Stein on Writing (3 page)

The good news is that the nonfiction mind-set has been changing. In recent years, ambitious journalists and writers of nonfiction books have increasingly adopted some of the techniques of fiction to enhance the readers’ experience of their writing. In journalism, the change has been revolutionary. In the early part of the twentieth century, journalists were taught to provide readers with the who, what, when, where, and why of their stories in the first paragraph. The result was the reader read the first paragraph and, sated, moved on to the first paragraph of the next story. How frustrating it must have been for journalists writing pieces of ten or fifteen or twenty paragraphs, finding readers skipping away after the first. Today, the best of good journalists are arousing their readers’ curi
osity in the first paragraph and seducing them into the rest of the story. A news story has become a story that contains the news.

In television, where new programs are frequent and often short-lived, one exemplar of broadcast journalism that has lasted more than a quarter of a century is
60 Minutes,
which weekly holds an audience of tens of millions. Its creator, Don Hewitt, tells us, “TV is good not when you see it or hear it but when you feel it.” Though it deals in fact,
60 Minutes,
like fiction, is concerned with evoking the emotions of its audience.

Don Hewitt’s creation thrives on the revelation of character. Its interviewers peel layers of camouflage to reveal matters that its subjects would rather conceal, it uncovers cover-ups, it causes people to speak of things that are revelatory, incriminating, or painful. The segments often bring out the dark side of human nature, which at times excites its audience’s interest in the opposite, justice and goodwill. It does, in other words, what creative writing aspires to.

It should not be surprising that
60 Minutes
has had imitators that do not imitate well, programs of scandal and gossip laden with sentimentality and cloaked in melodrama. An unfortunate amount of so-called transient fiction does the same thing.

Though the new nonfiction uses some of the techniques of fiction, important differences exist. Nonfiction stems from fact, and all attempts to evoke emotion in its readership cannot—or at least should not—take leave from its roots. It can make us feel what happened, but dares not invent what happened. Nonfiction can describe effectively what people do and thereby move us, but it cannot invent those actions. Nonfiction can report what people say, but it cannot guess what they were thinking. To help us understand the essential difference between nonfiction and fiction, let’s look at an example:

TRADITIONAL NONFICTION
: New York City has more than 1,400 homeless people.

BETTER NONFICTION
: The man who has laid claim to the bench on the corner of 88th Street and Park Avenue is one of New York City’s 1,400 homeless people.

FICTION
: His skin the color of rust, the man sits on his park bench next to his bag of belongings, staring at the brightly lit windows in the apartments across the street, at the strange race of people who still have hope.

In the transition from plain fact to fiction, we lose statistics and focus on the individual character. The writer, having invented the character, can
convey what the character thinks.

To orient us, consider for a moment the relationship between the writer, the book, and the reader. The writer, of course, writes the book. The book then acts on the reader’s mind and emotions, unseen by the writer. In fact when the writer finishes his work, he can vanish from the earth and his book will continue to affect the reader’s mind and emotions. The writer becomes dispensable. The work must do the job.

Can a novelist or story writer work on the reader’s emotions consciously while writing a first draft? Not easily, except through long practice and prowess. But the less experienced writer
can plan
the reader’s adventure before he writes each scene, and in revising that scene after a respite away from it, with the steel gaze of an editor he can see how the reader’s experience might be improved.

What of the nonfiction writer who sees himself solely as the communicator of fact, who is offended by the idea of working on the emotions of his audience? We sometimes speak of academic writing, of courtroom transcripts, of material that does not compel our attention or elicit a strong desire to continue reading, as
dry.
What we mean by “dry” is that it does not enable us to see as we read, it does not move us, and, most important, it does not stimulate our intellect with insight, its ostensible purpose. The writers of thousands of academic articles and books each year, of hundreds of thousands of legal papers and millions of business memoranda, are discourteous to their readers and fail in their purpose. They do not understand the power of language or the techniques for its use.

Isn’t there something distasteful in evoking the emotions of an audience? Some of the great villains of our age have been spellbinders, working the public’s emotions. In old newsreels we see Hitler in the Nuremberg stadium or Mussolini on his balcony building frenzy in an audience that has abdicated sense for sensation. But we are moved by heroes as well, often as a result of war: Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt. Their effect lies in the language they are cloaked in. Let us consider for a moment the most admired of the three. The historian Shelby Foote reminds us, “Lincoln was highly intelligent. Almost everything he did was calculated for effect.” That statement is one no writer should ever forget. “Almost everything he did was calculated for effect.”

We like to think of ourselves as moved to action by facts and reason, yet we shrink from politicians who may have got their facts right but
who bore us with language that is flat, cliché-ridden, robbed of effectiveness by their unimaginative prose. They want us to agree; what we feel is utter boredom. Researchers, scientists, academicians marshal their facts to a higher standard, but with their neglect of the emotive power of language they often speak only to each other, their parochial words dropping like sand on a private desert.

Despite our alleged reverence for fact, the truth is that our adrenaline rises most in response to effective expression. When a writer or speaker understands the electricity of fresh simile and metaphor, his choice of words empowers our feelings, his language compels our attention, acceptance, and action. When Shakespeare speaks, when Lincoln orates, we are moved not by information but by the excellence of their diction. Alone in a living room, our book lit by a chair-side lamp, we are enraptured by what is said because of the author’s choice of words and their order on the page. The best of good writing will entice us into subjects and knowledge we would have declared were of no interest to us until we were seduced by the language they were dressed in.

This book encompasses both modes of writing, fiction and nonfiction. The practitioners of each have differing attitudes. In my experience, most novelists and short story writers are eager to improve their craft, even after they have been published many times. Nonfiction writers who do not have to create living characters are sometimes complacent about a craft in which publication comes easier and is paid for with greater regularity. This book may inspire some nonfiction writers to reach for treasure on a higher shelf.

Fiction and nonfiction both can benefit from the writer’s imagination as well as his memory. For the story writer, witnessing—or remembering—incidents in life must be more than an act of reporting. It is the taking-off point not of what happened, but of what might have happened. That is what enables some fiction to provide us with an experience that we characterize as extraordinary.

Reporting in nonfiction can be accurate, like a photograph taken merely to record. The best of nonfiction, however, sets what it sees in a framework, what has happened elsewhere or in the past. As the recorded events march before us, a scrim lifts to convey another dimension, the highlighting focuses our attention, sight becomes insight, reporting becomes art. The evidence is in this book.

For the writer who intends to master his craft, I have a small-craft warning.

Imagine yourself as a youngster standing beside a bicycle for the first time. You watched someone riding this two-wheeled vehicle in a straight line. You may have wondered how the rider kept his balance, why the bicycle didn’t tip over. At your side is an experienced bicyclist who tells you how it’s done. You learn that by holding the handlebars steady and pedaling fast the bicycle moves forward without tipping. You are told that by steering gently with the handlebars, turning the front wheel in the direction you want to go, you can manipulate the vehicle elegantly, avoiding pedestrians and other obstacles, as long as you keep pedaling. If you stop pedaling or even slow too much, the bicycle will become unstable, wobbly, and your control of it will loosen until the bicycle will sway to one side and start to fall. You learn that to halt you have to press the hand brakes just so and be prepared to lower a leg for stability as you come to a stop.

Those are the essentials of cycling, but it doesn’t mean you can ride a bicycle. What you need is practice. You learn to coordinate your movements. You discover how rapidly you have to rotate the pedals in order to keep the bicycle moving, and how to redirect the handlebars gradually to turn a corner. Only with repetition do you find out how to slow down and stop without tipping over. Once you master riding, what you have learned will stay with you for the rest of your life. You may abandon the bicycle for an automobile, then years later take it up for exercise and find that in moments you are rolling ahead, fully coordinated, your brain responding to what you learned in your practice sessions long ago.

It is the same with writing.

Except that writers provide themselves with a monumental obstacle to achieving skill. Ballet dancers practice technique. Pianists wear down their black and white keys with hours of daily practice. Actors rehearse, and rehearse again. Painters perfect still-life objects at various angles, practice obtaining the best perspectives, experiment with color and texture, do sketches in preparation for oil. By practice one learns to use what one has understood. Only writers, it seems, expect to achieve some level of mastery without practice.

Do all writers resist the techniques that will help them master their craft? No. Some, eager to get published, seize on the advice of anybody with an authoritative title or a persuasive personality. Others find excuses for not writing at the same time every day, balk at re-revising incessantly, or excuse themselves because their lives are beset by difficulties. I am deaf to that excuse because I worked with the most disadvantaged writer in history, Christy Brown, who had the use of his
brain, the little toe on his left foot, and little else. When he was a seemingly helpless baby lying on the kitchen floor of a cottage in Ireland, his remarkable mother saw him reach out with his left foot and with his one good toe manage to pick up a crayon that one of his siblings had dropped. That was the beginning of a writer. Eventually someone at IBM made a special typewriter for Christy that enabled him to punch in a letter at a time with his one working toe. I published five of Christy Brown’s books, one of which made the national bestseller lists. I urge you to see the video of a remarkable film called
My Left Foot.
It won an Oscar for Daniel Day-Lewis, who played Christy. The film may cure you of fishing for an excuse for not writing.

Once in California I had a letter from a nonfiction writer who wanted desperately to write fiction but wondered if at sixty she was too old to begin. I told her that Elia Kazan was fifty-seven when he started with fiction and that I had published four active octogenarians in a single year, the lexicographer Eric Partridge, J. B. Priestley, Hannah Tillich, and Bertram Wolfe. If you’re a writer, you are never retired by someone else. You not only keep going, but the very act of writing helps keep you alive.

More than half a millennium ago, Chaucer, the great English writer of the Middle Ages, had this to say about the writer’s work:

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,

Th’ assay so hard, so sharp the conquering.

Life is short, Chaucer is telling us, the craft takes long to learn, the work is hard, but ah, when it is right, the writer’s triumph soars. Few among contemporary writers have expressed that pleasure as well as Kate Braverman did about finishing her remarkable short story “Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta”:

Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating. As soon as Lenny began speaking, I knew I had mainlined it. I felt like I was strapped in the cockpit with the stars in my face and the expanding universe on my back. In my opinion, that’s the only way a writer should travel. When I finished “Tall Tales” I thought, this one is a keeper. This is a trophy brought back from the further realm, the kingdom of perpetual glistening night where we know ourselves absolutely. This one goes on the wall.

As you perfect your craft through practice, remember the joy of finally getting on a bicycle and riding to your destination without giving a second thought to the technique that now comes naturally. Experience the pleasure of getting the right word, the right phrase, the right sentence, the right paragraph, and finally the ecstasy of creating a keeper for your wall.

Come Right In: First Sentences, First Paragraphs

FICTION

E
lia Kazan, brilliant director of stage and screen as well as a late-blooming novelist, told me that audiences give a film seven minutes. If the viewer is not intrigued by character or incident within that time, the film and its viewer are at odds. The viewer came for an experience. The film is disappointing him.

Today’s impatient readers give a novelist fewer than seven minutes. Some years ago I was involved in an informal study of the behavior of lunch-hour browsers in mid-Manhattan bookstores. In the fiction section, the most common pattern was for the browser to read the front flap of the book’s jacket and then go to page one. No browser went beyond page three before either taking the book to the cashier or putting the book down and picking up another to sample.

Thereafter, whenever an author told me that his novel really got going on page ten or twenty or thirty, I had to pass on the news that his book in all likelihood was doomed unless he could revise it so that the first three pages aroused the reader’s interest enough to quarantine him from distraction for the several hours the book demanded from him.

Readers have not grown more patient since that bit of research was conducted. Today, first sentences and first paragraphs of any writing are increasingly important for arousing the restless reader.

Arousal is nature’s stimulus for the propagation of the human race. The unaroused male of the species is as useless for that purpose as a worm. Arousal can happen sooner or later, but it must happen.

Similarly arousal is an author’s stimulus for the reader. Without early arousal, the reader does not yet trust that he will enjoy the experience that the writer has prepared. The ideal goals of an opening paragraph are:

1. To excite the reader’s curiosity, preferably about a character or a relationship.
   
2. To introduce a setting.
   
3. To lend resonance to the story.
   

Long before I edited a couple of Budd Schulberg’s books, he published his first novel,
What Makes Sammy Run?,
a book whose opening I like to quote from.
Sammy
was a huge bestseller in 1941. This is the way it starts:

The first time I saw him he couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old, a little ferret of a kid, sharp and quick. Sammy Glick. Used to run copy for me. Always ran. Always looked thirsty.

To prove that writers know what works even if they don’t take advantage of their knowledge in their own writing, I ask my students to pick out the most important word in Schulberg’s opening. See if you can’t find it in the paragraph just quoted.

Most writers quickly come up with the correct answer: “ferret.” It characterizes sixteen-year-old Sammy in a flash.

Next I ask for the second most important word in that paragraph. See if you can’t detect it.

That may take a bit more time, but after a moment’s thought a majority will zero in on “thirsty,” an original way of saying Sammy was hungry, meaning ambitious.

The words “always ran” convey quickly that Sammy is a hustler.

That opening is an inspiring example of quick characterization and especially of a way to arouse the reader’s interest because in a few words we sense a conflict brewing. The narrator knows Sammy is overly ambitious. The kid wants what? Everything!

Therein lies a clue. As readers, we are immediately interested in a character who wants something badly.

The fact that the narrator is Sammy’s boss also piques the reader’s curiosity. Will the narrator continue to put up with Sammy’s drive? Will Sammy get fired? Will Sammy succeed, and if so at what and how will he do it? The story is off and running in the first paragraph. We want to know what will happen.

At the time that Schulberg wrote
What Makes Sammy Run?
he wasn’t an old master. He was a young first novelist. If one understands the principles of intriguing the reader, one doesn’t need decades of experience.

James T. Farrell, a friend who achieved fame for his novel
Studs Lonigan,
once gave me a copy of a collection of his short stories called
French Girls Are Vicious,
in which the title story contains an interesting example for writers. The narrator begins, “I don’t like French girls. Perhaps it’s because of my Puritan upbringing ...”

We assume the speaker is a man. At the beginning of the second paragraph a surprise is waiting for us. The narrator is a woman! Our curiosity is aroused when a surprise unsettles our expectation.

It is astonishing how much the first words of a novel or story affect editors, reviewers, and readers. They are the trigger of curiosity, what writers have long called the “narrative hook.” In addition, the early words suggest the kind of book one is reading.

Thornton Wilder, my early mentor in playwriting, also wrote novels, the most famous of which,
The Bridge of San Luis Key,
starts this way:

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.

It’s precise as to date and time and the number of people. But the key to arousing our interest is in the words “finest bridge.” Bridges deteriorate. Many are hazardous. But this bridge that suddenly hurtled five people to their death was “the finest.” We want to know what happened, and why.

Here’s another:

Yank Lucas fell asleep late one night and left the gas burning on the kitchen range.

We want to know more. That’s the opening of John O’Hara’s 1967 novel,
The Instrument.

James Baldwin began his short story “Going to Meet the Man” with this unembellished way of interesting the reader:

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

Here’s a quieter—yet intriguing—opening sentence by one of the century’s grand masters, Graham Greene, from an early (1935) novel,
England Made Me.

She might have been waiting for her lover.

Maxine Hong Kingston kindled the reader’s interest in
The Woman Warrior
with the kind of hook that almost always works:

“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.”

See how much Irwin Shaw accomplished in the first sentence of his story “The Eighty-Yard Run”:

The pass was high and wide and he jumped for it, feeling it slap flatly against his hands, as he shook his hips to throw off the halfback who was diving at him.

Anthony Burgess, in both his fiction and nonfiction, enjoyed shocking the reader into attention. The following attention-getter is the opening of his twenty-second novel,
Earthly Powers:

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced the archbishop had come to see me.

That first sentence tells us the narrator is old, that he is in bed with someone of the same sex, that this is a regular event in his life, and the event this day is being interrupted by a visit from an archbishop! That certainly piques the reader’s curiosity about what kind of confrontation is about to happen.

Another example:

On the day he lost his right foot, Walter Van Brunt had been haunted, however haphazardly, by ghosts of the past.

Losing a foot is not an everyday occurrence. From the first sentence we know we are going to witness an important day in the life of Walter Van Brunt. Moreover, Van Brunt is haunted by “ghosts of the past.” Who or what are they? The interjection—“however haphazardly”—conveys a touch of literary flavor. Would a commercial action-adventure author ever say “however haphazardly”?

That’s a lot to get from a first sentence. It’s from a 1987 novel,
World’s End,
by T. Coraghessan Boyle, who has been called “one of the most gifted writers of his generation.”

Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, most often uses characterization to attract a reader’s attention. Here are the opening sentences of four of his novels:

When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the next fellow.

What made me take this trip to Africa?

If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.

Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Artur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers.

In order, the openings are from Bellow’s first novel,
Seize the Day; Henderson the Rain King,
his most celebrated novel;
Herzog;
and
Mr. Sammler’s Planet.
Note that all of Bellow’s beginnings
except Henderson
seize the attention of the reader by characterization, which we get soon enough.

All right, you say, these are well-known writers, prize-winning writers, what about writers like me? Fair enough. Here are some first sentences from work by students of mine who have yet to publish:

I wanted to strangle mother but I’d have to touch her to do it.

That’s by Loretta Hudson. The narrator wants to perform an act that is taboo and punishable, but what causes the reaction of the reader is the countervailing force, the repugnance at having to touch the person you want to strangle. I have heard audiences gasp when that opening sentence is read to them.

The same student started a story with an entirely different hook in the first sentence:

It would have been nice if the stork had dropped me down the right chimney.

That visual opening presents the narrator’s problem—the wrong parents!—in an attention-grabbing way. How abstract the beginning would have sounded had the author started, “I was born to the wrong parents.”

Here’s one by another beginner:

A telephone ringing in the middle of the night is not a welcome sound.

What should be clear by now is that writers with differing skills and experiences have all tried to engage the reader’s curiosity at the outset. There are questions you can ask yourself about your own first sentence:

• Does it convey an interesting personality or an action that we want to know more about?
  
• Can you make your first sentence more intriguing by introducing something unusual, something shocking perhaps, or something that will surprise the reader?
  

Your entire story or novel may depend on that first sentence arresting the reader’s attention. A terrific sentence on page two won’t help if the reader never gets there.

Is it absolutely essential for the first sentence to hook the reader? The first sentence of the next example is a simple statement of the narrator’s name. The rest of the paragraph appears on the surface to be conventional, but is it? It’s from the title story of John Cheever’s short story collection
The Housebreaker of Shady Hill
[1]

My name is Johnny Hake. I’m thirty-six years old, stand five feet eleven in my socks, weigh one hundred and forty-two pounds stripped, and am, so to speak, naked at the moment and talking into the dark. I was conceived in the Hotel St. Regis, born in the Presbyterian Hospital, raised on Sutton Place, christened and confirmed in St. Bartholomew’s, and I drilled with the Knickerbocker Greys, played football and baseball in Central Park, learned to chin myself on the framework of East Side apartment-house canopies, and met my wife (Christina Lewis) at one of those big cotillions at the Waldorf. I served four years in the Navy, have four kids now, and live
in a banlieue called Shady Hill. We have a nice house with a garden and a place outside for cooking meat, and on summer nights, sitting there with the kids and looking into the front of Christina’s dress as she bends over to salt the steaks, or just gazing at the lights in Heaven, I am thrilled by more hardy and dangerous pursuits, and I guess this is what is meant by the pain and sweetness of life.

You can’t be more direct than that. There’s Johnny Hake encapsulating his life for the reader. Cheever, however, is a sly craftsman. In the first sentence his character lets drop that he is “naked at the moment and talking into the dark.” Not the kind of thing you’d put into a résumé. A few more sentences and he’s “looking into the front of Christina’s dress as she bends over to salt the steaks.” That’s in the middle of a sentence, seemingly a throwaway, but in fact a hook for the reader. A craftsman like Cheever will season even the most conventional beginning with just enough that is unconventional to rouse the reader’s curiosity.

John Fowles is one of the more accomplished novelists of this century. His career began in 1963 with the publication of a relatively simple novel called
The Collector.
If you haven’t read it, I urge you to. Let’s look at how he starts the book:

When she was home from her boarding school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annex. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course I didn’t like.