Manual For Fiction Writers, Block, Lawrence [best books to read for beginners txt] 📗

left, walked three blocks, waited for the light to turn, then walked two more blocks to Glenda's apartment.

You get a much different quality by having him walk than if you made the bleeder stroll or march or sashay or whatever. By using the same verb three times in a sentence, you underscore the neutral quality of the verb. Without a single adverb to tell you how he walked, we wind up with a sense of how he did it, depending of course on what we know already about the character and his situation.

He legged it to the corner, made a sharp left, stared at the light until it went green, then quick-marched two more blocks to Glenda's apartment.

Is that better? Or worse? It depends, obviously, on what the sentence is supposed to do. It's unquestionably a whole lot different, though, and the difference is vested in the verbs.

For myself, prose style is largely intuitive. I don't often give it conscious thought while I'm actually writing. Nor would I suggest that you scrawl PUT VITAMINS IN YOUR VERBS on the wall above your typewriter. There's not much point in becoming self-conscious about your style.

I would suggest that you notice, in your reading, how other writers use verbs, and what you do or don't like about their techniques. See what changes you'd make, in their writing and in your own. And, if you're interested in watching a master put not only verbs but all the other parts of speech through their paces, you might make the acquaintance of Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.

CHAPTER 39

Modifiers for Mood-Swing

FIRST YOU write the story, Hemingway is supposed to have said. Then you go back over what you have written and cross out all the adjectives and adverbs. The result is a clean, spare, honest prose, stripped to the bare essentials without the intrusion of the author's perceptions.

I don't suppose that was the worst advice ever, especially at the time it was given, when the American novel was being reborn in a freshet of clean, spare, honest prose. I have read stories whose authors could profit by taking Hemingway's advice literally; a blue pencil would greatly help passages that run something like this:

The tall, ungainly woman walked haltingly up the winding tree-lined path that led to the large green-shuttered sprawling old white mansion. Her old arthritic vein-corded hands gripped her silver-topped cane, and its worn brass ferrule stabbed feebly at the unyielding earth with every faltering step she took-.

Cumbersome, isn't it? The modifiers pile up all over the place, and it takes us as long to read about it as it takes the lady to get to the house. What does the same passage look like stripped?

The woman walked up the path that led to the mansion. Her hands gripped her cane, and its ferrule stabbed at the earth with every step she took.

That's better, certainly, if only because some of the clutter is gone and the prose has a better rhythm to it. But I don't think we can safely conclude that the quality of any prose passage is in inverse proportion to the number of adverbs and adjectives it contains, and that these parts of speech ought to be ruthlessly purged from our professional vocabularies. Because there is one significant fault which the second example bears in relation to the first. It's trimmer, unquestionably, and it reads faster, but it gives us a lot less of the picture than does the first example.

When we read the stripped-down version, we don't know if the woman in question is young or old, tall or short, sprightly or lethargic. We have no picture of the path she's walking or the house she's approaching. We get hints from some of the verbs and nouns; we'd know even less than we do, for example, if the path led not to a mansion but to a house, if her hand held her cane instead of gripping it, and if the tip of the cane didn't specifically stab the earth but simply touched it. Even so, there are details to this picture which can only be sketched in by means of adjectives and adverbs.

Thus there is a question of balance involved. If we use sufficient modifiers to describe everything in full detail, we'll produce clumsy prose and spend several pages just getting the old lady up the path to the house. If we cut out the modifiers, the reader won't know what's going on.

There's no single right way to write anything, this sample passage included. The writer has to make choices, and generally makes them quickly and intuitively at that. The writing of prose, you see, is rather more like painting than photography. We cannot point a camera and, with the click of the shutter, record instantly all that is visible to the lens. Instead we must wield words as a painter wields a brush, spotting a detail here and there while leaving another section purposely vague.

The woman walked haltingly up the path to the green-shuttered mansion-

That's one way, focusing on the woman's walk and the house's green shutters. If this were a class, I might suggest that you try rewriting the passage yourself, producing three different versions of it. (And you might elect to do that on your own, class or no class.) Instead, let's have a look at some other examples.

The body of the whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has