Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Moe, Larry, and Curly.
Tinkers to Evers to Chance.
A priest, a minister, and a rabbi.
Executive, legislative, judicial.
The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.
At the end of his most famous passage on the nature of love, Saint Paul writes to the Corinthians: "For now, faith, hope, and love abide, these three. But the greatest of all is love." The powerful movement is from trinity to unity, from a sense of the whole to an understanding of what is most important.
THE LANGUAGE OF FOUR AND MORE
In the anti-math of writing, the number three is greater than four. The mojo of three offers a greater sense of completeness than four or more. Once we add a fourth or fifth detail, we have achieved escape velocity, breaking out of the circle of wholeness:
That girl is smart, sweet, determined, and neurotic.
We can add descriptive elements to infinity. Four or more details in a passage can offer a flowing, literary effect that the best writers have created since Homer listed the names of the Greek tribes. Consider the beginning of Jonathan Lethem's novel Motherless Brooklyn:
Context is everything. Dress me up and see. I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster. I've got Tourette's.
If we check these sentences against our theory of numbers, it would reveal this pattern: 1 -2-5-1. In the first sentence the author declares a single idea, stated as the absolute truth. In the next sentence, he gives the reader two imperative verbs. In the next, he spins five metaphors. In the final sentence, the writer returns to a definitive declaration — so important he casts it in italics. So good writing is as easy as one, two, three — and four. In summary:
• Use one for power.
• Use two for comparison, contrast.
• Use three for completeness, wholeness, roundness.
• Use four or more to list, inventory, compile, and expand.
WORKSHOP
1. In your reading, notice passages where the writer uses the number of examples to achieve a specific effect.
2. Reread examples of your recent work. Examine your use of numbers. Look for cases in which you might add an example or subtract one to create the effects described above.
3. Brainstorm with friends to list examples of the use of one, two, three, and four. Draw these from proverbs, everyday speech, music lyrics, famous orations, literature, and sports.
4. Look for an opportunity to use a long list in your writing. (For example, the names of kittens in a litter. The items in the window of an old drugstore. Objects abandoned at the bottom of a swimming pool.) Play with the order to achieve the best effect.
In "Why I Write," George Orwell explains that "good prose is like a window pane." The best work calls the reader's attention to the world being described, not to the writer's flourishes. When we peer out a window onto the horizon, we don't notice the pane, yet the pane frames our vision just as the writer frames our view of the story.
Most writers have at least two modes. One says, "Pay no attention to the writer behind the curtain. Look only at the world." The other says, without inhibition, "Watch me dance. Aren't I a clever fellow?" In rhetoric, these two modes have names. The first is called understatement. The second is called overstatement or hyperbole.
Here's a tool of thumb that works for me: The more serious or dramatic the subject, the more the writer backs off, creating the effect that the story tells itself. The more playful or inconsequential the topic, the more the writer can show off. Back off or show off.
Consider John Hersey's opening to Hiroshima:
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6,
1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb
flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl in the next desk.
Described by some as the most important work of nonfiction in the twentieth century, this book begins with the most ordinary of circumstances, a recitation of the time and date, with two office workers about to converse. The flash of the atomic bomb hides inside that sentence. Because we imagine the horror to follow, Hersey's understatement creates the anxiety of anticipation.
Here is how Mikal Gilmore, the brother of infamous killer Gary Gilmore, begins Shot in the-Heart:
I have a story to tell. It is a story of murder told from inside the house where murder is born. It is the house where I grew up, a house that, in some ways, I have never been able to leave. And if I ever hope to leave this place, I must tell what I know. So let me begin.
The events of this story are brutal and tragic, yet Gilmore's monosyllabic prose is as spare as a cell on death row.
Contrast such understatement to the razzmatazz of Saul Pett, who wrote this description of New York City's sprightly mayor Ed Koch for the Associated Press:
He is the freshest thing to blossom in New York since chopped liver, a mixed metaphor of a politician, the antithesis of the packaged leader, irrepressible, candid, impolitic, spontaneous, funny, feisty, independent, uncowed by voter blocs, unsexy, unhandsome, unfashionable and altogether charismatic, a man oddly at peace with himself in an unpeaceful place, a mayor who presides over the country's largest Babel with unseemly joy.
Pett's prose is vaudevillian, over-the-top, a little song, a little dance, a squirt of seltzer down your pants — as was Mayor Koch. Although municipal politics can be serious business, the context here allows Pett space for a full theatrical review.
The clever uberwriter can, in the words of Anna Quindlen, "write your way onto page one," as investigative reporter Bill Nottingham did the day his city editor assigned him to cover the local spelling bee for the St. Petersburg Times: "Thirteen-year-old Lane Boy is to spelling what Billy the Kid was to gun-fighting, icy-nerved and unflinchingly accurate."
To understand the difference between understatement and overstatement, consider the cinematic difference between two Steven Spielberg movies. In Schindler's List, Spielberg evokes the catastrophes of the Holocaust rather than depict them in graphic detail. In a black-and-white movie, he makes us follow the trials and inevitable death of one little Jewish girl dressed in red. Saving Private Ryan reveals the gruesome effects of warfare on the shores of France during the invasion of Normandy, complete with severed limbs and spurting arteries, all in color. I, for one, favor the more restrained approach, where the artist leaves room for my imagination.
"If it sounds like writing," writes hard-boiled novelist Elmore Leonard, "I rewrite it."
WORKSHOP
1. Keep your eyes open for lively stories that make their way onto page one of the newspaper, even though they lack traditional news value. Discuss how they were written and what might have appealed to the editor.
2. Review some of the stories written after great tragedies, such as the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, or the 2004 tsunami that killed thousands in Southeast Asia. Notice the difference between the stories that feel restrained and the ones that seem overwritten.
3. Read some examples of feature obituaries from the book produced by the New York Times, titled Portraits of Grief. Study the understated ways in which these are written.
4. Read works of humor from writers such as Woody Allen, Roy Blount Jr., Dave Barry, S. J. Perelman, and Steve Martin. Look for examples of both hyperbole and understatement.
Good writers move up and down a ladder of language. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like freedom and literacy. Beware of the middle, the rungs of the ladder where bureaucracy and technocracy lurk. Halfway up, teachers are referred to as full-time equivalents, and school lessons are called instructional units.
The ladder of abstraction rema
ins one of the most useful models of thinking and writing ever invented. Popularized by S. I. Hayakawa in his 1939 book Language in Action, the ladder has been adopted and adapted in hundreds of ways to help people ponder language and express meaning.
The easiest way to make sense of this tool is to begin with its name: the ladder of abstraction. That name contains two nouns. The first is ladder, a specific tool you can see, hold with your hands, and climb. It involves the senses. You can do things with it. Put it against a tree to rescue your cat Voodoo. The bottom of the ladder rests on concrete language. Concrete is hard, which is why when you fall off the ladder from a high place, you might break your foot. Your right foot. The one with the spider tattoo.
The second noun is abstraction. You can't eat it or smell it or measure it. It is not easy to use as a case study. It appeals not to the senses, but to the intellect. It is an idea that cries out for exemplification.
A 1964 essay by John Updike begins, "We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements." That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion? The answer is in his second sentence: "Consider the beer can." To be even more specific, Updike complained that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of opening a can of beer. Pop-top and beer rest at the bottom of the ladder, aesthetic experience at the top.
We learned this language lesson in kindergarten when we played show-and-tell. When we showed the class our 1957 Mickey Mantle baseball card, we were at the bottom of the ladder. When we told the class about what a great season Mickey had in 1956, we started to climb the ladder, toward the meaning of greatness.
Here's Updike again in his novel Marry Me:
Outside their bedroom windows, beside the road, stood a giant elm, one of the few surviving in Greenwood. New leaves were curled in the moment after the bud unfolds, their color sallow, a dusting, a veil not yet dense enough to conceal the anatomy of branches. The branches were sinuous, stately, constant: an inexhaustible comfort to her eyes. Of all things accessible to Ruth's vision the elm most nearly persuaded her of a cosmic benevolence. If asked to picture God, she would have pictured this tree.
Just as he moved down the ladder from "gratuitous inventions" to "beer can," here Updike goes the other way, gaining the altitude of meaning by climbing this "giant elm" toward "cosmic benevolence."
Carolyn Matalene, an influential writing teacher from South Carolina, taught me that when I write prose that the reader can neither see nor understand, I'm probably trapped halfway up the
ladder. What does language look like from that halfway vantage point? Let me answer with a story about one of my favorite schools in Florida, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Elementary. Since 1992 the teachers have dedicated themselves to helping every child learn to write. During a workshop there, I asked the principal if the school had developed a mission statement. She sent a helper to fetch a fancy, laminated page:
Our mission is to improve student achievement and thereby prepare students for continued learning in middle school and high school. This learning community will accomplish this mission by developing and implementing world class learning systems. Alignment will be monitored by continual application of quality principles and responsiveness to customer expectations.
I'm not making this up. I've got the original in my office if you'd like to see it. How did it wind up in my office? In an act of vigilante dedication to good writing, I stole it. Before long, the principal sent me a little card with the new mission statement, this one free of jargon and numbing bureaucratic language. It reads: "Our mission: Learning to write, writing to learn." Because I love the teachers and the principal, I proclaim this the greatest revision of the twentieth century.
One of America's finest baseball writers, Thomas Boswell, wrote in an essay on the aging of athletes:
The cleanup crews come at midnight, creeping into the ghostly quarter-light of empty ballparks with their slow-sweeping brooms and languorous, sluicing hoses. All season, they remove the inanimate refuse of a game. Now, in the dwindling days of September and October, they come to collect baseball souls.
Age is the sweeper, injury his broom.
Mixed among the burst beer cups and the mustard-smeared wrappers headed for the trash heap, we find old friends who are
being consigned to the dust bin of baseball's history, (from the
Washington Post)
The abstract "inanimate refuse" soon becomes visible as "burst beer cups" and "mustard-smeared wrappers." And those cleanup crews with their very real brooms and hoses transmogrify into grim reapers in search of "baseball souls."
Metaphors and similes help us understand abstractions through comparison with concrete things. "Civilization is a stream with banks," wrote Will Durant in LIFE magazine, working both ends of the ladder. "The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river."
Two questions will help you make this tool work. "Can you give me an example?" will drive the speaker down the ladder. But "What does that mean?" will carry him aloft.
WORKSHOP
1. Read with the distinction between abstract and concrete in your head. Be alert to moments when you need an example, or when you want to reach for a higher meaning. Notice if the level of language moves from the concrete to the more abstract.
2. Find essays and reports about bureaucracy and public policy that seem stuck in the middle of the ladder of abstraction. What kind of reporting or research would be necessary to climb down or up, to help the reader see or understand?
3. Listen to song lyrics to hear how the language moves on the ladder of abstraction. "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose." Or "War, what is it good for, absolutely nothin'." Or "Give me a sista, I can't resist her, red beans and rice didn't miss her." Notice how concrete words and images in music express abstractions such as love, hope, lust, and fear.
4. Read several of your stories and describe, in three words or less, what each story is really about. Is it about friendship, loss, legacy, betrayal? Are there ways to make such higher meanings clearer to the reader by being even more specific?
Of all effects created by writers, none is more important or elusive than that quality called voice. Good writers, it is said time and again, want to find their voice. And they want that voice to be authentic, a word that reminds me of author and authority.
But what is voice, and how does the writer tune it?
The most useful definition comes from my friend and colleague Don Fry: "Voice is the sum of all the strategies used by the author to create the illusion that the writer is speaking directly to the reader from the page." The most important words in that definition are "create," "illusion," and "speaking": voice is an effect created by the writer that reaches the reader through his ears, even when he is receiving the message through his eyes.
Poet David McCord remembers that he once picked up an old copy of St. Nicholas magazine, which printed stories written by children. One story caught his attention, and he was "suddenly struck by a prose passage more earthy and natural in voice than what I had been glancing through. This sounds like E. B. White, I said to myself. Then I looked at the signature: Elwyn Brooks White, age 11." McCord recognized the elements of style — the voice — of the young author who would one day grow up to write Charlotte's Web.
If Fry is correct, that voice is the "sum" of all writing strategies, which of those strategies are essential to creating the illusion of speech? To answer that question, think of a piece of sound equipment called a graphic equalizer. This is the device that creates the range of sounds in an amplifier by providing about thirty dials or le
vers, controlling such things as bass and treble. Push up the bass, pull down the treble, add a little reverb to configure the desired sound.
So, if we all had a handy-dandy writing-voice modulator, what ranges would the levers control? Here are a few, expressed as a set of questions:
• What is the level of language? That is to say, does the writer use street slang or the logical argument of a professor of metaphysics? Is the level of language at the bottom of the ladder of abstraction or near the top? Does it move up and down?
• What "person" does the writer work in? Does the writer use I or we or you or they or all of these?
• What are the range and the source of allusions? Do these come from high or low culture, or both? Does the writer cite a medieval theologian or a professional wrestler? Or both?
• How often does the writer use metaphors and other figures of speech? Does the writer want to sound more like the poet, whose work is rich with figurative images, or the journalist, who uses them for special effect?
• What is the length and structure of the typical sentence? Are sentences short and simple? Long and complex? Or mixed?
• What is the distance from neutrality? Is the writer trying to be objective, partisan, or passionate?
• How does the writer frame her material? Is she on beat or offbeat? Does the writer work with standard subject matter, using conventional story forms? Or is she experimental and iconoclastic?
Consider this passage, a CBS radio broadcast by Edward R. Murrow, on the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945. Read it aloud to experience the voice of the writer:
We entered. It was floored with concrete. There were two rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. They were thin and very white. Some of the bodies were terribly bruised, though there seemed to be little flesh to bruise. Some had been shot through the head, but they bled but little. All except two were naked. I tried to count them as best I could and arrived at the conclusion that all that was mortal of more than five hundred men and boys lay there in two neat piles.
The journalist grounds his report in the language of eyewitness testimony. I can hear the struggle between the professional reporter and the outraged human being. The level of language is concrete and vivid, describing terrible things to see. He uses a single chilling simile, "stacked up like cordwood," but the rest seems plain and straightforward. The sentences are mostly short and simple. His writing voice is not neutral — how could it be? — but it describes the world he sees and not the emotions of the reporter. Yet he places himself on the scene in the last sentence, using "I" to give no doubt that he has seen this with his own eyes. The phrase "all that was mortal" sounds literary, as if it had come from Shakespeare. This brief X-ray reading of Murrow's work shows the interaction of the various strategies that create the effect we know as voice.
Writing Tools Page 8
