems to Fred and me that we must …”) Yes, Shakespeare makes the error in question (in The Merchant of Venice: “… all debts are clear between you and I”). But his precedent does not govern, not yet anyway.

  • “I wish I would have …” This was once largely a regionalism (Midwest), but it is spreading. “I wish I had” is correct.

  • Danglers. If nothing worse, danglers can be embarrassing. A prominent wine critic used to write sentences of this sort: “A dark, brooding, muscular claret with cigar box aromas and hints of cherries in the finish, I have never tasted a better offering from this chateau.”

  • Confusion between the verbs “lie” and “lay.” Emerson was fighting the battle 150 years ago and nothing has changed. “Lie” is intransitive, “lay” transitive. “I lie down.” “I lay my body down.” Even in speech one should get this right. Remember Bob Dylan’s lyric: “Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed.” Remember it because it’s wrong, even though sexier his way.

  • Subjunctives. Beware the reflexive use of “were” after “if.” Part of the confusion is that this use of “were” belongs to what was once an entire system of subjunctive constructions. Everyone knows that “were” is correct in such common usages as “If I were you,” and “If it were up to me.” But it is tempting to use “were” when it doesn’t apply. In if-then constructions, “were” is now properly confined to statements contrary to fact or of doubtful truth. When expressing a fact, do not use the subjunctive, not even when “if” is involved: “If it was going to cost me a thousand bucks, then damn it, I was going to enjoy it.” Meaning that a thousand dollars was in fact the price. Most subjunctives are dead or dying and unnecessary. “Whether tomatoes be a fruit or a vegetable” has begun to sound affected, and is not required even in the most formal prose.

  • Verb agreement. More and more, writers make the verb agree with the last noun rather than the true subject of the sentence. (“The issue of continued job losses haunt the administration.” It has to be “haunts.”)

  • Gendered pronouns. In a few instances in this book we have followed the convention by which the masculine pronoun stands for both sexes. This practice is eroding fast, and with reason. Already the rule seems effectively to have changed for subjects that are singular in form but plural in meaning. “Everyone should do his best,” we were taught to say. Or “Nobody knows his manners these days.” In these cases the plural pronoun (“Everyone should do their best”) avoids bias at no great cost to the language. The New York Times copy desk now allows this violation. In at least some other situations—for instance, an address to the graduating class of male and female firefighters—common decency endorses using the awkward “his or her.”

  In other cases requiring a singular pronoun, some writers change “he” to “she,” whether consistently or alternately or randomly. This may have come to seem natural to those who do it, but to many readers (to us) it seems self-congratulatory. But then again, we are members of a generation that hears a stern voice in the ear enforcing the old rule. It is a weak defense to point out that the voice belongs to a woman who was teaching sixth grade.

  Other solutions have been proposed. The conservative writer Charles Murray has an idea that is simplicity itself: use the pronoun appropriate to your own sex. (Jane says everyone/her; John says everyone/his. Unfortunately no one seems to recognize this rule except Charles Murray, and it costs him nothing to follow it since he is a man.

  The language has yet to come up with a universally acceptable solution. In most cases it’s possible to write around the problem, by making the subject plural or changing the sentence s
tructure in some other way.

  • “May” and “might.” Avoid the troubling construction favored by sportscasters in which something that could have happened in the past is described as if perhaps it did happen: “If he’d caught that pass, they may have won the game.” The past tense of “may” is “might.”

  • “Who” and “whom” confusion. In speech, one can always use “who” when in doubt. It is better to be informal and wrong than wrong and pompous. Common pompous errors: “Whom shall I say is calling?” “Give the job to whomever will do it better.” The rule governing such constructions isn’t altogether obvious. “Whom” is the objective case, but in phrases like the preceding ones the whole clause (“whoever will do it better”) functions as the object, with “whoever” the subject of the clause. This rule may be arbitrary, but it is the rule, and violations of it grate on educated ears. In formal writing you don’t want to be wrong or pompous, so it’s worth taking time to figure it out. “Who shall I say is calling?” is correct, as is “The person whom you called is not in.”

  • “Which” and “that.” Fastidious writers congratulate themselves on getting the distinction right, and the more libertine take at least as much pleasure in their ignorance. One ought to know the distinction and follow the rule without getting snooty about it. The crux of the matter is the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. Modern English Usage explains it in more detail than almost anyone requires, but the passage is clear, definitive, and entertaining. See Fowler.

  WRITING GUIDES AND REFERENCES: A SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The Artful Edit, by Susan Bell (Norton)

  The Art of Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts (Graywolf Press)

  The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard (Harper & Row)