Lars Eighner's Lavender Blue

2. Learning to Write for Publication

Although anyone reading this book has taken English courses, learning to write for publication is akin to learning a new subject altogether. Some part of a foreign language course is devoted to an organized presentation of the grammar of the foreign language. But the real learning of the language is done in conversational practice, in the learning of dialogues, and in the parroting of taped examples in the language laboratory. In the lecture section of an organic chemistry course, the professor may join two molecular models in an instant, but in the laboratory the corresponding synthesis may require many tedious hours or days, and may never run to completion. In learning to drive a stick shift, one may understand the operation of the clutch and the gearshift long before one can change gears smoothly. Clearly there are two kinds of knowledge involved here: theory of the operation of the gears, and practical skill in operating the gears. The theory is far from useless, for it can direct practice rightly---and wrong practice is worse than no practice at all. But theory without practice is empty.

So it is in learning to write for publication. The theory may or may not seem simple, but all that is in a book can be understood easily. Obtaining the practical skill requires much more effort and in particular requires practice.

By far the best sort of writing to practice on is trivial: journals or diaries, letters, letters-to-the-editor, small essays and anecdotes. Do not begin climbing with Mount. Fuji, but start with a local, commonplace hillock. Practical skill is gained in small, haphazard steps, and these little improvements will be more evident, and thus more rewarding, when the subject is less than heroic. Practice your powers on little things, for if you reserve practice for some great work of literature which you plan to compose one day, you will find on that day you have no powers at all.

To this point I may add the following fable (which I first read, in different form, in Judith Martin's "Miss Manners" column):

Simple literacy, as taught in high school grammar courses, is by no means easy to achieve, but it is in a certain sense simple to learn. Mrs. Grundy, the archetypal English teacher, presents the rules. The student needs only to follow the rules. The student has no doubt what a rule is. It is something which if transgressed results in a big red mark from Mrs. Grundy's grading pen. Subject and verb must agree in number. The book says so. Mrs. Grundy says so. The student believes it and tries to make his subjects and verbs agree in number because he believes in the rule and because he wants to avoid a red mark.

Unfortunately, learning to write for publication is a less simple process. First, there is the question of what is a rule.

In giving a series of workshops I proposed to students of creative writing the following rule:

Immediately half the class rose in mutiny. "We have never heard of such a rule." Naturally I apologized quickly for attempting to teach them something they did not already know. When I returned to my office I looked through the grammars, style guides, and usage books I had there. One of them might have contained the controversial rule, but if so I did not find it. I doubted my sanity. Where had I come up with such a notion?

But when I turned my book of quotations I quickly found several dozen examples in which writers from Chaucer to Churchill, including some Americans, observed my rule. Well, was it a rule or not? Evidently my students had got through school writing things like "not as red as a rose" without getting a red mark from Mrs. Grundy. I serious doubt that any editor would accept or reject a manuscript on such a fine point.

For myself, I will choose to go with Chaucer and Churchill and Adams and Austen whenever I notice the point. But I still do not know if it is a rule. It is my advice. And whether a student should follow it or not is a matter of judgment. Certainly there are writers who have not followed this rule but who have done well enough in their careers. And I can find violations of the rule in my own work.

But almost all the difference between merely literate writing and fine writing is made up of such fuzzy little bits of advice that cannot really be called rules. In writing for publication there is no Mrs. Grundy, ready to snap her desk with her ruler and snap the woolgathering student back to attention. Very few editors will ever make a mark, much less a red mark, on a rejected manuscript. Moreover, these bits of advice occur as anecdotes, for no style book I have found -- and not even this book -- has managed to catalogue all the bits of good advice in the way the rules of English are cataloged in a high school grammar text. And for these reasons not every student who can learn to write well enough to please Mrs. Grundy will learn to write for publication.

In the immediately following chapters I present something of the theory of writing for publication. I have forced the theory into various more or less neat categories and the categories have been more or less neatly organized. But in practice, of course, various questions of style occur willy-nilly.

The theory, as I present it, may seem very simple, or indeed obvious (or perhaps just the opposite). The difficulty in practice is in recognizing the places in which the theory applies, and often in choosing which of the sometimes conflicting principles to apply in the particular case. Although I have organized the presentation of this material in a way that seems logical to me, I would advise you keep a notebook organized as you see fit -- although you might use index cards or an electronic file instead of a notebook. I have tried to give a number of examples at each point, but in practice you will encounter examples that seem more illustrative to you, and these belong in your notebook. The English language contains numerous pitfalls. Although I have listed many, you are bound to discover more, and to have more trouble with some than with others. These belong in your notebook. I can hardly list all the trade names in a book this size, and several volumes of hyphenation examples could be issued without resolving every possible question. When you have researched one of these matters, keep a record of your results -- issues of this sort are likely to recur within a writer's particular orbit.

The student's notebook, of course, is the real text, and only the student is the student's true teacher. I cannot (and should not) teach a student to write as I write, but can only show the way that the student may learn to write as best she can, which may indeed be better than I write but can never be the same.

It is not a matter of mastering the theory and then writing. Perhaps no one ever achieves complete mastery of writing. The only way to gain a degree of mastery is by writing. When you write regularly you will discover you do not have to look up the rule to remember which side of a quotation mark the period goes on. Although you may never remove all of the weak constructions from your writing, you will learn to remove more and more of them, and eventually you will learn to write fewer of them to begin with. Strong writing, like baseball, is very much a matter of percentages. You cannot expect to bat a 1.000 all season, but you may reasonably aspire to improve from .127 to .250, and that may be all the difference between winning and losing.

The strategy I suggest in learning style is given in the maxim: Learn the rules, and then learn to break the rules. By this I mean, try at first to strip your writing of mannerisms and weak constructions. Try to write the most vigorous and transparent language you can. Your ideal should be something like the style Hemingway is generally supposed to have used (but did not really): precise noun, action verb, precise object, period, precise noun, action verb, precise object, and so forth.

Of course were you ever to obtain that ideal, you could not write a whole novel in such stripped-down, streamlined prose; readers could not bear the tension. Indeed, writing in a series of simple sentences is the fault called periodic writing. But few beginners are in danger of writing too tersely. Once you are writing fairly concise prose, you can relax a bit, you can let bits of color in. Then, however, you are in a position to relax in a controlled and conscious manner. Your narrator's mannerisms can then be his own, and will not be clouded with your own unconscious mannerisms. If your writing is vague or abstract, it will be vague or abstract where you mean it to be vague or abstract, instead of being vague or abstract merely where you are incapable of being precise and concrete.

Most fine writing seems to flow smoothly and naturally, and one word seems to follow the other with a kind of obvious inevitability. The writer seems to achieve his or her effects spontaneously, or at least, effortlessly. This is of course an illusion. Somehow people do know that what the ballet dancer or the figure skater does is not so easy as it is made to appear. But too many people think there is no work to writing well. Almost every has dreamt, I suppose, of sitting down to a piano and producing beautiful music without having ever bothered to learn to play the piano. But most people who try to play the piano without having practiced can quickly ascertain from the sounds they produce the difference between the dream world and the real one. Unfortunately, would-be writers can do the most discordant things on an innocent piece of paper without ever being aware of having hit a sour note.

Writing well is hard work, and learning to write well is even harder. While this is a sobering thought, it has its hopeful aspect. Of the many who aspire to write, only a few will write anything. Of the many who write anything, only a few will bother to try to write well. Of the few who bother to try to write well, only a few will reflect upon what they have written and revise. Competition in the literary world grows continually, but it is nothing you need worry about if you are resolved to be one of a few of a few of a few.

One of the reassuring things about Mrs. Grundy's English class is that there is always at least one right answer. Mrs. Grundy doesn't pose questions that do not have answers. But let's consider this real life example, from a memo about a proposed excursion:

What we want, I think, is for each person to bring one bike for him- or herself. The first suggests, perhaps, that each person should bring as many bikes as he or she owns. The second might suggest that if altogether one bike is brought, that would suffice. But which is it? Does Mrs. Grundy know?

I want to give Mrs. Grundy the benefit of the doubt, so I do not suggest that she lacks an answer to this problem or that her answer, whatever it might be, is incorrect in any way. All I want to point out is that writing for publication is not one of Mrs. Grundy's examinations. You do not have to solve every grammar problem you encounter.

If you are a native speaker of English and you are reasonably well educated, when you encounter a perplexing problem, such as how to word the memo about the bikes, the reason is almost certainly that you are wrestling with a difficult construction. If it is difficult for you, it almost certainly will be difficult for the reader, and even if you have a gift for ferreting out the correct answer, if the reader is not equally gifted, the reader may not realize that you have found the right answer, and may not even know what you are saying, however correctly you say it.

This is a piece of advice I will repeat: when the going gets difficult, duck!

Everyone should bring a bike.

Is this the coward's way out? I really do not think so. In almost all such cases, the trouble comes from an awkward construction, and although you may find the correct way of being awkward, the best you can do is to be perfectly awkward. This is no brief against correct grammar. The grammatically correct awkward expression usually is somewhat better than the ungrammatical awkward expression. But not being awkward at all is the prize. Unfortunately, awkward expressions are, too often, apt expressions of awkward thinking. So when I suggest, as I often do, "Recast!" that often entails "Rethink!"

For persons with a certain kind of personality, recasting and rethinking are extremely difficult. Such persons are likely to relish difficult situations, for these situations provide them the opportunity of demonstrating superior grammar. And again, there is nothing wrong with having superior grammatical skills, but frequently needing superior skills may be problematic.

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