Writing Tools
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Amy Fusselman provides an example with the first sentence of her novel, The Pharmacist's Mate: "Don't have sex on a boat unless you want to get pregnant." The most intriguing words come near the beginning and at the end. Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses this strategy at the opening of One Hundred Years of Solitude to dazzling effect: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
What applies to the sentence also applies to the paragraph, as Alice Sebold demonstrates in this passage: "In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky." That final word resonates with such pain and power that Sebold turns it into the title of her memoir, Lucky.
These tools of emphasis are as old as rhetoric itself. Near the end of Shakespeare's famous tragedy, a character announces to Macbeth: "The Queen, my lord, is dead." This astonishing example of the power of emphatic word order is followed by one of the darkest passages in all of literature. Macbeth says:
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
The poet has one great advantage over those who write prose. He knows where the line will end. He gets to emphasize a word at the end of a line, a sentence, a paragraph. We prose writers make do with the sentence and the paragraph — signifying something.
WORKSHOP
1. Read Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and study emphatic word order.
2. With a pencil in hand, read an essay you admire. Circle the first and last words in each paragraph.
3. Do the same for recent examples of your work. Revise sentences so that powerful and interesting words, which may be hiding in the middle, appear near the beginning and at the end.
4. Survey your friends to get the names of their dogs. Write these in alphabetical order. Imagine that this list appears in a story. Play with the order of the names. Which should go first? Which last? Why?
President John F. Kennedy testified that a favorite book was From Russia with Love, the 1957 James Bond adventure by Ian Fleming. This choice revealed more about JFK than we knew at the time and created a cult of 007 that persists to this day.
The power of Fleming's prose flows from active verbs. In sentence after sentence, page after page, England's favorite secret agent, or his beautiful companion, or his villainous adversary, performs the action of the verb (the emphasis is mine):
Bond climbed the few stairs and unlocked his door and locked and bolted it behind him. Moonlight filtered through the curtains. He walked across and turned on the pink-shaded lights on the dressing-table. He stripped off his clothes and went into the bathroom and stood for a few minutes under the shower.... He cleaned his teeth and gargled with a sharp mouthwash to get rid of the taste of the day and turned off the bathroom light and went back into the bedroom....
Bond gave a shuddering yawn. He let the curtains drop back into place. He bent to switch off the lights on the dressing-table. Suddenly he stiffened and his heart missed a beat.
There had been a nervous giggle from the shadows at the back of the room. A girl's voice said, "Poor Mister Bond. You must be tired. Come to bed."
In writing this passage, Fleming followed the advice of his countryman George Orwell, who wrote of verbs: "Never use the passive where you can use the active."
I learned the distinction between active and passive voice as early as fifth grade. Thank you, Sister Katherine William. I failed to learn, until much later, why that distinction mattered. But let me first correct a popular misconception. The voice of verbs (active or passive) has nothing to do with the tense of verbs. Writers sometimes ask, "Is it ever OK to write in the passive tense?" Tense defines action within time — when the verb happens — the present, past, or future. Voice defines the relationship between subject and verb — who does what.
• If the subject performs the action of the verb, we call the verb active.
• If the subject receives the action of the verb, we call the verb passive.
• A verb that is neither active nor passive is a linking verb, a form of the verb to be.
All verbs, in any tense, fit into one of those three baskets.
News writers reach often for the simple active verb. Consider this New York Times lead by Carlotta Gall on the suicidal desperation of Afghan women:
Waiflike, draped in a pale blue veil, Madina, 20, sits on her hospital bed, bandages covering the terrible, raw burns on her neck and chest. Her hands tremble. She picks nervously at the soles of her feet and confesses that three months earlier she set herself on fire with kerosene.
Both Fleming and Gall use active verbs to power their narratives, but notice an important difference between them. While Fleming uses the past tense to narrate his adventure, Gall prefers the present. This strategy immerses readers in the immediacy of experience, as if we were sitting — right now — beside the poor woman in her grief.
Both Fleming and Gall avoid verb qualifiers that attach themselves to standard prose like barnacles to the hull of a ship:
Scrape away these crustaceans during revision, and the ship of your prose will glide toward meaning with speed and grace.
The earnest writer can overuse a writing tool. If you shoot up your verbs with steroids, you risk creating an effect that poet Donald Hall derides as "false color," the stuff of adventure magazines and romance novels. Temperance controls the impulse to overwrite.
In The Joy Luck Club, novelist Amy Tan exercises exquisite control, using strong verbs to depict the authentic color of emotional truth:
And in my memory I can still feel the hope that beat in me that night. I clung to this hope, day after day, night after night, year after year. I would watch my mother lying in her bed, babbling to herself as she sat on the sofa. And yet I knew that this, the worst possible thing, would one day stop. I still saw bad things in my mind, but now I found ways to change them. I still heard Mrs. Sorci and Teresa having terrible fights, but I saw something else.... I saw a girl complaining that the pain of not being seen was unbearable.
Ian Fleming's verbs describe external action and adventure; Amy Tan's verbs capture internal action and emotion. But action can also be intellectual, in the force and power of an argument, as Albert Camus demonstrates in The Rebel:
The metaphysical rebel protests against the condition in which he finds himself as a man. The rebel slave affirms that there is something in him that will not tolerate the manner in which his master treats him; the metaphysical rebel declares that he is frustrated by the universe.
Notice that even with all the active verbs in that passage, Camus does not pass on the passive when he needs it ("he is frustrated"), which brings us to the next tool.
WORKSHOP
1. Verbs fall into three categories: active, passive, and forms of the verb to be. Review your writing and circle verb forms with a pencil. In the margins, categorize each verb.
2. Convert passive and to be verbs into the active. For example, "It was her observation that" can become "She observed."
3. In your own work and in the newspaper, search for verb qualifiers and see what happens when you cut them.
4. Experiment with both voice and tense. Find a passage you have written in the active voice and in the past tense. Change the verbs to the present tense and consider the effect. Does it seem more immediate?
5.I des
cribed three uses of the active voice: to create outward action, to express inner or emotional action, and to energize an argument. Look for examples of all three in your reading and for opportunities to use them in your writing.
So the gold standard for writing advice is this: use active verbs. Those three words have been uttered in countless writing workshops with such conviction that they must be gospel. But are they?
Check out that last paragraph. In the first clause, I use a form of the verb to be, in this case "is." In the next sentence, I use the passive voice: "have been uttered." In the final sentence, I resort to another form of to be, in this case "are." My point is that you can create acceptable prose, from time to time, without active verbs.
Why, then, does voice matter? It matters because of the different effects active, passive, and to be verbs have on the reader and listener. I'll call on John Steinbeck again to describe this true-life encounter in North Dakota (the emphasis is mine):
Presently I saw a man leaning on a two-strand barbed-wire fence, the wires fixed not to posts but to crooked tree limbs stuck in the ground. The man wore a dark hat, and jeans and long jacket washed palest blue with lighter places at knees and elbows. His pale eyes were frosted with sun glare and his lips scaly as snake-skin. A .22 rifle leaned against the fence beside him and on the ground lay a little heap of fur and feathers — rabbits and small birds. I pulled up to speak to him, saw his eyes wash over Roci-nante, sweep up the details, and then retire into their sockets. And I found I had nothing to say to him ... so we simply brooded at each other, (from Travels with Charley)
I count thirteen verbs in that passage, twelve active and one passive, a ratio George Orwell would admire. The litany of active verbs heats up the scene, even though not much happens. The active verbs reveal who is doing what. The author sees a man. The man wears a hat. The author pulls up to talk with him. They brood at each other. Even inanimate objects perform action. The rifle leans against the fence. Dead animals lie on the ground.
Embedded in all that verbal activity is one splendid passive verb: "His pale eyes were frosted with sun glare." Form follows function. The eyes, in real life, received the action of the sun, so the subject receives the action of the verb.
That's the writing tool: use passive verbs to call attention to the receiver of the action. When columnist Jeff Elder described the extinction of an American species, the passenger pigeon, in the Charlotte Observer, he used passive verbs to paint the birds as victims: "Enormous roosts were gassed from trees. . .. They were shipped to market in rail car after rail car. ... In one human generation, America's most populous native bird was wiped out." The birds do nothing. They are done unto.
The best writers make the best choices between active and passive. A few paragraphs from the one cited above, Steinbeck wrote, "The night was loaded with omens." Steinbeck could have written, "Omens loaded the night," but in that case the active voice would have been unfair to both the night and the omens, the meaning and the music of the sentence.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire uses the distinction between active and passive verbs to challenge an educational system that places the power of teachers over the needs of students. An oppressive educational system, he argues, is one in which:
• the teacher teaches and the students are taught;
• the teacher thinks and the students are thought about;
• the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined.
V
In other words, an oppressive system is one in which the teacher is active and the students are passive.
A strong active verb can add dimension to the cloud created by some uses of the verb to be. Strunk and White provide a nifty example. "There were leaves all over the ground" becomes "Leaves covered the ground." A four-word sentence outworks seven words.
In graduate school, Don Fry helped me see how my prose wilted under the weight of passive and to be verbs. Sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph began, "It is interesting to note that," or, "There are those occasions when" — pompous indirections bred by the quest for an advanced degree.
But there are sweet uses of to be, as Diane Ackerman demonstrates in defining one difference between men and women:
The purpose of ritual for men is to learn the rules of power and competition.. .. The purpose of ritual for women ... is to learn how to make human connections. They are often more intimate and vulnerable with one another than they are with their men, and taking care of other women teaches them to take care of themselves. In these formal ways, men and women domesticate their emotional lives. But their strategies are different, their biological itineraries are different. His sperm needs to travel, her egg needs to settle down. It's astonishing that they survive happily at all. (from A Natural History of Love)
"Domesticate" is a strong active verb. So is "needs" in the sentence about sperm and egg. But, mostly, the author uses the verb to be, what we once called — promiscuously — the copulative verb, to forge some daring intellectual connections. Here, then, are your tools of thumb:
• Active verbs move the action and reveal the actors.
• Passive verbs emphasize the receiver, the victim.
• The verb to be links word and ideas.
These choices are not merely aesthetic. They can also be moral and political. In his essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell describes the relationship between language abuse and political abuse, how corrupt leaders use the passive voice to obscure unspeakable truths and shroud responsibility for their actions. They say, "It must be admitted, now that the report has been reviewed, that mistakes were made," rather than, "I read the report, and I admit I made a mistake." Here's a life tool: always apologize in the active voice.
WORKSHOP
1. Read Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," and discuss his argument that the use of the passive voice contributes to the defense of the indefensible. As you listen to political speech, notice those occasions when politicians and other leaders use the passive voice to avoid responsibility for problems and mistakes.
2. Look for brilliant uses of the passive voice in the newspaper and in fiction. Conduct an imaginary debate with George Orwell in which you defend the passive.
3. Revise your passive and to be verbs into the active, and notice how the emphases in your sentences change. Pay attention to the changed connections — the cohesion — between one sentence and another. What additional revisions do these changes require?
4. The poet Donald Hall argues that active verbs can be too active, that they can lead to macho prose ("He crunched his fist into the Nazi's jaw") and cloying romanticism ("The horizon embraced the setting sun"). In your reading, look for examples of such overheated prose and imagine useful revisions.
The authors of the classic Tom Swift adventures for boys loved the exclamation point and the adverb. Consider this brief passage from Tom Swift and His Great Searchlight:
"Look!" suddenly exclaimed Ned. "There's the agent now!... I'm
going to speak to him!" impulsively declared Ned.
The exclamation point after "Look" should suffice to fire up the young reader, but the author adds "suddenly" and "exclaimed" for good measure. Time and again, the writer uses the adverb, not to change our understanding of the verb, but to intensify it. The silliness of this style led to a form of pun called the "Tom Swiftie," in which the adverb conveys the punch line:
"I'm an artist," he said easily.
"I need some pizza now," he said crustily.
"I'm the Venus de Milo," she said disarmingly.
"I dropped my toothpaste," he said, crestfallen.
At their best, adverbs spice up a verb or adjective. At their worst, they express a meaning already contained in it:
The blast completely destroyed the church office. The cheerleader gyrated wildly before the screaming fans. The accident totally severed the boy's arm. The spy peered furtively through the bushes.
Consider the effect of deleting the adverbs:
The blast destroyed the church office. The cheerleader gyrated before the screaming fans. The accident severed the boy's arm. The spy peered through the bushes.
In each case, the deletion shortens the sentence, sharpens the point, and creates elbow room for the verb. Feel free to disagree.
A half-century after his death, Meyer Berger remains among the greatest stylists in the history of the New York Times. One of his last columns describes the care received in a Catholic hospital by an old blind violinist:
The staff talked with Sister Mary Fintan, who has charge of the hospital. With her consent they brought the old violin to Room 203. It had not been played for years, but Laurence Stroetz groped for it. His long white fingers stroked it. He tuned it, with some effort, and tightened the old bow. He lifted it to his chin and the lion's mane came down.
The vigor of verbs and the absence of adverbs mark Berger's prose. As the old man played "Ave Maria":
Black-clad and white-clad nuns moved lips in silent prayer. They choked up. The long years on the Bowery had not stolen Laurence Stroetz's touch. Blindness made his fingers stumble down to the violin bridge, but they recovered. The music died and the audience pattered applause. The old violinist bowed and his sunken cheeks creased in a smile.
How much better that "the audience pattered applause" than that it "applauded politely."
Adverbiage reflects the style of an immature writer, but the masters can bump their shins as well. In 1963 John Updike wrote a one-paragraph essay, "Beer Can," about the beauty of that sacred vessel before the invention of the pop-top. He reminisced about how suds once "foamed eagerly in the exultation of release." As I've read that sentence over the years, I've grown more impatient with "eagerly." It clogs the space between a great verb ("foamed") and a great noun ("exultation"), which personify the beer and tell us all we need to know about eagerness.