how to revise a sentence #7
Here is Paul Harding in Tinkers relating a boy’s attempt to run away from home.
The sunny weekend morning, the lackadaisical mule, and the extra heaviness of the slow rate imparted by the bulk of the wagon conspired to dilute [the boy]’s half notions of speed and flight and pursuit and evasion.
Easy to notice is
Harding’s excesshow to use restraint #4
I’ve been reading Tinkers by Paul Harding because I enjoyed listening to him speak about his writing process, but his writing style has somewhat disappointed me.
One of the many vignettes in his book begins with this modest sentence:
Ninety-six hours before he died, George said he wanted a shave.
This is a good sentence and, in a sense, a perfect sentence. It has no flaws. It does its job and nothing else. It states two facts in plain terms and allows all meaning to arise from their juxtaposition, the irony of personal grooming at the edge of personal oblivion.
We learn that, for all his adult life, George kept a daily habit of shaving to stave off his beard of mangy patches. (Supposedly, only a day’s stubble lent him the look of an invalid or a large child incapable of taking care of his own needs.) But in his dotage and ill health, George’s shaving routine has faltered. So he asks his family if they might shave him, and one of his adult grandchildren, Sam, volunteers.
Harding gives details like the bowl of scalding water and the cheap disposable plastic razor that are relevant and meaningful because they foreshadow Sam’s carelessness and invoke us readers to sympathize with George. But Harding also includes details that seem irrelevant and consequently dilute and distract from the meaningful ones. He mentions that the razor was found by the grandmother in a basket beneath the bathroom sink that was filled with various disused, soap-crusted toiletry. I think soap-crusted is the most excessive detail here, but I think the entire phrase could have been removed. Harding is giving us too much. Only to a certain extent do vivid descriptions make things more vivid to the reader. At some point, they stop deepening the feeling of immersion in a fictional world and start drawing attention instead to the author and his stylishness as a writer.
We readers have already a reservoir of vivid images we draw from when reading fiction. It is enough to say that the grandmother found a razor in her own house. That alone can conjure an image of a bathroom cupboard full of nonessential toiletry. And even if it does not, it conveys the relevant facts. Firstly, that George’s usual shaving equipment will not be used. And secondly, that for some bothersome reason George’s wife does not know where that equipment is or has neglected to find it. These subtle, meaningful implications are more salient to readers when the author does not distract them with other, irrelevant information.
Fiction is a collaboration between author and audience. Readers experience the same work differently, sometimes drastically so. The same reader returning a work encounters it with new eyes. To write with restraint is to withhold one’s creative surplus to make space for the reader’s reflections and ruminations. Every word, every detail the author provides is an invitation to the reader to consider something and therefore also a dismissal of their considerations. Detail and specificity become eventual enemies of depth and expanse.
A few sentences later in Tinkers comes another example of overwriting:
The can [of shaving cream] was old, excavated along with the razor from the guts of the cabinet under the bathroom sink.
The word excavated is a needlessly stylish alternative to the typical and sufficient “dug up.” Even a simple “taken” would’ve served. More indulgent than excavated is guts, which is an empty metaphor for “inside.” It suggests a deeper meaning that is not there. In indulgent moments like these, the quality of the novel degrades from vivid to lurid. (In context of the whole book, this particular choice of guts suffers further from the fact that Harding had already used it metaphorically twice when referring to the internals of clocks and goes on to use it in such a way another three times. It’s an evocative description but Harding washes it out with overuse.)
It’s not a sin to flex your muscles as a writer if you do so by building something compelling. But I think Harding succumbs to the temptation of making pointless flourishes and embellisments all too often, especially for a novel that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
in phrases like the extra heaviness of the slow rate imparted by the bulk of the wagon and speed and flight and pursuit and evasion. Do we really need all these words? But the sentence has a more fundamental issue. Why personify the circumstances into “conspiring” agents? It’s a creative formulation, but does it contribute anything to what is being expressed?
The point of inventive wording, I think, is to illuminate the subject by casting particular light on it. Phrasing should be effective, not affected. Why did Harding choose this phrasing? A humbler one would eschew wordy choices like conspire and impart to allow apt words like dilute, deflate, or dissipate to play the central role in the idea being conveyed. Something like:
The boy’s notions of flight and pursuit dissipated as he sat on this bulky wagon towed by this lackadaisical mule on this sunny weekend morning.
Already, the sentence is more faithful to its meaning. We’ve halved speed and flight and pursuit and evasion into flight and pursuit and reconfigured the sentence to make its verb, dissipated, relevant to the sentence’s principal message: reality is deflating the boy’s fantasy of running away. We no longer state that the boy’s fantasy is slipping away because of his circumstances, but we imply it.
The second half of our new sentence is a bit monotonous. Further iteration can help:
The boy’s notions of flight and pursuit dissipated as the wagon trundled along in the sunny weekend morning.
We’ve removed explicit mention of the lackadaisical mule and the bulky nature of the wagon in favor of a useful verb: trundled. However, we have somewhat weakened the implication that the slowness of the escape vehicle and the pleasant weather are to blame for the boy’s change in mood. We can also try another structure:
As the wagon trundled along through the sunny weekend morning, the boy’s notions of flight and pursuit dissipated.
Not only does this sentence strengthen the implication of the causual relationship between the environment and the boy’s psychology, it also heightens the sense of passing time in which the boy’s fantasies gradually lose their believability.
But this effect ends abruptly because the sentence ends immediately after the word dissipated. We can draw out the sense further by making space at the end of the sentence into which the dissipation can extend in the way its meaning suggests:
As the wagon trundled along, the boy’s notions of flight and pursuit dissipated into the sunny weekend morning.
At this point, we have space for the lackadaisical mule:
As the mule shuffled along and the wagon trundled behind it, the boy’s notions of flight and pursuit dissipated into the sunny weekend morning.
Lackadaisical is a fun word indeed, but As the wagon trundled along behind the lackadaisical mule dissatisfies me. I prefer the mule shuffled, I think it creates a more vivid image in the mind. There’s good reason for the rule of thumb Verbs over Adjectives. They help to
make instead of describinghow to make instead of describing
Despite all my admiration and enchantment while reading Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast I couldn’t help but frowning at his writing mantra: “make instead of describing”. Surely he’s been describing all along? He says he learned from a fellow writer to “distrust adjectives”. I don’t know exactly what it is he learned about adjectives because he did not abandon them.
Jack Kerouac also writes in this way in On The Road, impressing directly and vaguely the sentiments in his mind. “Stream of consciousness” sounds right not only because of Kerouac’s unedited, spontaneous style, but also because he offers access to the unrefined state of his thoughts, the feelings that are evoked in him. Unlike Keroauc, Hemingway edited and manicured his writing until it was pristine, but he presents the minds of his characters in the crudeness of their existence. He portrays thoughts in the way they rise and fall in a mind, appearing as a notion that remains vague if not developed before it exits soundlessly.
At the end there I wanted to use the word “intuitive”. Perhaps this is where Hemingway’s rule of thumb comes into play. Instead of describing the writing and the thoughts as “intuitive”, I can make them intuitive by describing as they exist, rather than describing the category (“intuitive”) to which they belong. Perhaps his rule is about describing things as they are, not as we later understand them. If so, then make instead of naming, or show instead of telling are better phrases.
Perhaps that’s why he uses the word “good”. A good cafe, a good wine, a very good novel. And somehow it works, despite the admonitions of high school English teachers for such vague wording. It describes an easy satisfaction, a vague but certain joy.
. Fancy words and fancy phrasings tend to contribute less than they provide. Their sacrifice allows the spotlight to fall on the content instead of falling on the writer, and ultimately, in a quieter way, this reflects well on the writer.