johnmanciniwrites

[johnmanciniwrites]

Attention: This Essay Will Take Approx. 5 Minutes to Read

An Introduction to Critical Thinking

We're fast approaching that hypothetical future point when robots will take over the hard jobs like making toast and folding laundry. The machines are closing the gap, and when we finally reach the "singularity," as it's called, the most immediately recognizable result will be unemployment. Not to worry. You’ll have all the legal pot you could want. Smoking it might make you paranoid about the likelihood you're under surveillance (which of course you are), but at least you won’t have to worry about remembering passwords or calculating tips. Maybe you can even get some reading done.

Whatever you do to prepare yourself for this dystopian inevitability, there are some basic human skills you might want to remember. Good old fashioned street smarts, for one. And other OG stuff like, say, critical thinking—you know, the ability to reason things out for yourself using logic and common sense. Having your own opinion may be your last vestige of liberty in this brave new world. So how might the industrious citizen go about forming an independent thought in today’s commercial landscape?

Step one: kill your television. At least, that was the simple advice offered in the eighties when this bumper sticker adorned the backs Civics and Escorts and Astro vans. Apparently, we used to have a healthy distrust of the establishment in this country. From the Vietnam War through 9/11, most Americans under thirty were skeptical of the Man. You know, "Don't trust anyone over thirty," as those free-speech-loving Berkeley students once said.

Now that I am over thirty and have spent more than a few years teaching writing to undergrads, I sometimes take a survey because I want to know what the kids read (not much, apparently). We compare screentime averages. After several semesters I learned that college students spend roughly six hours a day on their phones, not counting the other screens that crowd the remaining waking hours. The average adult spends only about fifteen minutes a day reading anything--and most of their time within view of a screen.

Don't get me wrong--I like my phone, but I try to remember that what's on the screen is not reality--not exactly. It's a curated representation of reality, a simulation or simulacrum as Baudrillard called it. The algorithm determines our desires and fears with increasing specificity and provides us with symbols to which we can relate--i.e. optimized and monetized content! When it comes to social media, we just happen to be the content they monetize.

Ever notice the way those memes leave an impression after you close your eyes? They return while you're lying in your bed unable to sleep, like a film on the underside of your eyelids, a vague blur that spreads like some drug from a Phillip K. Dick novel--the visual equivalent of earworms. Melodies and lyrics can do that. Or slogans, or words on a page. Images and language seep into our minds and spread like contagion, making contact, rewiring synapses. When we read or watch or listen for extended periods of time, an osmosis occurs.

People with short attention spans are easy to control. They don’t remember the last time they were lied to. Like Charlie Brown, they keep trying to kick that football and Lucy keeps pulling it away at the last second. We fall for the same trick again and again. Propaganda and revisionist history, fear and psychological manipulation, the exploitation of ignorance--Orwell illuminated all of these in both Animal Farm and 1984—two prophetic novels worth rereading (if you have more than fifteen minutes to spare).

So, quality control: Instead of doomscrolling through headlines and social media posts made to order by the almighty algorithm, one thing you might do to improve your critical thinking is read a book from beginning to end—in that order.

Reading is valuable in and of itself—we need not read for content alone. The sound, rhythm, and word order of well composed syntax is nourishment to the mind that thinks with language, that in fact uses language to illuminate the world outside and within. As we read, the brain looks for patterns--identifying the independent clause, retaining the subject and verb as the eyes track through multiple parallels, projecting the direct object or compliment, not to mention grasping the dramatic throughline, the structure and meaning. As W.B. Yeats noted: “As I altered my syntax, I altered my intellect.”

After all, how does one come to understand what a compound, complex thought looks and sounds like without reading one first? Our ability to follow a train of thought is enhanced by the ability to comprehend in parallel subordinate clauses.

Consider the following poem:

“I.M.E.M.” by Anthony Hecht

To spare his brother from having to endure Another agonizing bedside vigil With sterile pads, syringes but no hope, He settled all his accounts, distributed Among a few friends his most valued books, Weighed all in mind and heart and then performed The final, generous, extraordinary act Available to a solitary man, Abandoning his translation of Boileau, Dressing himself in a dark, well-pressed suit, Turning the lights out, lying on his bed, Having requested neighbors to wake him early When, as intended, they would find him dead.

This is one long sentence. The independent clause has four verbs. He settled (accounts), distributed (books), weighed (all) and performed (act). Then that “final, generous, extraordinary act” he performed gets modified by parallel clauses all beginning with their own verbs--abandoning, dressing, turning, lying--the last of which includes an additional adverbial clause (when...).

The first time you encounter this poem you may have some difficulty finding the independent clause (having to wade through a long left-branching introduction has this effect). But by doing so you achieve something similar to what Yeats was after. You alter your intellect.

We know the internet is a collection of stupid facts and sublime fictions, a carnival of conspiracies, a virtual reality curated by a host of companies for whom it would be more profitable to replace our views with their views. And there are oh so many ways to capture our attention-- say, for instance, through the clever means of wrapping a watermelon in rubber bands (as reporters from Buzzfeed did in 2016).

What will happen next? This question guides most content creation: it is a marketing principle known as the curiosity gap. When something surprising creates a gap in our expectations we feel a need to stay tuned, scroll down, click through or swipe. We anticipate more than we inquire.

When was the last time you read a user agreement on your phone? Like everyone else, you probably scrolled to the bottom and clicked accept. Who besides a lawyer can read the bloviated syntax and obfuscating lexicon of contract law and understand it?

Groucho: It's all right. That's in every contract. That's what they call a sanity clause.

Chico: Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! You can't fool me. There ain't no Sanity Clause! 

“Attention is life,” as the poet Mary Oliver said. In other words, when it's over, that which you paid attention to will have been your life. Spoiler: we are each allotted about four thousand weeks in which to figure this out. Which is not to say that you have to kill your television or take a hammer to your phone or stop playing video games, only to recognize, as John Lennon did, that we’re “doped with religion and sex and TV,” and develop an ability to discriminate between that which rots and that which enhances.

Solution: Learn a new routine. Read a new book. Life is full of distractions—some of which actually require our attention--like, say, an oncoming car (or a technological singularity). Unfortunately, Chico was right. There is no Sanity Clause.

[johnmanciniwrites]

Arts & Crafts

Finding Meaning in the Things We Create

Consider the gilded frame, the illuminated pedestal, the banana duct-taped to the gallery wall. Art wants to stand out, to be seen as special, more than just craft. I mean, sure, anyone could do it, but who in their right mind would?

From Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) to Bruce Nauman’s Self-Portrait as a Fountain (1970), art has been disruptive and bold, but in the seventies, performance artists seemed to try and outdo each other with the amount of self-inflicted pain and humiliation they were willing to suffer: whether running face first into a gallery wall or having themselves nailed to a Volkswagen, these guys wanted attention--and got it.

The closest literary equivalent might be Ginsberg’s “Howl,” Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, or Kerouac’s On the Road. Art in the twentieth century was raw, unsettling, intimate, and confrontational. Where did all this defiance and aggression come from? The Surrealists had a lot to do with it, but their defiance got sidetracked by elitism. Until Jackson Pollock swaggered onto the scene, the pursuit of truth and beauty seemed reserved for the intellectual set. Your father would rather you become a banker, a lawyer, or a linebacker. But Pollock tapped into a working-class ethos. Then the hard-drinking, football-playing Kerouac arrived, writing like he talked, writing like Pollock painted—hurling globs of words in an inebriated frenzy.

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

—Kerouac, On the Road

This is word jazz, improvised and unfiltered. But let's go back in time. Immediacy was first introduced to American writing by Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway who prized concision and whittled prose to bare bones:

Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down.

—Anderson, “Hands”

Outside it was getting dark. The streetlight came on outside the window. The two men at the counter read the menu. From the other end of the counter Nick Adams watched them. He had been talking to George when they came in.

—Hemingway, “The Killers”

It was Twain who famously summed up the amount of work that goes into writing like this: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." Until this sort of understated plainspoken sincerity came along, American writers tended to put more butter on the bread:

Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs...

—Thoreau, Walden

After ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light.

—Miur, “First Glimpse of the Sierra”

This is writing that wants to transcend--like poetry--and as the poet Housman said, "Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it." But from the factories of the Industrial Revolution through the carnage of the World War I, transcendent illusions were shattered, art got surreal, and language got difficult:

​It is very difficult so difficult that it always has been difficult but even more difficult now to know what is the relation of human nature to the human mind because one has to know what is the relation of the act of creation to the subject the creator uses to create that thing.

—Stein “What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them?”

Huh? you might ask. That matronly figure of modernism, Gertrude Stein wrote self-conscious prose, her complex, layered style tending to fragment and obscure--like Cubism. Here she is as painted by Picasso:

When I was living in LA, I briefly worked—“briefly” characterizing most work in LA—at a nonprofit that offered arts enrichment programs at elementary schools. Navigating surface streets from Crenshaw to Brentwood, I arrived at playgrounds with my box of supplies, and spent the afternoon struggling to keep eight or so kids busy until their parents arrived. I handed out wood scraps and hammers and nails and showed them how to build birdhouses. When I turned my back, one little boy would inevitably start throwing nails at the girl he liked, which I realize now was actually more of an artistic act—performance!—than the lame activity I had been assigned to teach. Here was an artist! A lovesick one, too.

These kids were not learning art; they were learning a craft. A birdhouse, like a rocking chair, however well-crafted, doesn’t mean anything. It's not art; it’s practical. The phrase “arts and crafts” always makes me think of fourth graders taking a break from science class to glue some dried macaroni to posterboard—like recess, only less sweaty. The problem is that the word “art” suffers from semantic bleaching, like genius or amazing. These days we have the art of the deal, the art of seduction, the art of the talking points memo. None of this has helped art’s case for separateness.

There are different sections in libraries for fiction and literature, and when you walk into a bookstore (if you can find one) you may see a section devoted to Classics and another to Best Sellers. I always wondered if it bothered serious writers to get lumped in with the mass market romcoms and spy thrillers. What does one have to do besides die in obscurity to be elevated to the academy of Literature? Must the artist's pants always be fancy?

The tendency to think of art as something stylish rather than plain, especially in the literary arts, has led to a lot of beautifully written novels in which nothing happens. (I’m looking at you, Proust.) Some great novelists sacrifice momentum for verbal acrobatics. Unfortunately, most fiction readers are looking for a good plot, not poetry--and as Auden said, "Poetry makes nothing happen."

So if you want to sell some books, tell a story, and if you want to tell a story, keep it simple. When we’re engrossed in a ripping yarn, the sentences dissolve. Verisimilitude, it's called. Old school virtual reality—no oversized goggles required. 

Ever try to get a dog to look at something by pointing at it? The dog looks at your hand, not the thing. This is the problem with modernist literature, and most poetry. The eye is constantly drawn back to the surface. If you learn how to manipulate syntax, and you listen closely, you may replicate the voice of a ten-year old girl in a Tennessee trailer park, or an English aristocrat aboard the Titanic. Both pose interesting style choices--but beware. As Stein said to Hemingway: “Ernest, remarks are not literature.” What she was alluding to, I think, was the importance of depth, structure, and artistic intention in a work of art.

Somewhere around the late nineteenth century artists stopped looking for beauty outside themselves and started painting what was in their heads. Painters abandoned the representational image, and writers started admiring their sentences too much. They all started playing mind games. They left bloodstains on the floor and taped bananas to the wall.

Reason for being is a big subject, bigger than I have space for here, and short of going down a rabbit hole of relativism in which your truth is just as valid as any other and we can all go home and stare at our bellybuttons, maybe we can agree that there is a pantheon of great art into which over time more are admitted through discovery or changing taste. Who can say what will be considered good art fifty years from now? Sometimes a tree falls in the forest, and we don’t hear it for a very long time.

These writers were dead long before they were appreciated: Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, William Blake, Herman Melville, Sylvia Plath. There are others. So maybe you don’t have to make a lot of noise or concern yourself so much with being heard here and now. Maybe crafting the thing with care and intention is enough. But if you decide to throw nails at the girl that you love, I wouldn’t expect her to love you back. At least not right away.

*If you enjoy essays like this, read Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard.

[johnmanciniwrites]

5 Things Every Story Should Have

Time, Rhythm, Momentum & Blood...

When I studied creative writing at San Francisco State, my fiction workshop teacher, Peter Orner, cited these four things as central to storytelling. But one thing about Peter, he didn’t like to explain too much. He preferred to let students draw their own conclusions. Here are a few of mine—plus a fifth thing.

Time—Every story has a timeline, whether it’s one lazy afternoon or one unforgettable year or one terrible childhood. Take Raymond Carver’s story, “Cathedral.” It’s about what happens one night when a man’s wife invites an old friend to dinner. Even though the story is frontloaded with three pages of backstory, the real time of the story—the what happened when—covers a single night, the night the blind guy comes to visit.

Rhythm—Listen to the voice, the style of the language, the word choice and order, the sentence variety, the simple and complex music of the lines. In other words, the syntax. Syntax is like the soundtrack of the story. It’s the voice in the reader’s head that moves them along. It is, I think, what E.M. Forster means when he says, “In music, fiction is likely to find its nearest parallel.”

Momentum—It's hard to distinguish this from rhythm, but I think momentum has more to do with dramatic development. The anticipation or curiosity created in the reader. A popular novel may not have the most appealing sentence structure, but it always has momentum. That’s why they call it a page-turner. On the other hand, there are beautifully written novels with zero momentum.

Blood—The reader wants to feel something beyond momentum. Peter called this "blood." You might also call it drama or felt life. Does a writer need to open a vein to write? There ought to be some level of honesty, something that makes it feel real—in the heart, the stomach, the throat. And not just that which is manufactured through sensory detail, but which is understood emotionally, in context. Why events matter. In War and Peace, when Andrei sees his Little Princess, who has died in childbirth, "put away like this into the ground," the horror of that, the remorselessness of this scene—that's blood. That's drama. But there's probably more than one way. The musical comedy, for instance. Laughter is also a feeling.

For some reason, Place (setting) seems to have been left off this list. I don’t think Peter will mind if I add it here. Setting, I would argue, is equally important and can significantly change a story. A love story that takes place in a desert would be very different on a crowded bus, or say, an elevator. Setting can determine character. Just ask Gretel Ehrlich, whose book, The Solace of Open Spaces, goes to great lengths to show how those desolate windswept landscapes of Wyoming shaped the values and stories of the people who live there.

So now we have five, which is perhaps more symbolic than four--more pentagrammic, at least. But before you go, think about this one: momentum, that element that makes the reader want to keep turning the page, that mysterious thing that makes a story move.

Q: What creates momentum?

A: Pressure

The combustion of fuel and air in an engine exerts pressure on the cylinders. It makes the car go. What exerts pressure in a story?

From Raymond Carver “Cathedral”:

“If you love me,” she said, “you can do this for me. If you don’t love me, okay. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable.”

Stressors close in from all sides: work, school, parents, peers, media, society. The children have needs, the boss has demands, friends have opinions, advice, requests. Even gravity is a force that exerts influence over the body. Side note: gravity also means extreme or alarming importance, a seriousness or solemnity of manner. In other words, language can have gravity. The words we choose can add psychological or physical pressure.

Creative writing classes often focus on “urgency,” but what is urgent for you may not be for me. Interpretation varies. Momentum in a story is the result of dramatic tension, usually something unexpected that sparks curiosity. People create little and big conflicts for each other, through suggestion, coercion, manipulation.

There’s something I want you to do. I have a request. Do me a favor. Listen to me. Can you keep a secret? I dare you. I’m begging. I’m pleading—no, I’m demanding your attention. Will you comply? Will you heed this call to action?

This is the hero’s task, as Joseph Campbell would tell us. This is the beginning of story. Decision time. Life is about to be thrown off balance. The promise to the reader is that whatever happens, the character will change for better or worse. They may refuse the call altogether, which would be a different kind of story, one of quiet desperation perhaps.

“If you love me,” she said, “you can do this for me.” Will Carver’s narrator accept this challenge and be friendly, or will he be a jerk? He’ll have to decide. The tension inherent in the choice creates momentum, dramatic urgency.

In the immortal words of Nathanial “Toots” Hibbert: “When it drops, you gonna feel it.” What he was singing about was pressure. For more on this point and how to apply it to writing, see Charles Baxter’s book on craft, Burning Down the House.

[johnmanciniwrites]

Bits & Pieces

When, Why, and How to Write Incomplete Sentences

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“Fragments are the only forms I trust.” – Donald Barthelme

The soundbite goes viral. People rally round a slogan. The meme speaks volumes. In our fragmented media landscape, phrases have more currency than clauses. Though this may not be what Dr. John meant when he said we walk on gilded splinters, in fact we do!

In his 1857 poem, “The Swan,” Baudelaire complained of an “immense nausea of billboards.” Imagine, even back then commercialism was overwhelming people with superficial distractions and empty promises. In a way, his take on a fragmented reality anticipates postmodernists like Barthelme, who responded to his own generation's deluge of sensory stimuli and existential anxieties by trusting their formal importance.

If fragmentation is key to understanding the modern or post-modern or post-post-modern condition, it might explain why Microsoft Word no longer offers a squiggly line when I write an incomplete sentence. Maybe it no longer matters. But maybe it should. Knowing when, why, and how to break the rules is an artist’s job.

One used to learn in grade school what makes a complete thought, when that thought “runs on” into another complete thought, when the writer should insert a period instead of a comma. But these days the nuts and bolts of grammar are rarely taught. If at all. Some universities offer tutoring sessions on fragments and run-ons. Attendance is optional.

So here's a tutoring session you can take at your leisure.

The well-placed fragment can add style and emphasis and even increase dramatic tension in your work. Fragments are often built on parallels, so it helps to have some understanding of syntax, such as being able to recognize a series of verb phrases when you write one. But a basic ear for language and voice should tell you when to pause with a comma, take a sip from the oversized Yeti or Stanley cup, and carry on. Or when you need to make a full stop. And then start again. A feel for rhythm and momentum can be learned. 

From Postcards by Annie Proulx:

Even before he got up he knew he was on his way.  Even in the midst of the involuntary orgasmic jerking he knew.  Knew she was dead, knew he was on his way.  Even standing there on shaking legs, trying to push the copper buttons through the stiff buttonholes he knew that everything he had done or thought in his life had to be started over again. Even if he got away.

The main clause (the complete thought) in the first two sentences is “he knew.” The fragment is built on the verb, knew. The first fragment announces a dramatic surprise in dramatic fashion. It increases urgency. The second is built on the modifying conditional phrase, even if. Repetition is key.

Here’s one from William Faulkner’s “Dry September”:

Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass – the rumor, the story, whatever it was.  Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro.  Attacked, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what had happened.

The fragment here is an appositive, basically the fourth item in the parallel list that tries to name the thing that had “gone like a fire in dry grass—the rumor, the story, whatever it was.” By isolating the last and most telling of the items in this list Faulkner strikes a power chord that emphasizes the scandal. It's also worth noting the long final sentence there, which seems to spread, from comma to comma, like the rumor itself.   

Here’s one from Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy:

We sat in the car instead, the broad front seat.  There was the scent of stale cigarettes and old joints and the sweet smell of the beach towel I held on my lap.  You were tan and wore the leather band around your right wrist. Just out of Stony Brook.  Worked a charter fishing boat all summer.  Wanted to own one of your own.  Wanted to see the west coast.  Never went into the city, didn’t like it.  Couldn’t imagine living in a place like Rosedale, going to college way up in Buffalo.  A Bonacker, a real Bonacker.  But your mouth was dry and your eyes dark brown.

These seven parallel fragments are all extensions of the previous sentence which tells us what you were. Most of them are verb phrases in which the you is implied (worked, wanted, went, didn’t like, couldn’t imagine) and the final fragment breaks this pattern with an implied intransitive verb (you were a bonacker). Notice how she returns to a complete sentence for the final line in this paragraph, breaking the pattern and adding closure.

You can build fragments with resumptive modifiers, by repeating a word and saying more about it. Consider the following example from Tobias Wolff’s “The Other Miller”:

For once, everybody else is on the outside and Miller is on the inside. Inside, on his way to a hot shower, dry clothes, a pizza, and a warm bunk.

Like the example from Faulkner, the following fragment is an appositive, which could have easily been incorporated into the sentence it is modifying—perhaps with an em dash—but the writer isolates it with fragmentation. It is also an appositive, essentially a long parallel modifier that renames “coal miners.”

From Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games:

Our part of District 12, nicknamed the Seam, is usually crawling with coal miners heading out to the morning shift at this hour. Men and women with hunched shoulders, swollen knuckles, many who have long since stopped trying to scrub the coal dust out of their broken nails, the lines of their sunken faces. But today the black cinder streets are empty. Shutters on the square grey houses are closed. The reaping isn’t until two. May as well sleep in. If you can.

I like that one at the end. If you can. The well-placed fragment announces itself. The sentence could have read “May as well sleep in—if you can” and perhaps achieved a similar effect. But by fragmenting the final phrase she cuts up the rhythm even more and adds an eerie tension to the notion of trying to sleep through what's coming. Which makes sense. This is, after all, the day of the reaping.                                  

So have no fear of fragments. They are not incorrect. No red pen required. In fact, their experimental and unconventional nature may be a proper reaction to our fragmented world. A more authentic reflection of the human condition in the twenty-first century.

[johnmanciniwrites]

Sound, Rhythm & Word Order

Understanding Sentence Patterns and Variety

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All English sentences are built on five basic patterns. The differences among the patterns lie in the predicate, the verb and what follows it.

#1.       subject + verb

           The snow fell.

           The powdery snow fell silently to the ground.

In a sentence using pattern 1 the verb is intransitive; its meaning does not need to be completed by an object or a complement. The addition of adjectives and adverbs doesn’t change the pattern.

#2.       subject + verb + subject complement

           Einstein was a genius.

           Barbed wire seems menacing.

This pattern occurs with intransitive verbs often called “linking” verbs. Linking verbs connect the subject with a noun that renames the subject or an adjective that describes the subject. Here the verb acts as an equal sign between the subject and complement. A = B.

#3.       subject + transitive verb + direct object

           Dogs eat bones.

           The carpenter will repair the roof.

A transitive verb transfers its action to a direct object. The direct object is always a noun, a pronoun, a noun phrase, or a noun clause.

#4.       subject + verb + direct object + object complement

           The press calls him a star.

           We are making the clerk angry.

An object complement is a noun or an adjective that renames or describes the direct object. Only a few verbs (appoint, believe, call, consider, elect, find, judge, make, etc.) allow this pattern.

#5.       subject + verb + indirect object + direct object

           My friend lent me her car.

           Gandhi brought India independence.

An indirect object tells to whom or for whom the action of the verb is intended. My friend lent her car to whom? Me.

The above lesson was borrowed from Edward Perlman, who has taught a course on advanced grammar at Johns Hopkins University for many years. I never enjoyed diagramming a sentence before I took Ed’s course. His message is insightful--think about it. Everything written in the English language is based on five basic sentence patterns?! There are, of course, limitless combinations of these patterns.

“Revision is three-fourths of the process,” said novelist Thomas McGuane. The above lesson provides a foundation for creative style editing. Once you can locate the subject and the verb, etc., you can use the other “stuff” as window dressing. As Ed said, “everything else is embroidery.” In other words, decoration. You can move information around to modify your sentence however you like. Prepositional phrases, for instance, can often slide from one end of the sentence to the other.

          I found the place in the dark.

          In the dark, I found the place.

Or you might rewrite that sentence completely, choosing a different pattern, hearing a different rhythm or emphasis. By the time I found the place it was dark. Now I’m emphasizing when I found the place. 

The writer has to listen to the sound of the sentences and decide. Short sentences have a different effect on the reader than long sentences. Short sentences may stress urgency, as do fragments. Too much repetitive structure might put the reader to sleep. Readers crave variety, and that’s usually what to go for. Look at the following paragraph, in which every sentence is a different length and pattern.

I found the place in the dark. Moonlight glimmered on the pearly shells of fossil oysters. There were some ducks swimming on the lake, black forms on silver ripples. I followed a thread of golden light into a clump of poplars. A dog barked. The door opened and the dog slunk past with a lump of red meat in its mouth. The woman pointed to a cabin in some willows. 

From In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

If we break down Chatwin’s paragraph into grammatical units (subject, verb, etc.) we can potentially rewrite the entire paragraph with different words, a super fun and slightly insane exercise I like to call...

SYNTACTICAL MAD LIBS

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Remember playing Mad Libs in grade school? Well, here is an advanced version you can play to teach yourself something about sentence structure. First choose a sentence that you admire, something you think is well-written. Then break down that well-written sentence into its essential parts. Now insert your own words, creating a new sentence that borrows the syntax of the original. 

Here’s an example 

An original sentence by Bruce Chatwin:

          "Moonlight glimmered on the pearly shells of fossil oysters."

What happens here? Light from the moon shows us something. The sentence is composed of a subject (moonlight) followed by the verb (glimmered). What follows that are two prepositional phrases beginning with on and of—both of which describe a relationship (where something happens or how it happens, because that’s what prepositional phrases do). Basically, this is how the sentence looks to me:

Generic version:

          “Subject + verb + prepositional phrase 1, prepositional phrase 2.″

My version:

          "Waves crashed on an empty beach in late January."

It's that simple. By borrowing the syntax of well-written work, we can write “cover versions” with our own lyrics. The syntax is like the music of the sentence. It’s the soundtrack in the background that moves us along. The words are just decoration. If you’re feeling ambitious you could try to write an entire book this way, say a syntactically identical version of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Any takers? You could call it A Goodbye to Legs, only instead of a love story set against WWI it could be a mystery about some appendages that go missing. The challenge is in writing coherent sentences that conform to the structure of the original (and then new paragraphs that conform, new chapters, etc.). So have fun with that. Nerd out. Embrace the surreal.

[johnmanciniwrites]

Osmosis

An Introductory Lecture

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“We want to have a better communication.” The head of campus security, a sweaty potato of a man, once said this to me. I was seated on the other side of his desk, wearing a wire up my sleeve and recording everything he said so that I could use it in a movie. We were speaking about the unfortunate scuffle that had occurred between me and one of his officers (side note: never tell a film student they can’t put their camera in the middle of traffic). Unfortunately, when it comes to communicating, even we sensitive writers can resort to physical violence. After all, “touch” is how we best understand our world. And when communication breaks down as it sometimes does, we fall back on base instincts and blunt force--i.e. two full-blown adults wrestling in the street.

Well, I’ve grown, and I can admit that the head of security was right. We do want to achieve a better communication. Armed with two things--our vocabulary and grammar--we try to understand the world around us. It’s not always easy. But the better we can become at articulating the story we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world around us, the better off we’ll be---and the more likely we are to find order in the chaos. I think this is what Joan Didion must have meant when she wrote this line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

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Step one in the great enterprise of improving yourself as a writer is accepting the fact that she who writes well must also read closely. Get to know the tools. Consider the musician, who--except in rare cases--does not invent their instrument from scratch. They use found materials and must learn what these materials are capable of, where the notes are, and in what order they sound best. And to do that they must listen.

The writer is advised to develop a musician’s ear for the rhythms of the world around them, the mezzo and fortissimo, the crescendos and morendos that animate the language we speak. It is, after all, a song of sorts. If we listen closely--and read--we just might learn to improvise on our own, or at least improve our phrasing.

Writing classes tend to focus on the “mechanics of writing,” which sounds a bit chilly and doesn’t really convey the fluidity and richness inherent in our language. Understanding different strategies for organizing your material--structure--will add an important tool to your writer’s toolbox. When you read you will be able to see the “schematic” behind the essay--much like a coder views a website, or a musician hears a song, or a cabinet maker sees a kitchen. Mechanical engineering is not a prerequisite.

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In addition to understanding structure, two elements every writer—which is to say, every human—must look for are substance and style. Someone who is without substance is thought to be shallow or fake. They’re like, all surface. The same can be said of writing, which requires substance. If you’re going to bake the world a meat pie, you better put some meat in it! Also, try to make it look good (after all, people have to want to eat it). The better you understand how sentences are put together the better you will be at adding flare and flavor to your work. One thing I learned in film school (besides wrestling) is that presentation is everything--but one should try to have substance.

Structured, stylistic, substantive writing opens doors. As charming as we humans can be, it isn’t always easy to convey that in an email. Since so many of our first impressions are made online, we would be wise to improve our abilities in this department. Those who can convey their core messages clearly and concisely are most likely to be remembered, i.e. invited to interview.

A friend of mine used to work at a large investment firm training new hires on how to communicate professionally. The title of his Powerpoint was PLAIN LANGUAGE—the idea being to keep it simple, to unlearn all that bloviated academic writing that we relied on when we were trying to meet page-length requirements in college. 

Most scholarly writing resembles a lot of hot air because those who thrive in that environment tend to write with their heads in specialized clouds--like so many self-important balloons. Pick up any dissertation and you’ll see what I mean. This writing suffers from the curse of knowledge. Bad habits can haunt even the best practitioners. Like Picasso said, it takes a lifetime to learn to draw like children. In other words, cherish the immediate. Be direct.

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There are hardly enough hours in the average lifespan (692,000 in case you were wondering) to read all the books in the world. Most knowledge comes to us gradually, through a sort of osmosis. But Americans only spend about twenty minutes a day reading anything. Cue Howard Beale: “This is mass madness, you maniacs!” Don’t you realize that our world is made of language, and those who control the language control our world? This might become a problem when our only access to information is through a chatbot. Just saying. If we are not to be manipulated we must understand the tools of manipulation. We must read thoroughly. Read into. Read between. Read the real news. Read the fake news. Read the classics. Read the poets—the quiet types, the listeners, devoted as they are to grammar and lexicon--who toil, however imperfectly, to widen the mind that it might one day be wider than the sky. Yes, the poets. No one cares more than they do about the careful process of putting the right words in the right order.

[johnmanciniwrites]

Bring the Beat Back

Uses of Dialogue, Part 2

“Always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.”

                                                                                  -- P.G. Wodehouse

In yesterday’s post I wrote about talking, talked about dialogue, blogged about beats--not the generation or literary movement--the values exchanged between characters, the particles at the heart of the story nucleus. 

Beats are the pulses within a scene, the verbal and nonverbal exchanges, the ping-pong of conversation, the en-garde and assault--the surprise left hook followed by the uppercut. Keep your eye on the bouncing ball. Like any good game of whiff-whaff, this spirited back and forth has dramatic consequences. For every action there is a reaction—a tension that creates conflict. The unexpected friction—resistance between desire and outcome—is what makes scenes pulse. 

A character takes a reasonable step toward a goal. And encounters an obstacle: They reach for the door, but the door doesn’t open; they call for help, but the line is dead; they offer up a rose and get slapped in the face.

Elliot is hungover and could use a drink. He’s been sober for fifteen months, sparring with his wife for fifteen pages. Now it’s morning. He’s standing out in the cold with a loaded gun, and he sees her watching him from the house. The effect, he thinks, is striking.

From “Helping” by Robert Stone:

           Elliot began to hope for forgiveness. He leaned the shotgun on his forearm and raised his left hand and waved to her. Show a hand, he thought. Please just show a hand.

He was cold, but it had got light. He wanted no more than the gesture. It seemed to him that he could build another day on it. Another day was all you needed. He raised his hand higher and waited.

A reversal of power often happens unexpectedly, sometimes with just a look. Even in silence an exchange of energy can take place. A so-called “pregnant pause” is in fact a reaction. It is “pregnant” because the silence it creates is charged with expectations. The baby of drama lives in this gap. The baby is named Progressive Complications.

Dialogue should move from positive (+) to negative (-) value or vice-versa. The emotional “value” depends on the character’s objective in the scene. In other words, either the exchange goes well for them or it doesn’t. Try and try again.

Think of music that builds to a crescendo. Beats tend to get more intense as the story develops. In other words, the conflict becomes greater, and the stakes increase with each exchange. Unlike, say, disco, writers try to avoid hitting the same emotional beat over and over.

“What ho!“ I said. "What ho!” said Motty. “What ho! What ho!” “What ho! What ho! What ho!” After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.

― P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves

Indeed. Dialogue should always serve conflict, which will develop character and move the story forward. Conflict comes through action or dialogue. Something is said, or something happens, which has impact. Every beat pushes the character toward their goal or away from it. Conflict is essential to scene. Without conflict, no scene. This is all I have to tell you.

Now we know that dialogue is made up of beats and that beats build scenes. Think of beats as shifts of power among characters. In the following scene the characters are Bertie and his trusty man-servant, Jeeves. Listen to the beats, the positive and negative value exchanges. With every new line, Bertie advances or falls behind.  

From Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters

I reached out a hand from under the blankets, and rang the bell for Jeeves.

“Good evening, Jeeves.”

“Good morning, sir.”

This surprised me.

“Is it morning?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you sure? It seems very dark outside.”

“There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn – season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”

“Season of what?”

“Mists, sir, and mellow fruitfulness.”

“Oh? Yes. Yes, I see. Well, be that as it may, get me one of those bracers of yours, will you?”

“I have one in readiness, sir, in the ice-box.”

He shimmered out, and I sat up in bed with that rather unpleasant feeling you get sometimes that you’re going to die in about five minutes.

Now read the same scene again, this time with boldface notation indicating the rise and fall of Bertie’s state of mind (i.e. the values at stake in each exchange and the positive or negative charge on our poor hungover good sir):

I reached out a hand from under the blankets, and rang the bell for Jeeves. [- desire]

“Good evening, Jeeves.” [+ welcomed relief]

“Good morning, sir.” [- contradiction/setback]

This surprised me. [- unexpected/continuation]

“Is it morning?” [- inquiring/confusion]

“Yes, sir.” [+ receiving confirmation]

“Are you sure? It seems very dark outside.” [- questioning/doubt]

“There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn – season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” [+ explanation]

“Season of what?” [- increasing confusion]

“Mists, sir, and mellow fruitfulness.” [+ clarification]

“Oh? Yes. Yes, I see. Well, be that as it may, get me one of those bracers of yours, will you?” [+/- understanding, desire]

“I have one in readiness, sir, in the ice-box.” [+ remedy]

He shimmered out, and I sat up in bed with that rather unpleasant feeling you get sometimes that you’re going to die in about five minutes. [- hungover]

Note the values oscillating between confusion and clarity, between the fogginess of a hangover and the clear light of sobriety. These are the beats (action/reaction) creating friction between characters with opposing views of reality. Think of this as x-ray vision--a view into the code behind the user experience. It’s worth trying on any piece of fiction. Slow down, reread, and analyze the code. What are the positive and negative values being exchanged in the following dialogue?

From Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

“And we could have all this,” she said. “And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.”

“What did you say?”

“I said we could have everything.”

“We can have everything.”

“No, we can't.”

“We can have the whole world.”

“No, we can't.”

“We can go everywhere.”

“No, we can't. It isn't ours anymore.”

“It's ours.”

“No, it isn't. And once they take it away, you never get it back.”

“But they haven't taken it away.”

“We'll wait and see.”

“Come on back in the shade,” he said. “You mustn't feel that way.”

“I don't feel any way,' the girl said. “I just know things.”

[johnmanciniwrites]

Conflict!

Uses of Dialogue, Part 1

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Capoeira is the Brazilian martial art that combines elements of dancing, gymnastics, and fighting. Its practitioners value movement and versatility, as do many of us non-aggressive types as well. Some say life is itself a struggle, a fight for existence. Others say it is a beautiful dance. Maybe it is both. A verbal sparring between lovers teaches us much about life. It has a rhythm all its own, each piece of dialogue or action creating a beat, a positive or negative charge, which is at the heart of conflict. Which is the heart of drama.

Beats are the building blocks of scenes—the pulses within a scene, the verbal and nonverbal exchanges between characters. Every action (verbal or non-) invites reaction. In story, the resulting conflict is often in the form of dialogue. Like music building to a crescendo, the beats tend to rise in intensity as stories progress, the last beat in a scene often being the most significant. Not necessary the loudest.

Think of two people arguing. It starts with a small dig, but soon the tension builds until someone throws a toaster, kicks the dog, cries or storms out of the room, slamming the door for good. Curtain falls. But wait, there’s more. Ideally, each scene should be more important than the last. Scenes are the building blocks of sequences, which comprise acts, which create the arc of a story. Complications progress.

Like the musician, a writer doesn’t want to keep hitting the same beat over and over again.

“What ho!" I said. "What ho!" said Motty. "What ho! What ho!" "What ho! What ho! What ho!" After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation. 

― P.G. Wodehouse, My Man Jeeves

It may be useful to think of writing dialogue as verbal sparring, in which you have to up the ante with each exchange. A character encounters an impasse and tries to go around a different way and gets cut off again. They come up with a greater strategy, but then that gets foiled. They have to keep trying harder – and tension increases until the final exchange, which results in success or failure – or in the case of comedy, a punchline.

Dialogue should always move character, conflict and story forward. 

Consider Aristotle’s advice to begin stories in medias res – “in the midst of things” as Hemingway often did. His mastery of Aristotle’s dictum is one of the reasons he is one of the kings of storytelling.

From Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers”

The door of Henry’s lunchroom opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter.

“What’s yours?” George asked them.

“I don’t know,” one of the men said. “What do you want to eat, Al?”

“I don’t know,” said Al. “I don’t know what I want to eat.”

Outside it was getting dark. The streetlight came on outside the window. The two men at the counter read the menu. From the other end of the counter Nick Adams watched them. He had been talking to George when they came in.

Hemingway is doing what Wodehouse suggests: moving a story with dialogue. We don’t know what’s going on yet, but Nick is watching, and so are we. “Always get to the dialogue as soon as possible,” says Wodehouse. “Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start."  

To put it another way, consider David Mamet’s advice: “Get on with it, for the love of Mike. Get into the scene late, get out of the scene early, tell the story in the cut.” 

Hemingway told stories “in the cut,” in the midst of action. More than that: he finds the electrical charge in the space between images and action. When two elements are introduced into the same mixture a reaction occurs. A gap opens between the character’s expectations and the result of their action. The reader is propelled forward, and story moves.

Exchanges have positive or negative value (values that reflect those of the character—what they want or think they want). One minute we’re up, the next we’re down. Such is the rollercoaster of life. One must adapt to the fluid and swinging movement, the “ginga” as capoeira fighters call it. After all, we’re all just holding on to the ride, taking the sharp turns and dizzying loops as they come--like Sims characters, our status meters fluctuating between green and red.

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Looks like it’s time to eat! More on beats and dialogue later. Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with one more significant and elegant human exchange. As you read the ending of this final scene between the fictional Earl and Edna, reflect on the ever-changing values of real relationships.

From “Rock Springs” by Richard Ford

           When I put down the phone I saw that Edna was watching me, not in a hateful way or a loving way, just in a way that seemed to say she didn’t understand something and was going to ask me about it.

“When did watching me get so entertaining?” I said and smiled at her. I was trying to be friendly. I knew how tired she must be. It was after nine o’clock.

           “I was just thinking how much I hated being in a motel without a car that wasn’t mine to drive. Isn’t that funny? I started feeling like that last night when that purple car wasn’t mine. That purple car just gave me the willies, I guess, Earl.”

           “One of those cars outside is yours,” I said. “Just stand right there and pick it out.”

“I know,” she said. “But that’s different, isn’t it?” She reached and got her blue Baily hat and put it on her head and set it way back like Dale Evans. She looked sweet. “I used to like to go to motels, you know,” she said. “There’s something secret about them and free – I was never paying, of course. But you felt safe from everything and free to do what you wanted because you’d made the decision to be there and paid that price, and all the rest was the good part. Fucking and everything, you know.” She smiled at me in a good-natured way.

           “Isn’t that the way this is?” I was sitting on the bed, watching her, not knowing what to expect her to say next.

           “I don’t guess it is, Earl,” she said and stared out the window. “I’m thirty-two and I’m going to have to give up on motels. I can’t keep that fantasy going anymore.”

[johnmanciniwrites]

A Really Long Sentence That Ends With Food

Right and Left Branching Sentences

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To write is to grow. As sentences grow, they “branch” either to the left or to the right (this depends on where the subject and verb appear and how you introduce detail and essential information). 

If you prefer to set the stage before letting the actors get to the action, if you think your audience needs to know the where, why, and when of happenings before they get to the what-actually-happened then you probably tend to begin a lot of sentences with prepositional phrases, phrases like “In the time before Covid...” or “Around the corner from the mask store...” or “After packing my bags for our trip to the U.S. Capitol...” These could be left-branching sentences. 

Some sentences inevitably branch both to the left and right, thereby appearing balanced. Take this for example, the first sentence of the novel, Charming Billy, by Alice McDermott: 

Somewhere in the Bronx, in a wooded alcove set well off the street, Maeve found a small bar-and-grill that was willing to serve the funeral party of forty-seven medium-rare roast beef and boiled potatoes and green beans amandine, with fruit salad to begin and vanilla ice cream to go with the coffee.

As first sentences go, it does a good job of setting the stage. Like all sentences, it has an arc, it tells a story in brief. Something happens--Maeve found a small bar-and-grill. It must have at least a subject and a verb, a compliment might be nice. Everything else is embroidery. And you can make your sentences as richly embroidered as you like. It’s a judgment call, partly an aesthetic decision, but one with dramatic import.

Here are some other ways Alice McDermott might have written the sentence:

Left branching:

Somewhere in the Bronx, in a wooded alcove set well off the street, Maeve found a small (bar-and-grill).

There you go. The object of the verb ends the sentence. Meaning is conveyed. We can move on with our lives. But we might have to start a new sentence about the place if we want to use all that detail we left out. Maybe starting a new sentence devoted to the place might break paragraph unity. Best to stick with Maeve and what she’s doing. 

Right branching:

Maeve found a small bar-and-grill somewhere in the Bronx, in a wooded alcove set well off the street that was willing to serve the funeral party of forty-seven medium-rare roast beef and boiled potatoes and green beans amandine, with fruit salad to begin and vanilla ice cream to go with the coffee.

This has a cumulative effect, getting the subject>verb>direct object out of the way and building on and on with detail. To my ears this one sounds off balance, branching as it does wildly to the right, it becomes unwieldy and tedious.

If it’s true that “all writing leads toward specificity,” which is what Johns Hopkins professor Ed Perlman once said, then the more modifications you can make to a noun or verb the clearer picture the reader will get. In which case you can richly embroider your sentences – i.e. make them specific – by adding modifiers.

Modifiers make nouns and verbs more specific, from adjectives and adverbs like “small” bar-and-grill or “wooded” alcove to entire relative phrases (subordinate clauses set off by “that” or “which”), which add abstract info or concrete detail.

Here are two more examples from Charming Billy:

Left and Right Branching (McKee’s “balanced sentence”):  

Abruptly, before Maeve could say another word, the priest asked us all to say a Rosary with him, understanding (of course) that there was only so much more that could be said, that the repetitiveness of the prayers, the hushed drone of repeated, and by its numbing repetition, nearly wordless, supplication, was the only antidote, tonight, for Maeve’s hopelessness.

Wildly right branching:  

The others parked up along the drive, first along one side, then the other, the members of the funeral party walking in their fourth procession of the day (the first had been out of the church, the second and third in and out of the graveyard), down the wet and rutted path to the little restaurant that, lacking only draught Guinness and a peat fire, might have been a pub in rural Ireland.

As William Burroughs wrote, “Those who read can run.” In context this had more to do with being able to keep up with his linguistic acrobatics, but I mention it because the reader wants to move on, and a long sentence can bog her down. Once the core tenor of the sentence has been revealed, the reader wants to get going. 

Some long, richly modified sentences keep the reader in suspense, which can also be used for comic effects.

From A Pelican at Blandings by P.G. Wodehouse:

“It was the natural exuberance of a young girl who has found love and happiness and is looking forward to the wedding with full choral effects, with the man she adores standing at her side in a morning coat and sponge bag trousers and the bishop and assistant clergy doing their stuff as busily as one-armed paperhangers with the hives. And then the reception and the going away dress and the sunlit honeymoon and all that apple-sauce.”

Technically that’s two sentences, but that second one is a fragment of the first. Face it. You’ve got to call it quits sometime. Note the telescoping of “apple sauce,” which surprises. There is suspense, and inverting of expectations, and the payoff is a throwaway metaphor that undermines all the grand detail that came before. Wodehouse uses this kind of suspense sentence a lot. The “one armed paperhangers with hives” phrase has a familiar comedic punch.

This technique results in what Robert McKee calls the “periodic sentence” or suspense sentence. It’s created by front-loading with modifiers, building up to a payoff (the withheld trigger word, usually the direct object).

The “cumulative sentence” (or right branching sentence) piles on details, often with parallel modifiers, slowly painting a picture. This kind of sentence branches to the right, adding detail after the subject, verb, and object are revealed.

The “balanced sentence” puts the core word (or key term—i.e. what is central to understanding the meaning) in the middle of the sentence, using both left and right branching modifiers.

Here’s another example from Blandings (describing the way things used to be under rule of Connie, governess of the castle):

“Under her regime dinner would have meant dressing and sitting down, probably with a lot of frightful guests, to a series of ghastly dishes with French names, and fuss beyond belief if one happened to swallow one’s front shirt stud and substituted for it a brass paper-fastener.”

The “paper-fastener” here arrives to much delight at the end of a wildly right branching sentence, one which piles detail on to the infinitive object compliment (“to a series of ghastly dishes…”). The very specific hypothetical of someone swallowing the button off their shirt and putting a paperclip in its place is saved for the end of the sentence. The surprising comic image works like a punch line.

[johnmanciniwrites]

Between the Idea and the Act

Thinking and Doing Pt 3: Defining Character (and Comedy)

If you’re a thinker you might tend to drift. To space out a little. Take your time. Get lost in thought. That’s okay. Just don’t forget to act.

Every action creates a reaction. Every stimulus issues a response. In between is the stuff of internal processing. Here’s the formula: 

Action (concrete description) 

+ 

Internal Processing (abstract exposition) 

________________________

= Reaction (concrete description)

In the following paragraph, notice how “psychically” close George Saunders stays in the narration. Consider: what do you know about the emotional experience of the speaker? 

From “The Falls” by George Saunders:

Morse found it nerve-racking to cross the St. Jude grounds just as the school was being dismissed, because he felt that if he smiled at the uniformed Catholic children they might think he was a wacko or pervert and if he didn't smile they might think he was an old grouch made bitter by the world, which surely, he felt, by certain yardsticks, he was. Sometimes he wasn't entirely sure that he wasn't even a wacko of sorts, although certainly he wasn't a pervert. Of that he was certain. Or relatively certain. Being overly certain, he was relatively sure, was what eventually made one a wacko. So humility was the thing, he thought, arranging his face into what he thought would pass for the expression of a man thinking fondly of his own youth, a face devoid of wackiness or perversion, humility was the thing.

Over thinking things, what? Neurotic characters tend to be interesting. And making small things big has always been a source of comedy. See any episode of Seinfeld for examples.

A character enters a scene and announces that they have BIG news to share. The other characters must react. In the following paragraph Bertie hears news of his friend’s engagement. Observe as he processes this and gauges an appropriate reaction.

From P.G. Wodehouse – The Mating Season

“…she admitted I was the tree on which the fruit of her life hung!”

Those who know Bertram Wooster best are aware that he is not an indiscriminate back-slapper. He picks and chooses. But there was no question in my mind that here before me stood a back which it would be churlish not to slap. So I slapped it.

“Nice work,” I said. “Then everything’s all right?”

The delay Wodehouse uses in Bertie’s internal processing helps provide distance to the emotion, drawing it out to great effect to get the most out of the punch line, “Nice work.” The suspense has a comedic effect.

Imagine if you will a crowded drawing room (a gaggle of coffee and sandwich chewers) into which enters a constable. He intends to arrest someone. Earlier in the story--also The Mating Season--Esmond, the vicar, had complained of the constable’s constant proselytizing. Frankly, he was sick of it. This earlier annoyance here comes to fruition. 

The reactions of a gaggle of coffee and sandwich chewers in the drawing-room of an aristocratic home who, just as they are getting down to it, observe the local flatty muscling in through the door, vary according to what Jeeves calls the psychology of the individual. Thus, while Esmond Haddock welcomed the newcomer with a genial “Loo-loo-loo,” the aunts raised their eyebrows with a good deal of To-what-are-we-indebted-for-the-honour-of-this-visitness and the vicar drew himself up austererly, suggesting in his manner that one crack out of the zealous officer about Jonah and the Whale and he would know what to do about it.

So much of Wodehouse’s comedic plots involve characters impersonating each other for various reasons—mistaken identity being a classic comedic trope, a favorite of Shakespeare, among others. What would drive someone to masquerade as someone else? In the following paragraph there is a knock at the door. Mr. Crocker decides to open the door. Between these two actions, note the internal processing.

From P.G. Wodehouse’s Piccadilly Jim:

One of the bad habits of which his wife had cured Mr. Crocker in the course of the years was the habit of going and answering doors. He had been brought up in surroundings where every man was his own doorkeeper, and it had been among his hardest tasks to learn the lesson that the perfect gentleman does not open doors, but waits for the appropriate menial to come along and do it for him., He had succeeded at length in mastering this great truth, and nowadays seldom offended. But this morning his mind was clouded by his troubles, and instinct, allying itself with opportunity, was too much for him. His fingers had been on the handle when the ring came, so he turned it.

Why would an author spend such a long time describing someone thinking about whether or not to open a door? Mr. Crocker is a well-off American businessman who’s bored living in England with his wife. When he opens the door, he’s mistaken by the guests for the butler, which he pretends to be, which leads to a job offer. Incongruity and hilarity ensue. All of that for the turning of door handle? But it is the door that opens the plot to progressive complications. 

[johnmanciniwrites]

Psychic Pivot

Thinking and Doing Pt. 2: Transitions

There’s an advantage to narrating a story at safe remove from your characters. Playing God has its perks, staying aloof, all-seeing and knowing. The omniscient narrator has total freedom to go where the characters cannot, withhold or reveal information, as well as dip into characters’ heads and see what’s rattling around in there. 

Transitioning from the outside to the inside is the thing—getting from the surface detail to the character’s interior thought. Certain language triggers can set off thoughts and flashbacks--“He remembered…”, “It reminded him of a time…” etc.--helping to soften the modal shift—much like the visual cues of a film, the blurred wavy lines and soft focus. We know what those tricks signal. We accept them, even if they’re corny. 

However you get there, once you arrive inside the mind of your character, much can be made to develop the drama. Every action offers some internal processing, which leads to another action, a reaction. Understanding stories from the point of view of a specific narrator lets us experience the story through their senses. 

From “A Trip to the Store” by Roberta Hartling Gates:

“Lisa, you don’t have to lie to me,” I said. “I know what he does to you.”

Beside me on the seat she was still, quiet like an animal that’s folded itself away. What kind of dope was I? I wondered, as a semi rushed by, its slipstream sucking at us. Why had I said that? And if I was going to say it why haven’t I built up to it more?

The shift from dialogue to internal thought (once questions start popping up we’re inside the head of a character) is abrupt, but the simile helps soften the transition—and note how that slipstream helps keeps us grounded in scene.

In this example, note the transition from omniscient third to close or limited third. The underlined verbs “wishing” and “figured” trigger the transition from omniscient to limited narration, moving toward direct access to interior thought. 

 From “Morton & Lilly: Dredge and Fill" by  C.J. Hribal: 

Morton has just returned from the beer shed at Veteran’s Park, and is standing now on his crumbling slab of deck, the edges of it green with mold, clumps of chickweed erupting from the fissures that seem wider every spring. It’s Homecoming Weekend down at Veteran’s Park, and he’s wishing he’d stayed there, drinking beer with his buddies and hitting on women he knew in high school. Rita Sabo especially, though she made it clear she wanted no part of him. He figured maybe for old times’ sake. I used to date your sister, he told her, like that should be an argument in his favor. Date. He’d had to say date. That wasn’t the half of it, what all they’d done, but he was trying to be polite. Didn’t that count for anything?

Closing psychic distance allows us to know what things mean to the characters. Don’t close us out. Even if they are hard-headed types, maybe alcoholics who don’t necessarily have a rich inner life, they still have things they value. What they value will be essential to understanding the drama. 

From “The Pretty Girl” by  Andre Dubus:

I don’t know how I feel till I hold that steel. That was always true: I might have a cold or one of those days when everything is hard to do because you’re tired for no reason at all except that you’re alive, and I’d work out, and be the time I got in the shower I couldn’t remember how I felt before I lifted; it was like that part of the day was yesterday, and now I was starting a new one. Or a hangover: some of my friends and my brother too are hair-of-the-dog people, but I’ve never done that and I never will, because a drink in the morning shuts down the whole day, and anyway I can’t stand the smell of it in the morning and my stomach tells me it would like a Coke or a milkshake, but it is not about to stand for a prank like a shot of vodka or even a beer.

[johnmanciniwrites]

Deep Dive

Thinking and Doing pt 1: On Narration and Psychic Distance

When constructing a piece of fiction it helps to think of story in terms of film or theater—and the importance of scene. Think of the page as a stage or a static-camera shot in which characters enter and exit the frame. But remember: in film we have the close-up, the expressive emotion of the human face, and in theater we have the soliloquy, the breaking of the fourth wall, dramatic lighting and music. 

In fiction we have to rely on summary without losing sight of the dramatic action, or being too instructive or explanatory. I’ve found that writing in the first person lends itself to that internal dialogue, which can go wherever the particular mind of a character is inclined to go—off on a flashback or two, deep into some serious analyzing of the situation.

All of this can help to explain character, but it won’t reveal it. For that we need action. People are defined by what they do or don’t do. Before we get action (or reaction, or even inaction), the mind has to process a stimulus of some kind. So something happens. Reflect on that. Dive deep inside the mind of a character and see how that character processes life’s events. What do they believe and value? How does that relate to what they want?

From Leonard Gardner’s Fat City:

Confidence, Ruben Luna believed, was the indispensable ingredient of success, and he had it in abundance – as much faith in his destiny as in the athletes he trained. In his own years of battling he had had doubts which at times became periods of terror. With a broken jaw wired into silence, he had sucked liquid meals through a tube, wondering if he were even sane. After a severe body beating and a bloody urination in the dressing room, he had wondered if the big fights and large sums he had thought would be coming but never came could be worth what he had already endured. But now Ruben’s will was like a pure and unwavering light that burned even in his sleep. It was more a fatalistic optimism than determination, and though he was not immune to anxiety over his boxers, he felt his own capacities, he had an odds advantage that he had never had as a competitor. He knew he could last. But his fighters were less dependable. Some trained one day and laid off two, fought once and quit, lost their timing, came back, struggled into condition, gasped and missed and were beaten, or won several bouts and got married, or moved, or were drafted, joined the navy or went to jail, were bleeders, suffered headaches, saw double or broke their hands. There had been so many who found they were not fighters at all, and there were others who without explanation had simply ceased to appear at the gym and were never seen or heard about again by Ruben, though once in a while a forgotten face returned briefly in a dream and he went on addressing instructions to it as though the intervening years had never been.

Ruben is having a moment. We are so close to the main character that we are inside of them. Their thoughts become ours. This is called close-third narration for a reason. In a novel with plenty of play-by-play action (it’s about a boxer, after all) Gardner provides interior depth, which rounds out the characters and keeps them from being mere puppets.

But you don’t want to rely on internal summary, don’t always want to tell the reader how the characters are feeling—at least not without also showing them why they think or feel a certain way. So that sort of brooding needs to be warranted by the dramatic action. When you summarize a character’s interior thoughts, it should proceed or follow an action. Expository dips into the interior should happen naturally, and only when you need them. The thing to do is to get in, get out, and get back to scene.

The term “psychic distance” comes to us from John Gardner. Here is a paragraph from The Art of Fiction (broken down into a numbered list of sentences). Note the varying degrees of psychic distance from the character—from outside to inside his mind…

It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway. Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms. Henry hated snowstorms. God how he hated these damn snowstorms. Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul.

Now look at it like this, and note how the language progresses from general to specific detail. The rhythm of the sentences changes as we come closer and closer to the thought process and POV of main character:

It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.

Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.

Henry hated snowstorms.

God how he hated these damn snowstorms.

Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul.

[johnmanciniwrites]

Point of “You”

 On the Uses of 2nd Person

_

Writers are told: write what you know, and naturally, the first instinct is to start with that all-important pronoun, I. But what happens when the writer flips it around, when I becomes You? 

Second person, from the Old English “ye” to a southerner’s “y’all,” has a distinct, decorative quality. It draws attention to itself. It’s a literary conceit that presents a challenge to the reader because it puts the reader in the story. It is the language of self-help, song lyrics, the to-do list. It is closely linked with dialogue, and perhaps because of this it can add an appealing conversational voice to the narration.

From If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice – they won’t hear you otherwise – “I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

Some writers say that second-person is really just first- or third-person masquerading as second, but I doubt that Calvino’s effect could have been achieved any other way. We have a storyteller here, putting his arm around our shoulder and saying, Read on, my friend. How would this work in third or first person? The “you” assumes a specific audience, one that must interact with the story. After all, writing, like reading, is a transaction. 

One difference between second person and first or third is one of psychic or narrative distance. The I of first-person narration allows the reader to inhabit the character, whereas third person allows for more distance, not that the drama loses dynamism. It’s just different. It keeps the reader at arm’s length, is less personal than the first-person confessional voice. First-person narration immerses the reader psychologically in the mind of the narrator. There is nowhere else to go.

Both first- and third- provide some distance from the action that second-person does not allow. Second-person is a bold choice because of its artifice. It presumes the suspension of disbelief and seems to accept its own artificiality, the more oddly specific the better.

From Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City:

The train shudders and pitches toward Fourteenth Street, stopping twice for breathers in the tunnel. You are reading about Liz Taylor's new boyfriend when a sooty hand taps your shoulder. You do not have to look up to know you are facing a casualty, one of the city's MIAs. You are than willing to lay some silver on the physically handi-capped, but folks with the long-distance eyes give you the heebie-jeebies.

             The second time he taps your shoulder you look up. His clothes and hair are fairly neat, as if he had only recently let go of social convention, but his eyes are out-to-lunch and his mouth is working furiously.

I look up? I am reading about Liz Taylor? Says who? McInerney boldly uses second-person to implicate the reader in his classic tale of 1980s excess. He is essentially talking to himself in the mirror. Which is what he was doing at 5am when he decided to write down the advice he had just given himself and turn it into a story. There is a level of intimacy that this device achieves, putting one inside the self-conscious mind of the narrator. It also has a way of keeping the reader at arm’s length. There is also, an urgency to the writing. It is imperative that you do these things. But the imperative mode can also be used to achieve some artful and timeless effects.

From “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid:

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk bare-head in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum in it, because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school?; always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming…

Kincaid’s “Girl” uses the imperative mode, a sort of how-to for the young lady, which in this case seems to be a subtle parody on the sort of literature regarding manners and etiquette that used to be required reading among certain classes. Something to consider about Girl: is it poetry or prose? The line in flash fiction is often blurred, which is part of its appeal. But here we have character and setting, personal and societal values, even stakes (not becoming a slut!?). Kincaid’s writing is lyrical in its rhythms, and the parallels, which always have a way of lulling us the reader into complicity if not submission.

Second person immerses the reader in the story and in a specific set of cultural values. Also, the imperative seems to work well when narrating children who have a list of chores to do. Similarly, Junot Diaz puts the reader in his world—in his shoes—with his take on the how-to.

From “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)” by Junot Diaz:

Clear the government cheese from the refrigerator. If the girl’s from the Terrace, stack the boxes in the crisper. If she’s from the Park or Society Hill, then hide the cheese in the cabinet above the oven, where she’ll never see it. Leave a reminder under your pillow to get out the cheese before morning or your moms will kick your ass. Take down any embarrassing photos of your family in the campo, especially, that one with the half-naked kids dragging a goat on a rope. Hide the picture of yourself with an Afro. Make sure the bathroom is presentable. Since your toilet can’t flush toilet paper, put the bucket with all the crapped-on toilet paper under the sink. Spray the bucket with Lysol, then close the cabinet.            Shower, comb, dress. Sit on the couch and watch TV. If she’s an outsider her father will bring her, maybe her mother. Her parents won’t want her seeing a boy from the Terrace—people get stabbed in the Terrace—but she’s strong-headed and this time will get her way. If she’s a white girl, you’re sure you’ll at least get a hand job.

Speaking of that nagging, to-do list (and oddly specific details), here’s one more example, Lorrie Moore’s “How to Be An Other Woman” from her book, Self-Help:

Try to decide what you should do: 

I. rip open the front of your coat, sending the buttons torpedoing across the room in a series of pops into the asparagus fern; 

2. go into the bathroom and gargle with hot tap water; 

3. go downstairs and wave down a cab for home. 

He puts his mouth on your neck. Put your arms timidly around him. Whisper into his ear: "There's a woman, uh, another woman in your room."

[johnmanciniwrites]

Mod Style

Kinds of Parallel Modifiers, Pt. 2

There are four types of parallel modifiers in the writer’s toolbox. I’ve written about one: the appositive. So what about the other three?

As I mentioned in the post on style and voice, if you “like” a writer you probably like the way they say things more than what they actually say. In other words:  the sound of the language, i.e. their voice. The way a writer creates that voice is through their use of stylistic elements, and parallel form is one element that will help a writer achieve a sophisticated style.

Think of modifiers as aftermarket parts for your sentences. They’ll give them a more comfortable ride and make them sound better than your basic factory model.

Repeat a grammatical pattern to create rhythm (parallel structure) and then ratchet up the sophistication of the sentence with an appositive, a resumptive, a summative or free modifier.

Resumptive

A resumptive modifier resumes a thought where you last left off by repeating a word and saying something else about it.

At last I stared upstream where only the deepest violet remained of the cloud, a cloud so high its underbelly still glowed feeble color reflected from a hidden sky lighted in turn by a sun halfway to China.

                                                                  --Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

What else can be said about that cloud? A lot, evidently. It depends on how far one is willing to push a thought or observation—in this case, all the way to China. 

Politicians also love resumptives:

I look forward to a bright future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.

                                                                       --John F. Kennedy

Public speakers love them because the repetition helps audiences grasp and remember the point. It also helps the speaker remember their speech. Notice the nice series of three parallel phrases that will define JFK’s proposed bright future strength/restraint, wealth/wisdom, power/purpose. They work in tandem with the resumptive, helping to drive home the argument.

They are useful in persuasive writing:

A real danger in this digital revolution is the potential it holds for dividing society, a society that will divide into two camps, the techno-elite and the techno-peasants, a society where a “wired” few will prosper at the expense of the masses.

--From Daniel Kies’ “Some Stylistic Features of Business and Technical Writing”

From literary essays to political speeches to plain old professional writing, resumptive modifiers help emphasize the point you want to make. In this case, to reveal more about this society with a double resumptive modifier.

Here are two more examples of resumptives used in fiction.

She told me all of it, waking me that night when I had gone to sleep listening to the wind in the trees and against the house, a wind so strong that I had to shut all but the lee windows, and still the house cooled; told it to me in such detail and so clearly that now, when she had driven the car to Florida, I remember it all as though I had been a passenger in the front seat, or even at the wheel.

                                                                       --Andre Dubus, “A Father’s Story”

But God she was beautiful, beautiful beyond anything he had ever seen or thought to see, five feet ten inches tall, a hundred and fifty-five pounds of rock-solid muscle cut to ribbons and perfectly symmetrical: sixteen-and-a-half-inch calves, tiny, almost delicate wrists, knees, and ankles, and a twenty-four-inch waist that had an abdominal wall unlike he had ever seen on any athlete, man or woman, showing as it did six distinct layered rows of muscle under skin utterly without subcutaneous fat, the finely toned rows of muscle starting in her solar plexus and ending where her richly furred pubic hair grew at the base of her belly.

                                                                       --Harry Crews, Body

By repeating a word you draw attention to it. This adds emphasis to the point you are trying to make, enhances the substance with style. And the great thing about repetition is it is inherently musical. It creates rhythm, and rhythm is seductive. 

Summative 

Summative modifiers act just as the others do, usually triggered by commas or dashes, sometimes as fragments. The difference is that they tend to summarize the entire clause.

In the last twenty years, the world has moved from the industrial age to the information age, a sociological event that will change forever the way we work and think.

           --From Kies’ “Some Stylistic Features of Business and Technical Writing”

One feels that she ought to be sticking round, ministering to her husband, conferring with the cook, feeding the cat, combing and brushing the Pomeranian – in a word, staying put.

                                                     --From P.G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves

His velour pullover is open to his sternum, and the exposed chest is precisely the complexion of new Play-Doh, the substance from which Gunther sometimes seems to be made.

                                                 --From Ralph Lombreglia’s “Men Under Water”

That last one is not a summative modifier. While “the substance from which…” does arrive at the end of the sentence, it doesn’t sum up the entire clause but only modifies “Play-Doh.” It’s technically an appositive, or free modifier. The terms are mainly for professors. The modifiers all behave the same way. They just appear in different forms. That brings up the final type: the free modifier. Free to float—watch it slide. It’s slippery.

Free

Socrates questioned the foundations of political behavior, forcing Athenians to examine duty they owed the state, encouraging youth to question the authority of their elders, claiming all the while that he wanted only to puzzle out the truth.

                                                             --From Will Durant’s “Story of Philosophy”

How grateful they were for the coffee, she looking up at him, tremulous, her lips pecking at the cup, he blessing the coffee as it went down her.  

                                                          – John Updike, Rabbit, Run

Not because we work in the plants ourselves – our work, like God, is everywhere and nowhere – but because this is where reality is, the life and labor of the folk, the source of all art.

                                                           -- Ralph Lombreglia, “Men Under Water”

And over the grass at the roadside, a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging his high-domed shell over the grass.

                                                           --John Steinbeck Grapes of Wrath

To achieve a higher aesthetic and sonic experience in writing, to strengthen the style, rhythm, complexity, and specificity of your sentences, make use of parallel modifiers. Just as the “rule of thirds” applies in photography and pictorial composition, three is the magic number. There is just something pleasant about lists of three. By eliminating linking verbs (is, are, was) as well as relative pronouns (that, which) you can enhance the sophistication and brevity of style.

Here’s one final example. This paragraph from William Least-Heat Moon’s Blue Highways uses a combination of several of the modifiers mentioned. Have a look...

Beware thoughts that come in the night. They aren’t turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources. Take the idea of February 17, a day of cancelled expectations, the day I learned my job teaching English was finished because of declining enrollment at the college, the day I called my wife from whom I’d been separated for nine months to give her the news, the day she let slip about her “friend” – Rick or Dick or Chick. Something like that.

[johnmanciniwrites]

Rhythm and Rhyme

Kinds of Parallel Modifiers

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”

                                                                       --Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Nabakov loved his modifiers. They account for much of what is appealing about his lushly elegant prose. Remember that silken sinister Old Azureus? Well, the same parallel sophistication can be found in all of his novels, especially that first sentence of Lolita, which begins with a string of appositives—phrases that define this unusual creature, Lo-lee-ta.

Think of it like this: You could modify your car with a new paint job or sound system or, say, a special air intake filter. You could make modifications to your wine cellar, your kitchen, maybe even your leg. Similarly, you can also modify parts of your sentences. Make sense? Here are your options: 

Kinds Modifiers

There are roughly five different modifiers in your toolbox: adjectives/adverbs, appositives, resumptives, summatives, and free modifiers. They’re just words, phrases or clauses that describe or clarify the meaning of a word, phrase or clause.

The most obvious modification you can make is adding detail to a noun or verb. The amount of detail you pile on--and where you pile it--determines what the grammar nerds will determine it should be called. But it doesn’t really matter what you call it, just as long as you know how and when to use it.

If our goal in writing is to give as clear a picture as possible (it usually is), then we should be as specific as we can and modify for detail. To modify is to specify. A modifier adds color to objects and actions, detail and specificity of tone. An adjective or adverb creates a certain mood. Consider the difference between “The snow fell.” and “The powdery snow fell silently to the ground.” All that powder and silence is altering the atmosphere, bringing it into sharper focus to give us a clearer, more precise mental image.

Any adjective or adverbial phrase, prepositional phrase—or subordinate clause of any kind—is a modifier. It adds information, provides detail. The different names we give them depend on where and how they fall in the sentence. For instance “free” modifiers can often move around, adding variety, changing emphasis (and sometimes meaning) to your sentences, while “summatives” will always arrive at the end, summarizing the preceding clause.

You might open with a modifier (initial): 

Tossing her hamburger on the table, she ran into the bathroom. 

You could squeeze one into the middle of a sentence (medial): 

The final episode, an excrutiating melodrama, lasted a full two hours. 

Or just end with one (final): 

She looked around Arby’s, her eyes reflecting her hunger.

When it comes to editing for clarity and style, you’ll want to use the appositive to join simple sentences to make a complex one.

“Norman Mailer’s first novel was The Naked and the Dead. It was a best-seller.”

becomes...

“Norman Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was a best-seller.”

See how that works? It just renames “novel.” Simple, right? Here are a few more examples of appositives, italicized for emphasis:

There were some ducks swimming on the lake, black forms on silver ripples.

                                                                       --Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia

His velour pullover is open to his sternum, and the exposed chest is precisely the complexion of new Play-Doh, the substance from which Gunther sometimes seems to be made.

                                                                -- Ralph Lombreglia, “Men Under Water”

Florida was made for running; Roy had never seen anyplace so flat. Back in Montana you had steep craggy mountains that rose ten thousand feet into the clouds. Here the only hills were man-made highway bridge—smooth, gentle slopes of concrete.

                                                                         -- Carl Hiaasen, Hoot

Our part of District 12, nicknamed the Seam, is usually crawling with coal miners heading out to the morning shift at this hour. Men and women with hunched shoulders, swollen knuckles, many who have long since stopped trying to scrub the coal dust out of their broken nails, the lines of their sunken faces.

                                                                 -- Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

Off shore a number of dolphins were at play among the waves, primordial shapes suspended in translucent faces—such were the wonders of the Tijuana River Valley where sights and sounds all but obliterated from the southern half of the state might yet be found—God’s script, written among the detritus of two countries.

                                                                  -- Kem Nunn, Tijuana Straits

It’s a matter of subordinating detail--the stuff that doesn’t call for its own sentence. The appositive is the easiest to use, most often by joining simple sentences and eliminating boring verbs (is, are, were). Instead of saying Lolita is the light of my life. She is the fire, etc., you just add a comma, and viola, a modifier is born. 

Next up: I’ll get into the use of resumptives, summatives, and free modifiers, and you too will learn how to unlock the power of your sentences, impress your teachers and bore the hell out of people at parties! Until then..                                   

[johnmanciniwrites]

The Finer Points of Parallel Style

Advanced Uses of the Form

__

The use of parallels, serialized detail presented in list form, can create feats of time compression similar to the filmic musical montage. In the following example from Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, we’re given a character sketch of the mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia. Consider the importance lists have in the nonfiction writer’s research, in outlining essential information. In this case, a list of LaGuardia’s (The Little Flower’s) accomplishments are shown rather than told. All with the use of parallel structure.

From The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York:

The Little Flower was mastering New York City as no mayor since Peter Stuyvesant had mastered it. Roaming his domain in person like Haroun-al-Raschid, he suddenly appeared on lines in front of municipal lodging houses, checking on the treatment of the luckless, or in police precinct houses, employing the mayoralty’s hitherto-unused magisterial powers to mete out swift punishment to arrested gamblers, or at the Bronx Terminal Market before daylight one freezing December morning, assembling an audience of shivering market concessionaires by having two police buglers blow a fanfare and then, clambering up on the tailboard of a truck, announcing an assault on racketeers in the artichoke business by reading a formal proclamation banning the inoffensive vegetable from the premises. Doffing his big Stetson for a big fire chief’s helmet, he dashed to fires to make “personal inspections” from which he emerged covered with soot, and he groped through smoke and flames to the side of two firemen pinned under a collapsed wall and knelt by them whispering encouragement until they were freed. He raced to train wrecks in the sidecar of a police motorcycle, battered down doors at the head of police raiding parties, snatched the baton from an orchestra conductor to lead a bravura performance of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and conducted the Sanitation Department band at a special performance at Carnegie Hall (after instructing a stage manager, “Just treat me like Toscanini”). He gave a city hungering for leadership the impression that there was no part of his domain that he did not dominate.

The mayor’s powers are manifold, and how LaGuardia demonstrated that power is presented in a series of parallel images: assembling, clamboring, announcing. The verb phrases pop out. The eyes can follow them as the singsong rhythm created by parallels carries us through a very long sentence. 

The rhythmic style can also enhance the meaning, affect how we view a character. Take for instance that certain sinister silkiness of “Old Azureus.”

From Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov:

Old Azureus’s manner of welcoming people was a silent rhapsody. Ecstatically beaming, slowly, tenderly, he would take your hand between his soft palms, hold it thus as if it were a long sought treasure or a sparrow all fluff and heart, in moist silence, peering at you the while with his beaming wrinkles rather than with his eyes, and then, very slowly, the silvery smile would start to dissolve, the tender old hands would gradually release their hold, a blank expression replace the fervent light of his pale fragile face, and he would leave you as if he had made a mistake, as if after all you were not the loved one – the loved on whom, the next moment, he would espy in another corner, and again the smile would dawn, again the hands would enfold the sparrow, again it would all dissolve.

Parallels are useful in delivering a masterful argument, by driving home a point with repetition, such as in this excerpt from Ned Beattie’s speech (written by Paddy Chayefsky) in the 1976 movie, Network:

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it, is that clear?! You think you have merely stopped a business deal -- that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back.It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance!  You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars!, Reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? 

The listing of detail in parallel form lends authority, and increases verisimilitude. Parallels can show the steps in a process, like a series of close-ups that draw out an action in slow motion. In the following example, a string of right-branching parallels which detail the action that follows the sentence: “Then Reacher’s blow landed.”,  the details accumulate and build tension. 

From Worth Dying For by Lee Child:

Two hundred and fifty pounds of moving mass, a huge fist, a huge impact, the zipper of the guy’s coat driving backward into his breastbone, his breastbone driving backward into his chest cavity, the natural elasticity of his rib cage letting it yield whole inches, the resulting violent compression driving the air from his lungs, the hydrostatic shock driving blood back into his heart, his head snapping forward like a crash test dummy, his shoulders driving backward, his weight coming up off the ground, his head whipping backward again and hitting a plate glass window behind him with a dull boom like a kettle drum, his arms and legs and torso all going down like a rag doll, his body falling, sprawling, the hard polycarbonate click and clatter of something black skittering away on the ground, Reacher tracking it all the way in the corner of his eye, not a wallet, not a phone, not a knife, but a Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol, all dark and boxy and wicked.

Back to Robert Caro for the final example: check out his description of New York, a city in which everything has its price. Note the repetition of the phrase “New York was a city in which…” followed by one specific example after another, many of which interrupted by dashes and parentheses in order to wedge in more detail, more information. All accomplished with the masterful use of parallel structure. It’s a lot to take in, but it is worth it.

New York was a city in which the police, every day, sold the law in the streets—sometimes it almost seemed as if being on the force was synonymous with being on the take—and in which sacred justice was sold in the very temples of justice (which was not too surprising, of course, since many of justice’s black-robed priests, who presided in those temples, had purchased the right to do so), in which the only law that really counted was the law of the jungle. New York was a city in which public office was, increasingly, a means to private profit. New York was a city in which it sometimes seemed as if there was scarcely an officeholder who didn’t demand a slice of the pie—and in which the pie was big enough so that it sometimes seemed as if a slice was available for every officeholder no matter what his party, the Democrats shrewdly making enough key Republicans a part of the arrangements by which the city was governed—putting them on the public payroll, giving them a share of judgeships and a cut of lucrative city contracts, taking them in as business partners—so that the GOP wouldn’t try too hard to disrupt those arrangements, and so that when a private citizen, or the Citizen’s Union, or a newspaper, demanded an investigation of official corruption, no one with the power to conduct a real one was interested in doing so. New York was the city of the Fix, of “protection,” of the shakedown. The twelve years of La Guardia had been only an interlude. New York was again what it had been before the Little Flower bounced into city hall: a city in which everything had its price. 

[johnmanciniwrites]

How to Push Sand Around

An Introduction to Parallel Structure

I once had a teacher who warned my fiction writing workshop of the danger of spending too much time editing for style. “You can push sand around all day,” he said. “You still have the same thing. Sand. All you do is change the shape.” 

In other words, style edits only change the shape of the sentences, not the substance of the story. But what about the writer who cares about the shape of the sentences? I mean, we’re talking about style and voice, the rhythm and sound of sentences, the song that animates the story.

While we shouldn’t ignore the larger task of developing dramatic emotion in character, the stuff that will ultimately move us to tears, joy, deeper understanding, etc., I’d like to suggest (and many poets would agree) that the well-crafted sentence can move us deeply as well. And if the dramatic emotion is already in place, an elevated style can make its impact that much more powerful.

Writing is, after all, the accumulation of detail, and what better way to accumulate detail than to list it out? A list of verbs becomes a list of verb phrases of varying length, which then have the potential to become a dynamic complex sentence. Prepositional phrases reoccur, create a rhythm, and so it goes, on and on, over the river and through the woods. Using parallel structure is kind of like rhyming with grammar.

Before getting into the finer points, consider how parallel structure can be used to improve awkward constructions. This is Style Editing 101. The following lacks parallel form. 

It is easier to speak in abstractions than grounding one’s thought in reality.

Sound a bit clunky? The pairing of “to speak” with “grounding” grates on the ears. It’s a faulty parallel. “It is easier to __ than to __” is how that should read. Why? It shows that the two ideas are on equal footing. Also, the repetition of “to be” sounds better.

Abused children commonly exhibit one or more of the following symptoms: rebelliousness, restlessness, anxiety, and they are depressed.

When it comes to listing anything, conformity is key. The phrase “they are depressed” is the result of the “symptom” of depression, which is what should be at the end of that list. Why should it be? Logic. While the rule of parallels is occasionally a matter of taste, the above lack elegance and sophistication, unlike the following.

From “The Volcano Lover” by Susan Sontag:

When she played, she could see the music. It was an arc surging upward from her delicately tapping feet, streaming through her body, and exiting through her hands. She leaned forward, a strand of unpowdered hair falling across her forehead, her slightly flabby arms bowed as if to embrace the keyboard, her radiant face molded by feeling, her lips parted for soundless moaning and singing.

See that music? The arc is surging, streaming, exiting. A strand is falling. Arms are bowed. Face is molded. Lips are parted. It flows like music. Look at it this way:

She leaned forward, a strand of unpowdered hair falling across her forehead, 

     her (slightly flabby) arms bowed (as if to embrace the keyboard)

     her (radiant) face molded (by feeling)

     her lips parted (for soundless moaning and singing)

Stacked, we can get a visual on the list Sontag is working with. Notice the first detail about the unpowdererd hair, which could have been written like the others: “her unpowdered hair fell across her forehead,” but that would have been a bit monotonous. Creating a pattern is one thing. Knowing when to deviate from that pattern is the mark of an artist. The rule of three usually applies.

From “Teaching a Stone to Talk” by Annie Dillard:

God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things.

What does god need? Nothing. He needs, asks, demands nothing. Like the stars. Nice fragment there. Could have connected to the previous sentence. Did not. Repetition is Dillard’s friend, and it can be yours too. It creates a natural pattern, a rhythm that can be used to lull the reader into submission. You do not have to repeat phrases, but notice that when you do, you draw your reader to attention. You emphasize equality. Many skilled orators, from preachers to politicians--and their speechwriters--are well aware of this.

The genius of our founders is that they designed a system of government that can be changed. And we should take heart, because we've changed this country before. In the face of tyranny, a band of patriots brought an Empire to its knees. In the face of secession, we unified a nation and set the captives free. In the face of Depression, we put people back to work and lifted millions out of poverty. 

                                                --from Obama’s 2008 campaign speech                                                                (probably written by Jon Favreau)

Here is one more example from Annie Dillard, an expert at building vivid description using parallel form. Spoiler alert: a moth flies into a flame and dies. How much can be said about that? What can be learned? Quite a lot, it turns out. The writer, as always, seeks substance and finds significance in action, but I’m talking about style. Notice the economy of sensory detail, the precision and brevity. The control the writer has over the image. Notice the lists of verbs (a few bolded for emphasis), their alliteration, the rhythm they create. Notice also the use of two similes “like tissue paper” and “like pistol fire” which enhance the imagery without overstaying their welcome.

From Annie Dillard’s “The Death of a Moth”

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wing-span, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax – a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle’s round pool.

The lonely moth has sacrificed its life, increasing the size of the flame, illuminating the writer’s surroundings, creating out of a darkness, like a tiny god. And what is created? More parallel detail:

the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater,

the green leaves of jewelweed by my side,

the ragged red trunk of a pine

Has the writer done her work? I think so.